Apple wants to buy Jay Z’s Tidal music app

Apple believes in delivering nothing but the best to its customers. The tech titan is reportedly in discussions with Tidal about acquiring its music streaming app, which offers exclusives and early releases from big artists like Beyonce and Kanye West, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The talks are in early stages and might not necessarily result in a deal, the report says, but Apple’s intentions are clear; it wants those exclusives to bolster its Apple Music streaming app that’s currently in hard-fought competition with Spotify.

Apple has been pushing to score exclusives of its own, like the release of Drake’s most recent album. But Tidal has been winning on that front. Rapper Jay-Z bought Tidal for $56 million in March 2015, then revamped it with a set of landmark partnerships with some of the biggest names in music, including venture as co-owners: Alicia Keys, Calvin Harris, Arcade fire, Chris Martin from Coldplay, Beyonce, Daft Punk, Jack White, J. Cole, Jason Aldean, Kanye West, Deadmau5, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna and Usher.

It was a big bang ceremony where Tidal made these stars co-owners in exchange for music rights. While that arrangement seemed unlikely to pan out at first, Tidal was the only place to stream Kanye’s new album “Life Of Pablo” for several weeks, and is still the only place you can stream Beyonce’s visual album “Lemonade”.

Music is a big part of Apple’s future plans and even if it had to pay a steep price for Tidal, its exclusives could give it a big edge over Spotify, which has concentrated on listening features like Discover Weekly instead.

Apple Music now has 15 million paying subscribers, compared to Spotify’s 30 million paying subscribers and 100 million active listeners. While Apple Music has been growing fast, the company might want to buy Tidal to accelerate user acquisition of people who’ve never really used streaming services. That could be easier now than going it alone without Tidal and having to wrestle listeners away from Spotify later when they’ve become entrenched with playlists and personalization.