Tidal May Have Juiced Kanye And Beyoncé's Streaming Numbers (HBO)
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August 3, 2018
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August 3, 2018
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1.87%
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Jay-Z’s music streaming service Tidal is dodging accusations of manipulating its streaming numbers. An alleged whistle-blower leaked data to the Norwegian paper Dagens Naeringsliv, which appears to show that numbers for Beyoncé's “Lemonade” and Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" were inflated by 320 million listens.
Most music streaming services pay their artists from a shared pool of money, and if Beyoncé and Kanye’s numbers really have been manipulated, it means they took away royalty payments from other artists on the platform. Tidal has previously disputed these claims.
Dagens Naeringsliv grew interested in Tidal in 2016, when the platform released stats on its listeners. In a statement, Tidal said it had more than 3 million users, and that Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo” had been streamed more than 250 million times in just ten days. It was then that the newspaper began investigating, and got ahold of what appeared to be Tidal’s internal streaming data.
Professor Katrin Franke at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology analyzed the data and found some very unusual listening behavior for “The Life of Pablo” and “Lemonade”. It looked as if some users were listening to the same song up to 122 times at exactly the same time, on the hour, down to the very millisecond.
Other data appeared to show users listening to tracks in the same patterns over and over again throughout the same day. In total, Franke and her team found around 1.7 million accounts had been affected.
Four music associations in Norway TONO, Gramart, Fono and MFO have launched criminal complaints against Tidal with the Norwegian police. But Tidal denies the claims and told us that the information on the hard drive was stolen and manipulated, and that it would “vigorously” fight the allegations.
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