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Jay Z's Tidal Music Streaming Service Is Fraudulently Inflating Subscriber Numbers, Report Says (digitalmusicnews.com)
A new report published by Markus Tobiassen and Kjetil Saeter of Norwegian publication Dagens Naeringsliv is accusing Jay Z's Tidal music streaming service of fabricating their subscriber numbers by creating fake accounts and lying to the media and partners. The company claims to have more than 3 million paying subscribers with more than half of those paying $20-a-month. Digital News Music reports: Tobiassen and Saeter interviewed staffers at TIDAL, as well as partners and confidential sources. And the information that came back was pretty damning. "When 16 of the world's biggest pop stars, one a convicted cocaine smuggler and a former Israeli intelligence officer was not able to obtain enough customers to Jay Z's Tidal, the company began to inflate subscription numbers," the report alleges. DMN spoke this morning with Tobiassen, who offered a translation of the report. "On March 30th of last year, Tidal issued a press release stating that the company had reached 'three million members,'" the report states. "The news story reported worldwide was that Tidal had three million paying subscribers. Tidal also specified to online newspaper The Verge that this figure did not include trial subscribers. This was the last time Tidal reported a total number of subscribers to the public." The only problem with that? "In April 2016, one month after the press release issued by the company claiming three million members, Tidal made payments to the record labels for around 850,000 subscribers. The figure reported internally by Tidal in April is 1.2 million subscribers." The report further states that Tidal itself reported a figure of 1.1 million to the major record labels in late 2016. In other words, nowhere near the numbers reported to media outlets like Digital Music News and Verge.
common practice
And even he had the sense to get his music off Tidal.
An untruth being uttered in the music business?! Fetch my fainting couch!
Jay Z strikes me as a man of uncommon taste. I mean, how else do you explain Jay Z & Abramovic?
as long as their investors and the labels have the right numbers they can report any number they want to the media and it will be perfectly legal
I'd be surprised if 3 million people have even heard of the service at all...
You lame you lie.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
See subject.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
"But at this point I'd take bitch problems if the other problems disappear ...."
"Damn, tidal be bleed'n money right out the rear"
"Fans be so fickle it somth'n to fear"
"Kanye ev'n left, and we been BFF for over one year"
" nigga didn't even shed so much as one tear"
that is the start of the lyrics for ur new song Jay Z. That's the great benefit to being a rap singer - just sing about your problems and if it's a hit, hey, no more problems!
Dear Slashdot editors:
If you keep making a story for every "A company lied" instance, the front page will be non-stop company lying spam and there will be no news for nerds. Or things that matter.
This is neither. Note the absence of comments as people continue to care less about stories like this.
An American (c)rapper lie !!
Never..
hope he doesnt turn into a California Sheepshead over it.
The 3 million number could be correct, and the 0.8 million reported to the large record labels could be false.
And the large record labels can't really complain, since they would report something like 0.2 million to the managers of artists, who would then report 0.1 million to the artists. Everybody pockets the difference if made up numbers can't be checked.
and accept that Spotify has won the online streaming music war. Your horses will not win this race, period.
i could see a critic of employee loungerooms consolidated in Slashdot who, working with /. editors, divest tech company secrets here to threaten their employers to proofread the anonymous disclosure to a ratio of money payed to delay the inevitable article from appearing on Slashdot. bwahaha! The story will come out eventually, but pay Slashdot a Reverse Firehose Fee that goes to a tech Institution training club for the employees and officers swindled or cheated from their tech job: like Wikileaks but pro-active to catch the problem and nurture a charity of itself so nobody hits rock bottom. Any fag can do the Wikileaks astroturf, but with a name like Slashdot it sounds like a surgeon entering a warzone on a mission as a ninja to do traffic sign waiving. Which is better than Wikileaks trying to depression-bomb countries.