WiMP

» see wimpmusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

wimp launched on 19 february 2010 in norway as a joint venture between aspiro ab and the record retailer platekompaniet. spotify had shipped its consumer product two years earlier and was already the reference. wimp was the local answer for a market that took its music seriously and paid for it. the name was a piece of scandinavian humor about being pushed around by the majors.

by 2012 the service was in denmark, sweden, germany, poland. in 2013 aspiro shipped a hifi tier with flac and alac lossless audio, an audiophile bet that spotify would not match until years later. the norwegian press covered it like a national point of pride. paid subscribers stayed modest against spotify's global scale.

project panther bidco, jay-z's shell company, closed the acquisition of aspiro ab on 30 january 2015 for around fifty million euros. wimp and tidal were the two aspiro properties. from 30 march 2015 both became tidal. the wimp brand went dark that day. the lossless tier and the norwegian engineering team were the parts that carried forward, minus the name.

i did not use wimp. tr never had it. i was on ttnet in ankara around 30 in 2015, listening to youtube playlists and downloaded mp3s the way i had been since university, because spotify would not open tr accounts until later. tidal did eventually launch here after the merger, so this is one of those graves where the corpse was absorbed rather than buried, and the norwegian version is what's actually gone.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hifi bet ~

wimp shipped 24-bit lossless in 2013 while spotify was still on 320 kbps ogg vorbis. this became the specific technical case tidal has kept making since 2015, and it is the piece of wimp that survives. every time tidal marketing said "cd quality" or "hifi" through the 2020s, that was a wimp product decision from the aspiro years still shipping under a different brand.

~ the tidal absorption ~

the acquisition made all the pop-star headlines because of the launch event on 30 march 2015 in new york, which pulled in madonna, alicia keys, beyoncé, jack white, chris martin, deadmau5. tidal was framed as the artist-owned answer to spotify. under the hood it was mostly aspiro's software and mostly wimp's product team, plus a nordic subscriber base already paying for hifi. the norwegian branding was the piece the marketing did not want to keep.

~ what stayed ~

tidal is still a product. it changed hands again in march 2021 when square bought a majority stake for around three hundred million dollars. the norway office kept engineering for years after both deals. wimp itself, the yellow-and-black logo and the local personality, ended on 30 march 2015 in the same press release that everyone remembered for entirely different reasons.

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