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Friday, January 30, 2015

Jay Z WiMPS OUT

Picks Up a Pair of High-End Streaming Services

Look out, Spotify. Jay Z is buying Swedish tech company Aspiro for 464 million Swedish crowns ($56 million) in cash, TheVerge reports. Aspiro operates a pair of streaming services: the ad-free WiMP and the hi-fi Tidal. Both target committed audiophiles, offering daily track recommendations, curated playlists, artist interviews and audio available to stream and download in the lossless FLAC format.

The five-year-old WiMP is currently available in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Poland and Sweden, a limited customer base compared to Spotify, but these countries are where streaming has firmly taken hold; as of last June, WiMP boasted about 580k paying users. Tidal, meanwhile, is built off the back of WiMP and launched in the U.S. and U.K. last year.

 
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