Here are the 2 reasons Sprint could think Jay Z's Tidal is worth $600 million (S)

This is a huge win for Tidal, which Jay Z bought for $56 million in 2015. While Billboard says he and "

Here's the playbook.

But it's unclear how Sprint could leverage this without destroying value.

Rihanna isn't likely to want her next album to be only available on the Sprint network for any period of time — not without some sort of huge deal on top of her presumed Tidal ownership. So when Sprint says that "Tidal

Sprint could also go the route of "zero-rating," that is, letting Sprint customers listen to Tidal on the network free of any data charges.

This would be a boon for Tidal users, particularly for those who use the high-quality streaming option. T-Mobile already lets you stream all major streaming services free through its "binge-on" program, so it's hardly a revolutionary program, and Sprint has done some video zero-rating as well.

But it does fit into an emerging tactic by wireless companies to wring money out of media assets they own.

The clearest example so far is AT&T with DirecTV Now, its streaming TV service that competes with cable and satellite. If you are an AT&T customer, you can stream DirecTV Now all you want without it counting toward your data cap. Critics say this practice is anti-competitive, but AT&T's argument is that it allows any service to be "zero-rated": they just have to pay for it.

The problem with that logic is that when DirecTV is paying AT&T, the company is basically moving money from one pocket to another, while if a service like Netflix were paying the fee, that would be money lost.

Sprint could employ a similar strategy with Tidal. It could set a fee for services like Spotify and Apple Music to pay to be exempted from data caps on its plans. Tidal would have to pay too, but again, that money would just be going from one Sprint entity to another (provided Sprint ended up buying Tidal).

Even so, it's hard to imagine that Tidal, which has fallen well behind its competitors in terms of subscriber numbers, could be worth 10 times what Jay Z paid for it, at a time when even the marquee names in the business are losing money.