TIDAL Owner Block Acquires Artist-Oriented Financial Product Provider HIFI

Block has acquired HIFI, a firm that provides financial products for music artists and their teams.

HIFI founder and CEO Damian Manning announced the acquisition in a Thursday (Oct. 12) post on LinkedIn and a message on the company’s website.

“We’re thrilled to announce that as of today, HIFI is joining Block Inc. (formerly Square Inc.) to further our shared purpose of economic empowerment with the financial technologies and services we have built to help artists thrive,” the message on the website said. “Block has long worked to create economic access across its ecosystems, and through its TIDAL business, is focused on serving artists at every stage in their career.”

HIFI is described on Manning’s LinkedIn page as a financial rights organization for the music industry. “HIFI’s members are an independent collective of music professionals and their advocates for whom the organization builds empowering financial products and services,” the description said.

Block is the parent company of Square, Cash App, Spiral and TBD, and it bought a majority stake in TIDAL, a global streaming music platform, in March 2021 for $297 million in cash and stock.

PYMNTS reported at the time that TIDAL billed itself as “an artist-led music and entertainment platform” and that it would operate independently within Square. As a payments-focused tech firm, Square would offer TIDAL artists financial tools to help them manage their financial lives.

A year later, during a Block investor day in May 2022, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said Block is “no longer just a payments company.”

Referring to TIDAL as one of the components of the ecosystems Block is building, Dorsey said “we knew we had a model that would allow us to create new ecosystems, serving new audiences. We chose three to start: Musicians and the bitcoin ecosystem of developers and consumers.”

Dorsey reiterated this message during a May earnings call, saying that what sets the company apart is its ecosystem of tools that work together in a variety of verticals.

“We have over 30 products, including some vertical-specific software,” Dorsey said. “And [there’s] a developer platform, which if our customers don’t find the tools they need in our platform, [they] can always build their own or hire [a] developer to do the same.”