Reports from Bloomberg and elsewhere say Jay Z has bought Aspiro AB, a media company that has a digital music streaming service in Poland, Sweden, Germany, Norway, and Denmark.
OK, why not? It cost his holding company $56 million. That’s what he and Beyonce spend on vacations.
Aspiro has WiMP (really, a terrible name for the US) and Tidal. The latter sells and streams high end audio files which could only be appreciated fully on Sony’s excellent new Walkman A17 or Neil Young’s Pono player. The latter took quite a beating this week on Yahoo with a scathing piece by David Pogue.
Meantime, if Jay Z had wanted a library of high definition tracks, he could check out hdtracks.com, the single best service which already has a huge catalog.
But a challenger to Spotify? Not here in the U.S. Maybe WiMP and Tidal are the future for Europe. But my sense is that Spotify is entrenched at this point, with Pandora right behind.
