Fledgling subscription streaming service Tidal has been doing much to distinguish itself as the Platform Of The People, largely aided by company chief Jay Z's defensive mantra "Tidal is for all" and its consequently incongruous Tidal X platform, which stages private gigs with affiliated artists exclusively for the benefit of Tidal subscribers.
It was at one such Tidal X gig late last week — in honour of Jay Z himself — that the hip hop mogul decided to air some of his latent grievances against industry competitors such as YouTube and Spotify, taking the opportunity at the outset of his performance to lay down a pointed freestyle that also set its targets on Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine and search-engine monolith Google before veering into political territory with comments on the shooting deaths of Freddie Gray, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin.
Following his poignant interlude, Jay Z returns to the corporate shots, once again referring to other companies' bottom lines (though Spotify seems to have jumped a billion dollars in revenue in the fortnight between Jay Z's #TIDALFACTS Twitter rant and this freestyle, with Mr Carter now citing the company as being worth "$9 billion") to make his point about Tidal's … honest? scrappy? DIY? … roots and purpose.
You can watch Jay Z's freestyle below. Regardless of what you think about the whole Streaming Service War that seems to have ignited with Tidal's arrival, there's no denying that Jay remains a masterful rhymesmith, able to make unlikely rhymes such as "culprit" and "supposed to get" work with casual confidence and an underlying cool that makes it easy to forget that he's essentially taking pot shots at absent parties, in front of a crowd of people guaranteed to be on his side. Not that there's anything wrong with that, we suppose.
