Jay-Z’s Streaming Scandal
Music mogul and veteran rapper Jay-Z once quipped "I'm not a businessman. I'm a business, man." It proved visionary, as he's transitioned from street hustling rapper to multi-disciplinary millionaire (and friend of Warren Buffett). But the latest news from Norwegian newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv (DN), is a report containing damning allegations about the business practices at TIDAL, the streaming service owned by Jay-Z. Tidal has been accused of intentionally falsifying streaming numbers for Beyonce’s “Lemonade” and Kanye West’s “Life of Pablo” albums to a combined 320 million plays and consequently paying inflated royalties to the artists’ labels.
If this allegations are true then Jay-Z is going to have to answer some questions. If TIDAL fraudulently allocate additional streams to the Beyonce and Kanye West, they would have unjustly enriched them and deprived other artists of their fair share.
TIDAL has denied the accusations claiming that West’s album had been streamed 250 million times in its first 10 days of release in February of 2016, while claiming it had just 3 million subscribers — a claim that would have meant every subscriber played the album an average of eight times per day. These claims led the Norwegian paper to investigate the service’s numbers and report that it was intentionally inflating its subscriber count, a report supported by research from British firm Midia, which estimated that Tidal’s total number of subscribers was closer to 1 million globally.
Hip-hop is about hustling and faking it ’til you make it. Jay-Z needs TIDAL to be a financial success. If manipulating and faking the Stats is the way to stay trending and crack the code of monetizing music in the 21st century then getting two of the biggest stars on the planet to be exclusive to TIDAL and coming out the other side with huge numbers was a great master plan because it is obvious TIDAL didn’t have the subscriber base to pull it off.