Tidal and MQA..two questions.


Tidal seems to be in financial trouble as it has been reported in many news outlets. Jay-Z is having problems with not paying artists and paying two artists too much money.
https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/05/20/tidal-investigates-data-breach-led-allegations-fraud-financ...
1. Therefore if Jay-Z was forced to sell the artist owned company ...who would bail it out?
2. Also are there any other streaming services that offer MQA content (other than Tidal)?

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Someone will buy it. Streaming was 65% of music revenue last year. Jay-Z seems to need a lot of money so he’ll probably sell eventually. That would be OK with me as I’d rather have the emphasis on the site on something other than hip-hop/contemporary R&B.
There have been numerous reports that Tidal has been hemorrhaging money for at least the last 1-2 years. In part, that's due to the subscription cost being so high. In any event,  Apple and Spotify dominate the streaming market and Tidal is a bit player (pun intended).

Sprint owns 33% of Tidal and Sprint itself is owned by a Japanese bank. Plans for a merger of Sprint and T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telephone) were quashed under the Obama administration, but have recently been revived as Trump is viewed as more "pro-business" (or more anti-competition).

Music streaming isn't a major consideration for Tidal's owners (Jay-Z included). Sprint, presumably by appealing to the "millenial" contingent by oh-so-cool advertisements for hiphop streaming music, the corporate "suits" hoped to increase their subscriber base. It hasn't succeeded for Sprint. T-Mobile has expanded, but only by disengaging from "traditional" cellular contracts and data caps.

Jay-Z hasn't been able to figure it out: that's obvious. Unless Tidal's other owners can write off losses or somehow capitalize on hifi streaming, I suspect it's soon to be dead, MQA or no.
None of the streaming services have ever turned a profit.  When Spotify was preparing for their IPO a few months ago, they publicized their prediction that, in 2018 they would turn the corner and start turning a profit.
A few weeks ago metrics for the music industry were published and downloaded content declined, while CDs and vinyl held their own, the increases were all on the streaming side.
I suspect that the business of streaming music will follow the video streaming companies, and start raising their prices.  They'll need to, to stay in business.  A few months ago Netflix added a few bucks a month to their price; there were some negative comments for a few days, but I'd be surprised if they lost that many subscribers as a result of the price increase.
It's hard to see Tidal succeeding in the long term. There just isn't a strong enough value prop over Spotify for most users. All of my friends at work (tech millennials) have Spotify, I'm not aware of a single Tidal user except the fringe audiophiles.

Re: what will happen to MQA, everyone does realize that MQA is just lossy compression + DRM of high-res content into a roughly standard-res stream, yes? We won't be losing anything SQ wise if the format goes away, just convenience. A service could easily come along and stream 24/96 FLAC, for instance. Whether there's a business case for that (or MQA for that matter) is another question.
Tidal sounds worlds better than Spotify and I sure hope Sprint or another entity purchases it and continues to make it better.