On March 30, 2015, in a converted train station in Manhattan, sixteen of the biggest artists on the planet walked onto a stage dressed in black1. Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Madonna, Kanye, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Jack White, Daft Punk with the helmets on. Chris Martin and Calvin Harris appeared on a television that someone wheeled in. Alicia Keys called it “a graduation,” and one by one they signed a declaration. Madonna signed with her leg up on the table2. At Vintesh we watched it live and thought: they’re about to do something completely different.
They didn’t. We’ve carried it ever since, so today we’re putting it down.
What they launched
They launched Spotify with better audio. CD quality instead of MP3, $19.99 a month instead of $9.99, and the promise of paying artists more because the owners were artists. Two real things. Neither one moves the needle on the internet.
The numbers tell the rest. Jay-Z had bought the Norwegian company behind the service for $56.2 million3. In 2016 Tidal claimed 3 million subscribers, a figure a Norwegian newspaper questioned two years later along with the stream counts for Lemonade and The Life of Pablo2. In 2017 Sprint bought a third for a reported $200 million3. In 2021 Square — Block today — paid $297 million for majority ownership3. In 2024 Block said it was “scaling back” its investment, cut about a quarter of the team, and reports put the base at roughly 700,000 subscribers4. Spotify closed the second quarter of 2026 with 300 million paying subscribers8.
Eleven years on, Tidal is a decent service for audiophiles. Which is exactly what it was on day one, with fewer people.
What Vintesh would have done
That stage had something Spotify, Apple, and nobody else could buy: a direct relationship with the most-followed people on earth, willing to put their faces on a product. That’s the asset. And they spent it on a spec sheet.
Vintesh’s idea was to use the one thing that unites all of us — music — to open a different paradigm of social network. It works like this:
Anyone can go to tidal.com and open an account. But not anyone can post. The only people who post are the ones Tidal selects: at first the sixteen on that stage, and alongside them people who aren’t musicians but whom you’d want to see up close — a Leonardo DiCaprio, a Jeff Bezos. The rest of us watch. It’s window-shopping through the lives, the process, and the content of a curated group. Everyone can comment; nobody else can post. And since the platform’s owners also own the stages, Tidal shares its venues with its base of creators: the concert, the studio, the dressing room, inside the app.
It isn’t a network where everyone shouts. It’s a network where a few speak, millions respond, and the scarcity of the voice is the product.
The format existed. Someone else shipped it.
Here’s the part that still stings us. In February 2023 Instagram launched broadcast channels6: a channel where only the creator posts and followers react and vote in polls. That September WhatsApp launched the same thing, and Zuckerberg announced 500 million monthly users in seven weeks7. Telegram had it earlier. Substack did it with text; OnlyFans and Patreon, with the wallet.
The format Vintesh had in its head in 2015 was on half a billion phones in 2023. It was shipped by a company that didn’t have Beyoncé on a stage, but did understand that a curated voice is a product and audio quality is a feature.
And the final irony: in 2026 Tidal introduced Upload and Spotlight5 — anyone can upload their music, but only what an editor selects gets featured, with cash awards paid through Cash App. Curation as the product, in other words. Ten years late, and in SoundCloud’s lane.
What Vintesh takes into every meeting
This isn’t an article about music. It’s the conversation we have with almost every operator we talk to in Latin America when they walk in saying “we want to do AI.”
When you hold an asset nobody can copy — a relationship, a distribution network, data only you have — the worst move is to launch the category’s default product with a better spec sheet. That product is a capital race, and it’s won by whoever has the most: Spotify, Apple, Amazon. Tidal ran it with audiophiles against three of the richest companies in history.
The right question isn’t “how do we do the same thing, better?” It’s “what behavior can only we start?” A cooperative with forty years of trust from its members doesn’t need a chatbot; it needs a channel only it can open. A distributor with the route to every corner store in the country doesn’t need a dashboard; it needs the format that turns that route into something nobody else can see.
Tidal had sixteen people holding hands and turned it into 16-bit audio. At Vintesh we still carry it. If anyone at Tidal reads this: the idea is still free.
