Chance the Rapper is preparing to color all over Tidal with some help from his famous friends. On Saturday, Tidal will exclusively live-stream Chance’s Magnificent Coloring Day festival.
The one-day concert will be held at the Chicago White Sox’s home stadium, U.S. Cellular Field, in Chance’s hometown of Chicago. Chance will be coloring in the history books as Magnificent Coloring Day will be the first festival held at the stadium and the first concert there in more than 13 years. The festival will feature performances from Chance, John Legend, Skrillex, Alicia Keys, 2 Chainz, Tyler the Creator, Lil Wayne, and Lil Uzi Vert.
Tidal’s roughly 4.2-million subscribers may be dwarfed by those of Apple Music and Spotify, but Jay Z’s streaming service has shown the ancillary value in streaming music festivals. Magnificent Coloring Day is the third festival Tidal will live stream in the last two months, following July’s One Africa Music Fest and September’s Made In America festival. Rihanna’s scintillating 85-minute set at Made in America is still one of the nine most viewed videos on Tidal.
This festival exemplifies the confusing relationship between music streaming services and artists. Chance exclusively streamed his mixtape Coloring Book on Apple Music for two weeks in April. Coincidentally, Tidal will be live-streaming Chance’s festival as his former distribution partner, Apple, is in the middle of its own 10-day Apple Music Festival. To further blur the lines, Alicia Keys, a co-owner of Tidal and one of the keynote speakers at the now ignominious launch event last March — performed at the Apple Music Festival in London earlier this week.
While Apple will not be streaming Magnificent Coloring Day, and will not air a performance from Apple Music Festival on the same day, Chance will close out Apple’s festival on September 30. More than 44,000 tickets were sold for the event. Streaming the festival from your Tidal mobile app and/or web browser may be your best way to see Chance tell tens of thousands what happens if one more label tries to stop him. The festival stream begins at 1 p.m. CST.
