Tidal Exclusives Bring Back Piracy

Just when you thought music piracy was dead and buried it comes roaring back as alive as ever. The reason? Exclusives by Kanye West, Beyonce and Prince on Tidal.

These exclusives have been great for Tidal, as they have helped it to jump more than 100 places on the App Store most downloaded app chart, where it now sits at #3 on the iOS list.

As a result, Tidal is now the most popular music app in the US, even above Pandora and Spotify (Apple Music doesn't chart since it's a native app).

That's the good part of the story. The bad part is that some people just don't want to pay a monthly fee to stream a single album, they're not fond of Tidal, or they already subscribe to another service, so they resort to piracy instead. As a result, it's been estimated that West's The Life Of Pablo was torrented over 500,000 times in just its first day of release!

It looks like the same thing all over again in the initial hours after the release of Beyonce's Lemonade, as it's already on top of the the charts of both Kick Ass Torrents and The Pirate Bay.

And while Lemonade may be getting all the credit for Tidal's sudden ascendancy, the fact of the matter is that it's the only place online (other than YouTube, of course) where you can stream Prince's entire catalog. After his passing last week, there's been a tremendous appetite for his music, again helping Tidal tremendously.

So it looks like the only one making out on these exclusive's is Jay-Z and his Tidal service. The artists lose sales and streaming royalties to piracy, and the entire industry loses a chance to further the streaming cause. It's a missed opportunity.

The real smart move here would have been to make the exclusive's available only on the paid premium tiers of every service to give consumers a reason to sign up or upgrade. It could have happened with Adele's 25, it could have happened with The Life Of Pablo, and it could have happened with Lemonade.

Instead they've resurrected a scourge to the music industry where no one benefits except the pirates.

(This post was first posted on Forbes)

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Tidal Subscribers Sue Kanye West For Posting On Other Services

Here's an interesting twist in the Kanye West/Tidal story. He's getting sued by Tidal subscribers who claimed they were duped into paying for the service.

It all stems from when the performer released his latest album The Life of Pablo exclusively on Tidal. At the time, West claimed that the album would never appear on another streaming services, and as a result, some two million people flocked to Tidal to pay at least $9.99 a month to have a listen.

Alas, that exclusivity was to be short lived as TLOP is now available on both Apple Music and Spotify - for free.

That's part of the reason why West has been named in a class action suit against him. Perhaps because that might be a flimsy case to present, the plaintiff's attorneys are leaning more heavily on a privacy issue instead.

"Mr. West's promise of exclusivity also had a grave impact on consumer privacy," the lawsuit states, mostly because user credit card information, music preferences and other personal information were collected.


The lawsuit contends the value of new subscribers and their personal information could be as much as $84 million for Tidal.

The album was reportedly streamed some 250 million times within 10 days of its release.

This will be an interesting one to watch.

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Kanye Gets Tidal To Extend Trial Period

If you want to listen to Kanye West's new album The Life of Pablo, there's only one place online and that's Tidal. The problem is that after the 30 day trial period, you have to start to pay for the service, either at the $9.95 per month premium rate, or the more spendy $19.95 per month rate for the CD quality Tidal Hi-Fi.

Fearful of losing a chance at upselling trial subscribers that signed on just to listen to the album who's time has run out, Tidal has extended it's free trial period by 30 days.

There are probably a couple of reasons for this. First, Tidal screwed up Kanye's TLOP launch by not reporting it's numbers to Billboard, resulting in the album not even charting when it was released. Whether this was because the numbers might have been embarrassingly low, or just a human error hasn't been determined.

The second reasons might be that Tidal owner Jay-Z is reportedly looking for either a partner in the platform, or a straight buy-out. Any subscriber attrition, even those on free tier, looks bad, so it's in the company's best interest to bite the bullet and add another free month rather than have the numbers decrease.

One interesting thing is that Kanye and his producers keeps changing TLOP even after it's been released, which may be the wave of the future in terms of production. Hit the release deadline and perfect it later in the form of updates may become the norm before you know it.

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Tidal's In Big Trouble

When Jay-Z bought the music streaming service Tidal last year the purchase was met with a lot of hope and controversy.

Hope because he was an artist and successful businessman who could steer the company in the right direction. Controversy because of the initial tone-deaf press conference where a who's who of artists were trotted out, all saying that they'd finally be getting their financial due now that Tidal was here.

Since then it's been all downhill. Just in the last 30 days:

• Tidal exclusively released Kanye West's latest album The Life of Pablo, which gained no traction on the Billboard charts since Tidal refused to release any of the user data to Nielsen. A total embarrassment for all.

• Yesterday Tidal was served with a class-action lawsuit for $5 million for failing to register and pay mechanical royalties to an artist in the U.S. This is exactly the same type of lawsuit currently pending with Spotify, and one that an "artist's company" would be expected to avoid.

• Today it's being reported that Tidal fired both its COO and CFO, after having fired it's CEO late last year. At this point, the company is left without any experienced leadership.

Jay-Z has reportedly been in talks with Samsung to buy Tidal, but one wonders why that company would even want it, since it already has a failing music service in Milk Music.

Tidal could have been an innovator and leader in the streaming sector, but instead it's just a mess. It's lead in hi-res music streaming was never exploited and even acknowledged once Jay-Z took over, and every month there's a new mis-step. Maybe Jay-Z isn't the businessman he's cracked up to be after all.

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I'm With The "Brand"

It seems that as a music star becomes more popular, so too does their desire to cash in on their fame through non-musical business moves. Then is so opposed to the spirit of what a popular musician used to be that it leaves those of us from that era more and more incredulous. UK paper The Independent just did a nice article on the subject and here are some of the examples that they came up with.

• Rap star Kanye West has his own internet search engine (it's called Search With Kanye West).

• Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has his own line of "hot sauce".

• The R&B singer Usher teamed up with Mastercard to launch a range of credit cards.

• Justin Bieber has, curiously for a 16-year-old boy, his own line of nail polish called "One Less Lonely Girl".

• Madonna opened the Hard Candy Fitness centre in Mexico City, the first of what she hopes will be a worldwide chain of "first class" gyms.

• Lady Gaga has released her own range of Heartbeat headphones.

• Jennifer Lopez sold the first pictures of her twins Emme and Max to People magazine for a reported $6 million.

• Beyoncé is now focusing on her clothing ranges, House of Dereon and I Am Sasha Fierce.

• Jay-Z has non-musical business opportunities including the clothing label Rocawear and the New York nightclub 40/40.

• 50 Cent, Eminem and P Diddy all have their own clothing ranges, while P Diddy has also carved out an extra source of income for himself in promoting the vodka brand Cîroc.

• The popular Guitar Hero game now has Metallica and Aerosmith versions, while stars such as Ozzy Osbourne (who made himself into a product with a reality TV show about his home life) are playable characters.

• X-Factor winner Leona Lewis was signed up by the game Final Fantasy XIII, where she appeared in advertisements for the product and allowed one of her songs to be used in the game.

• Last year, pop star Katy Perry said: "I have a job, I know my responsibility and I'm always trying to take it to the next level ... most of these bitches just hawk breath mints or shoes. No offence to them, but maybe I'll hawk shoes later in life." She seemed to have forgotten all that, however, when she debuted her own perfume, Purr, last month.

Once again, celebrity seems to mean more these people than being an artist.

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