Jay-Z Buys Spotify Competitor Aspiro for $56 Million

It seems will.i.am isn’t the only musician buying up tech businesses, Jay-Z has now purchased a Spotify competitor, namely Aspiro for $56 Million.

Aspiro is a Scandinavian company, much like Spotify, but instead it offers more services more centric to diehard music fans rather than causal listeners. It has a service called WiMP and another called Tidal and both are much more costly ($20 a month) but instead offer a greater range of features.

WiMP is most only available in Scandinavia, while Tidal is available in the US and the UK. They all offer features such as advanced music curation and playlists, but Tidal offers much higher quality audio – 25 million tracks in 16-bit FLAC.

While it’s no surprise that Jay-Z would buy such a company, it’ll be interesting to see what he does with it and whether the service will really pose a threat to Spotify.

Source: Gizmodo