If you listen to music, you should by now have heard of ‘Tidal’. It’s Jay Z’s new subscription music service. For $20 a month, subscribers get “high-fidelity audio and exclusive video clips”. Shareholders of Tidal include Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Daft Punk, Madonna, Beyoncé and a few more, and they have proclaimed to “forever change the course of music history”.

Tidal is dedicated to cultivating a sound business enterprise that promotes the health and sustainability of our art and our industry around the world. We believe it is in everyone’s interest—fans, artists and the industry as a whole—to preserve the value of music and to ensure a healthy and robust industry for years to come. – Alicia Keyes

UK folk band Mumford & Sons are not happy with the idea of Tidal, and refuse to have anything to do with it.

“We wouldn’t have joined it anyway, even if they had asked. We don’t want to be tribal,” says frontman Marcus Mumford. “I think smaller bands should get paid more for it, too. Bigger bands have other ways of making money, so I don’t think you can complain. A band of our size shouldn’t be complaining. And when they say it’s artist-owned, it’s owned by those rich, wealthy artists.”

At the same time, they’re not doing what Taylor Swift did with Spotify (remember her “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for” moment?). The band understands that music these days is streamed. Instead, Mumford & Sons thinks that one needs to “diversify as a band”, explaining that doing so “doesn’t mean selling your songs to adverts”. They say they use their albums as “stand-alone pieces of art, and also as adverts for [their] live shows”.

Guitarist Winston Marshall had a few extra words for Tidal. If you don’t know, Tidal was relaunched at a rather extravagant event with every celebrity shareholder present and the whole thing was live-streamed. “New school fucking plutocrats” is what Winston referred to them as…

Main man Mumford further explained the group’s thoughts of Tribal:

What I’m not into is the tribalistic aspect of it—people trying to corner bits of the market, and put their face on it. That’s just commercial bullshit. We hire people to do that for us rather than having to do that ourselves. We just want to play music, and I don’t want to align myself with Spotify, Beats, Tidal, or whatever. We want people to listen to our music in their most comfortable way, and if they’re not up for paying for it, I don’t really care.

OK, guys, we sort of get your whole ‘tribal’ explanation, but don’t be angry just because Jay Z didn’t ask you to join, if that’s a secret reason…

[Source: The Daily Beast]