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Arcade Fire's Win Butler has opened up about his involvement with Tidal, admitting that the streaming service's launch was "poorly managed" but insisting it would have been "silly" for the band not to be involved.
Jay-Z's streaming service had its high profile launch back in March, when it was widely derided for seeming to, as The Independent reports, "present millionaire artists as charity cases asking for the public's support."
Its cost, too, was criticised - it's double the price of its main competitor, Spotify.
Amongst the huge list of huge artists who invested in Tidal were Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Regine Chassagne. Now, in an interview with The Independent, Butler has discussed the app's failure, so far, to take off.
"None of the artists knew anything about the PR," he admitted. "It was a poorly managed launch, but conceptually the thing that we liked about Tidal was that it’s HD streaming quality."
He added, "The [major labels] dictated that Tidal has to cost $20. The major label music industry has completely ruined every aspect of their business. At every step of the way they’ve had the tools offered to them to create an industry that works, and they’ve completely blown it. That’s why we never had any interest in signing a contract with one of these companies because they’re clearly completely clueless."
"It seems silly," he concluded, "for fear of being embarrassed, to not at least sit at the table with Jay Z, Kanye and Daft Punk and talk about art and music and how it’s going to be distributed."
The Reflektor Tapes, Arcade Fire's forthcoming feature-length documenary, is set to be screened worldwide on 24 September.
