Jay Z’s Tidal Accused of Inflating Number of Subscribers

Beyonce, Jay Z at TIDAL

Tidal Accused of Exaggerating Subscribers

Jay Z’s popular music streaming service Tidal has been accused of exaggerating the actual number of users that it has. A report says that on at least two occasions, Tidal has over-reported its subscriber numbers, in an effort to appear more successful than it really is.

In September of 2015, Jay Z claimed that Tidal had

1,000,000 people and counting.

However, according to the report, at the time, they actually had 830,000 subscribers. In fact, Tidal’s internal report may have also overstated the subscriber number. It says that payments made to record labels at that time indicated that the service had around 350,000 subscribers.

The report also says that in a press release on March 30 that it had grown to 3 million paying subscribers, up from 900,000 in June 2015. However, in April, a month after Tidal claimed to have 3 million subscribers, its internal reports showed 1.2 million subscribers. And payments to record labels indicated that it had 850,000 subscribers. Tidal nor Jay Z has yet to comment.

Tidal is a subscription-based music streaming service that combines lossless audio and high definition music videos with curated editorial. The service has over 25 million tracks and 85,000 music videos. Tidal claims to pay the highest percentage of royalties to music artists and songwriters within the music streaming market. Tidal was launched in 2014 by Norwegian/Swedish public company Aspiro. It has distribution agreements with all of the three major labels, in addition to many indies. In the first quarter of 2015, the parent company Aspiro was acquired by Project Panther Ltd., which was dissolved on August 2, 2016 which was owned by Shawn “Jay Z” Carter.

Following the acquisition of Aspiro by Jay Z in March 2015, a mass-marketing campaign was introduced to relaunch Tidal. A press conference took place on March 30, 2015, introducing sixteen music artists to the stage, including Jay Z, who were all co-owners and stakeholders in Tidal. The service was promoted as being the first artist-owned streaming service.

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