Arcade Fire's Win Butler and his wife and bandmate Régine Chassagne were present among the pantheon of pop music Avengers on hand to sign the charter at the public unveiling of Jay Z's fledgling streaming service Tidal earlier this year, but in a new interview with London newspaper The Independent on the evening of the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of Arcade Fire's new making-of-the-album documentary The Reflektor Tapes he outlines some of the reasons the venture seemed doomed out of the gate.Butler and Chassagne were enticed by Tidal's HD audio options but annoyed by the rollout and $20-a-month price point, the latter of which Butler blames on the carelessness of major labels. "The major label music industry has completely ruined every aspect of their business," he said. "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."The Canadian indie rockers smelled blood in the water early, and were hesitant to play ball with majors, given their defiantly independent business acumen. Even so, Tidal presented networking opportunities that were too good to pass up: "It seems silly, 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." But since Tidal's glamorous keynote, which also featured Kanye West, Beyoncé, Madonna, Jack White, Alicia Keys, and Daft Punk, business has been rocky.Tidal has offered a bevy of cool exclusives—early access to new music and videos from Prince and Beyoncé, a stream of Jay Z's deep cut mining B-Sides concert, free tickets and streaming of Jay's Made in America Festival—but ultimately struggled to keep pace with the competition, especially in the wake of Apple Music's equally star-studded but far less confounding unveil. Tidal's ideals remain admirably audiophile and artist oriented, but it remains to be seen whether there's room for them in the market.Craig is just a reflektor. Follow him on Twitter.
Advertisement