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Madonna on Tidal: We’re Working Out the Kinks

The Material Girl defends streaming service.

Madonna stepped up to defend Tidal during a recent talk with the Associated Press. The 56-year-old Material Girl is a part-owner of the streaming service fronted by Jay Z, as are all of the other superstars involved.

| CLICK TO MEET THE OWNERS OF TIDAL |

During the interview, she further cemented her faith, in spite of Tidal's rough spots. "It's just the beginning,” said Madonna. “We're working out a lot of kinks and hopefully we're going to build something unique and amazing that's going to attract a lot of people.

She added that Tidal’s mission isn’t to make the rich richer. "It's important that people understand we didn't create Tidal, we didn't put this together, we didn't all join forces because we're broke and we want more money. The idea is we want to support other artists and we want people to understand this is our heart, this is our work, and we want people to recognize that and we want other artists to have a chance.”

As of May, Tidal amassed about 800,000 subscribers. The numbers are owed at least partly to affiliations with some of the biggest artists in the world, like Madonna, BeyoncéRihanna, Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne.

The star-power hasn’t shielded the company from more drama. Tunechi’s alignment helped Tidal break records with the Free Weezy album stream, but resulted in a $50 million lawsuit from Cash Money. Another sour note was criticism the company received for being more expensive than Spotify, and now, Apple Music, but most of the money outrage seems to have died down. 

Madonna touched on the pricing issue in her interview stating, "We live in a society now where everybody just expects everything to be for free, but you don't get a house for free; you have to pay somebody to build it.”  

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(Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Roc Nation)

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