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Square, the payments company of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is said to want to expand its operations by acquiring Spotify’s competitor Tidal.
It was in 2015 when artist Jay-Z bought the Swedish-Norwegian company Aspiro for 500 million kronor. Then the company launched the music streaming service. Tidal and Jay-Z brought together a host of famous artists who endorsed the project.
Despite the spectacular launch, the company has failed to prevail in the battle with the giants Spotify and Apple Music. Since then, other competitors such as Amazon Music and Deezer have also gained ground in the streaming music market.
The investment has been costly, since the Jay-Z acquisition until early 2019, Tidal has had a total loss of just under 1.4 billion SEK. Sometimes the company has been criticized for lack of transparency, Tidal, for example, does not indicate how many users the service has.
In 2018, Tidal was accused of faking more than 320 million listeners on the platform, financially benefiting top artists at the expense of others. It was not clear if it was the company itself that inflated its figures or if it was due to third parties, while Tidal denied that it had happened at all.
Bloomberg News is now reporting that US financial services company Square, which is run by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and has a current market capitalization of SEK 850 billion, is said to be negotiating the Tidal acquisition.
Square, which offers mobile payment solutions similar to Sweden’s Izettle, according to sources, is considering acquiring the streaming service to diversify its business.
The price was not reported in the negotiations, but when US telecoms operator Sprint bought a third of Tidal in early 2017, the entire company was valued at SEK 5.8 billion.
Read more: Jay-Z’s Spotify challenger loses ground in the US, continues to lose ground
