22 Immutable Laws Applied to Tidal & Spotify

I recently attended the Budweiser Made In America Music Festival in Philadelphia, PA and one sponsor really caught my eye: Tidal (The streaming music service). They did a great job promoting their product from interactive tents to having one of the stages named "Tidal".  The thing that tipped me over was that they were recording the entire festival, every stage with what looked like very high end video gear.  We are talking dollies, cranes, perches, zooms in the back... let us just say it looked very expensive.

As a paying Spotify customer I went home and signed up for the free Tidal trial, looked at the concert videos and honestly have not logged back on in almost 2 weeks. WHY!? I really could not see the value let alone the "extras" that would have me leave Spotify.  The concert videos were "eh" and it made me realize that watching "Live Concerts" are HORRIBLE compared to the real thing. And as far as the underlying product I am consuming, both services provide the same thing: music to my ears.

Loving Tidal's advertising at Made in America, trying them out, yet never signing up for their service got me thinking of the book, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing which is now 22 years old(1994), yet reads like it was published this year. 

I took my own thoughts on the two companies to see how they stacked up against the 22 laws:

One thing that stuck out was that in my opinionated analysis, Spotify is doing AMAZING, but I will get to one aspect that authors Al Ries and Jack Trout did not anticipate in the crazy no profit billion dollar valuation games.

​As far as Tidal, I think 3 huge laws that they have broken will pretty much explain why they will most likely have to fold in the coming months/years.

1. The Law of Hype:  Everyone remembers when Tidal first launched.  Famous artist changed their twitter/profile avatar to a turquoise  square and announced a soon to be MUSIC HISTORY game changer will be coming.  Huge parties were thrown around the country to celebrate with some of the top celebs and what came? Another streaming service.
2. The Law of Success: I love this one.  You had some of the MOST SUCCESSFUL musicians become investors in this new service with Jay Z leading the way.  I mean how can this new service fail with all this talent!  Simple: selling music is different than recording music.  Hubris is a bitch. 
3. The Law of Duality: In most markets and categories there will eventually be only two very large players in the room.  And it is currently Spotify and Apple who are #1 and #2.  Tidal broke to many other laws to try and crack this duality.

Now, going back to Spotify. Though they are leaps and bounds the #1 Market leader with no signs of slowing down, it still will not matter if they can not make money!  The last law is 22 The Law of Resources: It says that you basically need money to make money to become the marketing leader.  But what if the market you are in was never going to make money.  Where the bigger you became, the bigger the loses? I hope Spotify will turn a profit, because I love listening to my all i can listen music.