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    "headline": "Jay-Z’s Tidal went from a $56 million buy in 2015 to a $297 million Square deal in 2021",
    "description": "Square's 2021 payment bought 86.8 percent of the service, not all of it, and a 2017 Sprint stake had implied a far higher value along the way.",
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    "keywords": "Block, Jack Dorsey, Jay-Z, Music streaming, Tidal",
    "articleBody": "A six-year-old business deal is circulating again this week: in early 2015 Jay-Z’s holding company agreed to pay roughly $56 million for the Scandinavian firm behind Tidal, and on March 4, 2021, Jack Dorsey’s Square announced it would pay $297 million for a majority stake in the same service. Both figures check out. The story in between, and what happened after Square took over, is more tangled than the two numbers suggest. The 2015 purchase: a Swedish company and a WiMP spinoff Tidal was not Jay-Z’s invention. It began life inside Aspiro, a company listed in Sweden that ran a Norwegian streaming service called WiMP and launched the Tidal brand in the US, UK and Canada on October 28, 2014. On January 30, 2015, Project Panther Bidco, a vehicle controlled by the rapper (born Shawn Carter), offered 464 million Swedish kronor in cash for Aspiro, about $56 million at the exchange rate of the day. Aspiro’s shares jumped 59 percent toward the offer price of 1.05 kronor, and its main owner, the Norwegian media group Schibsted, accepted. On March 30, 2015, Jay-Z relaunched the service at a press event in New York with 16 artist co-owners on stage, including Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Alicia Keys, Usher and J. Cole. The pitch was simple: an artist-owned platform with lossless audio and exclusives. Lil Wayne and T.I. later joined as co-owners. West reportedly walked away in 2017 after a quarrel with the board over pay. Six years in four price tags The trending headline jumps from 2015 to 2021, but there was a stop in the middle. In January 2017 the US carrier Sprint bought a 33 percent stake for a reported $200 million. Laying the deals side by side shows how the implied value of the whole company moved: January 2015: 100 percent of Aspiro for about $56 million. January 2017: 33 percent for a reported $200 million, which implies roughly $606 million for all of Tidal ($200 million divided by 0.33). March 2021: Square agrees to pay $297 million in cash and stock for what it called a “significant majority ownership stake.” June 2022: Block, as Square had by then been renamed, discloses the stake it acquired was 86.8 percent, which implies about $342 million for 100 percent ($297 million divided by 0.868). On the simplest reading, $297 million is 5.3 times $56 million, which works out to growth of about 32 percent a year compounded over six years. That reading flatters the deal. Sprint’s money went into the company along the way, the 2021 price bought less than the whole business, and the implied value in 2021 sat well below the figure Sprint’s investment pointed to four years earlier. Nor did the $297 million go to Jay-Z alone: Tidal had several artist shareholders, and Square said all of them would stay on as co-owners after the sale. What Square, then Block, did with Tidal Square framed the purchase as an extension of its tools for small businesses to a new group of entrepreneurs: musicians. Dorsey said the deal rested on “finding new ways for artists to support their work.” Jay-Z said he had always seen Tidal as more than streaming and that “six years later, it has remained a platform that supports artists at every point in their careers.” He was set to join Square’s board once the deal closed, and a Square executive, Jesse Dorogusker, was put in charge of Tidal on an interim basis. The changes since then have mostly been cuts and simplifications. Tidal added a free tier in the US in November 2021, closed its download store in October 2022 and laid off more than 10 percent of its staff in December 2023. In April 2024 it folded its two paid plans into one, then dropped the MQA audio format it had championed since 2017, and on July 24, 2024, it ended support for Sony’s 360 Reality Audio. In March 2025 Dorsey announced plans to cut 930 jobs across Block. In June 2026 Tidal said tracks it identifies as wholly AI-generated will carry a label and earn no royalties, a rule set to start on July 15, 2026. Where it stands Tidal now says it is available in 61 countries and licenses 100 million tracks and 650,000 music videos, up from the more than 70 million songs and 56 countries Square cited in 2021. The Tidal sale was set to close in the second quarter of 2021, and Block’s 2022 shareholder disclosure put the final number on it: 86.8 percent of the service for $297 million. Jay-Z’s attention this fall has been on the stage rather than the boardroom. His three Yankee Stadium nights in July grossed $42.3 million, a box office record for a rapper, and his JAŸ-Z30 anniversary series ends with two Los Angeles stadium dates on October 23 and 24. Further reading Wikipedia: Tidal (service) Image: Mike Barry from Wirral, England, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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