MQA going into administration

I suspect Qobuz might be a little concerned about this. If Tidal ditch MQA and go with hi res flac instead that could really eat in to Qobuz’s market share

6 Likes

Or Qobuz already being there may give them the advantage, with Tidal having to admit giving up MQA and possibly having to commit to paying for greater bandwidth.

Another possibility, depending on the licence position, might be for Tidal to maintain their MQA service for as long as people are still prepared to pay for it, simply not adding new titles, in the meantime readying true high res.

Tidal has gone all out with options MQA, Sony 360, Dolby Atmos as well as full HD music videos.
After alongtime i ditched Qobuz 3 mths ago for Tidal once Innuos allowed the first unfold.

I think we can all be grateful that Naim did not pursue the software development to embed MQA in there products. They may a have lost a few customers but it looks like it was a positive decision with their resources focused in other directions.

9 Likes

In the beginning there was WiMP only available in scandinavia I think, Tidal came out of this service by a swedish company called Aspiro. Aspiro then sold off Tidal as a separate service running on Aspiro servers. I think Aspiro still run many of Tidals servers.

Today a company called Block owns the majority in both Aspiro and Tidal. Block is controlled by Jack Dorsey (one of the Twitter founders). Blocks thing, besides Tidal, is payment platforms and financial apps plus an e-shop platform called Weebly. Block lost over 500 milion dollars in 2022 and has in 2023 had to fight off allegations of creating fake accounts for the likes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, failure to fight off fraudsters, lying about monthly users and so on. I have no idea what is behind those allegations or if they are true.

Blocks declared interest when buying Tidal and Aspiro was building up routines using blockchain/NFT:s to sell music and merch.

Personally, I think Tidal can just drop MQA and no-one, except a few hifi-nuts, would notice that little MQA-led going off.

It is interesting that both Linn and Naim stayed out of the MQA-business. Maybe they knew something about that venture us mortals dont. Or they are just experienced and wise.

10 Likes

Since I sit in sweden I checked the Aspiro company, revenue about EUR 100 million in 2021 with a loss of EUR 40 million. And declares zero employees (probably outsource everything). The board members also sit on the Tidal US board.

So the Tidal owners currently lose money everywhere. Do they need MQA on top of that?

I hope that this doesn’t affect Radio Paradise Radio who stream MQA-encoded audio through DACs that support it.

1 Like

I very much doubt they will build data centres… almost certainly they will use commercial whole sale CDNs and other main stream cloud providers…just like almost everybody else.
I seem to remember Tidal used to use Akamai … and possibly still does for some if not all of their CDNs.

2 Likes

If you/others haven’t seen it, there’s a blog view on MQA by Linn from several years back – I cannot post link here (Forum rules I think) but put ‘Linn MQA’ in to 'web search engine and it should come up.

In 2 words, a ‘land grab’, to the ultimate detriment of just about everybody in the delivery chain bar the MQA-mob (perhaps the abbreviated word Linn didn’t use!)

3 Likes

That Linn white paper is classic (easy enough to google “Linn on MQA” to find it). I knew MQA was a power/money grab before I even found/read that paper. A thinly-veiled DRM solution looking for a problem. Good riddance to it.

9 Likes

That makes sense, I was basing my assumption on what looks like, based on the numbers from their shareholder report, a very large depreciation and amortisation charge. Which would suggest a capital intensive business, but you’re right, they’re more likely to have capacity in a hyper scale player.

The Linn Paper was written by one, probably significantly biased individual, however, being posted on the Linn website gave it more credibility, in my opinion than what it really deserves. The author predicted a lot of doom and gloom to the record industry and predominantly recording artists, but I dont see any hard evidence, since the paper was written, that any of this doom and gloom actually became a reality of any significance.
Its a shame this british invention never really fully took off znd as ofhers have said was probably too late to the market to maximise its usefulness.
Tidal may continue with MQA or maybe not, either way they will probably have some form of Hi- Res streaming going forward to be in competition with other streaming companies.

3 Likes

I thought that was only on Bluesound devices?

If you’ve been looking at the same data I have, then the ~$8m D&A charge(?), isn’t out of keeping. Instead, and I think this is like Spotify IIRC, the Tidal operation (inc. Aspiro as mentioned above) was incurring material ‘operating losses’ i.e. the business model remaining immature and, some might say, unproven (latest UK accounts to 31/12/20). One aspect which caught my eye, was that the business takes in subs but doesn’t pay rights’ holders until at least 30/60 days** after which, in cashflow terms, means the business can be heavily funded from these ‘owed’ monies, just like a main contractor construction business, which pays subbies on extended terms. ** often with rights businesses, it can be found that monies collected aren’t distributed-on, as nobody is 100% sure where the rights are demised/owned i.e. they can just mount up as a growing obligation in a set of financial accounts!

Per the previous Forum thread on Spotify, there must be a serious question as to whether these streaming businesses have a medium/long term future in their current guise – although it appears being owned by Block may have changed things for Tidal?

Of course, the backers may be seeing & playing the long game here? IME private equity business model maturity timelines tend to be max 5Ys/on the outside 7, as the underlying PE Funds (not the PE houses) holding the investments have these kinds of maturities. AFAIK, both Tidal and Spotify have been going ~7/8 years now (longer?), and the line of sight to outright profitability looks, to my eyes, to be several years away yet (if at all?).

1 Like

It didn’t take off because it isn’t needed anymore. So it just represents an additional cost for the whole ecosystem with no actual benefits to anyone other than the inventor. Or to put it more bluntly, MQA had become simply parasitic. It’s good that it is on its way out. Not before time imho.

7 Likes

This is what i thought is happening as with all companies opting for Chapter 11, wipe the slate.
Either way will be interesting to see where this goes.

I don’t think that is unusual - all the main and niche streamer providers take between 1 and 3 months (most at the longer end) to pay royalties in my experience. Youtube seems to be quickest.

1 Like

Certainly a few years late, but it did exist 10 years ago. I don’t know about you but I didn’t have unlimited data back in 2013 so it seemed useful at the time.

If there was a way to step up the quality as bandwidth allowed (e.g. MQA 2.0) they could have addressed concerns, focus on authentication, and ensure there was no mishandling to be found on Tidal.

1 Like

Probably just too cheap to pay licensing fees for that MQA badge. Other small, well-established brands like Bryston have the same business model.

No, it was ‘just a smart business decision’ not to waste money and valuable resource time moving in a direction for a product that was not needed.

jmho - ymmv

10 Likes