Is Tidal Lying About Kanye West’s “Pablo” Streaming Numbers?
Tidal apparently just made a fool of themselves.
A few days ago Jay-Z’s music streaming service released a press release where it offered the total numbers of subscribers to date. 3 million was the figure announced - meaning Tidal grew in 2.5 million subscriber in 2015, as the remaining 500k belong to the subscribers that already existed when Jay-Z bought Aspiro, the parent company that originally owned Tidal, in 2014.
However, that, already infamous, press release didn’t only include the numbers of subscribers to date of Tidal, Jay-Z also revealed in it what many people were pressuring him to disclose: the streaming numbers of Kanye West’s latest studio album “The Life of Pablo”, a Tidal-exclusive which Kim Kardashian’s husband released a few weeks ago. According to the press release, “TLOP” was streamed 250 million times in its first 10 days. Pretty incredible. And you know what? I really didn’t stop for a moment to analyze the figure, I just silently congratulated Kanye for such an achievement upon reading the figure. Nevertheless, the reliable folks at HitsDailyDouble.com did do some analysis before congratulating Kanye and what they cleverly discovered by doing just some simple math is both sad and worrying. Read an extract of their article below:
“Tidal asserts that exclusive album The Life of Pablo by Kanye West was streamed 250m times in its first 10 days of release.
“We're not math wizards, but we took off our shoes and socks so we could count on both fingers and toes and our rough calculation is that 3m goes into 250m about 80 times. Which means that every single one of Tidal's paid subscribers have played Pablo in its entirety eight times a day every day for 10 days.
Damn, people really like that record. They're giving up work, meals, sleep and bathroom breaks to listen to it. Come to think of it, people are singing the songs wherever we go."
LMAO. I am living for the irony of the journalist who wrote this piece. And I guess he is totally right. It's very hard to believe those "official" numbers. Was it so hard for Jay-Z to have checked the numbers on the press release and have done some simple math to not fall into such "embarrassment"?
What are the "real" streaming numbers of “The Life of Pablo” then? Can you imagine if they’re minimal? Perhaps Universal Records should get Kanye to get it together and stop him from giving Tidal exclusive things. “TLOP” should be sent to iTunes and Spotify immediately. I bet he and his label re losing millions by making “TLOP” available on Tidal only.
Further proof of Kanye’s “weird” stream numbers on Tidal? From Music Business Worldwide: “Considering that Justin Bieber’s Purpose recently broke Spotify records with 205 million global streams in its opening week, across that service’s some-100m users, the Kanye figure certainly seems high”. Is embarrassment/delusion real, y’all? I think it is. Tidal claiming to have beat Spotify in this kind of streaming record (Kanye beating Bieber) with Spotify having almost 100 MILLION users and Tidal only 3? Come on!
Tidal needs more subscribers ASAP if they don’t want to die. Surely Jay-Z’s ace up his sleeve is Beyoncé’s upcoming album. But, do you think Beyoncé’s label will let her do a Tidal exclusive release? I really hope not!