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Tidal Under Criminal Investigation In Norway Over 'Faked' Streams (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: High-fidelity music streaming service Tidal is under criminal investigation in Norway for allegedly inflating album streams for Beyonce's Lemonade and Kanye West's The Life of Pablo. The alleged faking of streaming numbers was exposed last year by Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv (DN), which said it had obtained a hard drive with the tampered data. Around 1.3 million accounts were supposedly used to lift the play counts of said albums by "several hundred million," with Tidal paying out higher royalty fees to the two artists and their record labels as a result.
In the wake of the report, a Norwegian songwriter's association known as Tono filed an official police complaint against Tidal. The Jay-Z-owned streaming service denied the accusations and subsequently launched an internal review to be conducted by a third-party cyber security company, which is still ongoing. Today, DN revealed that Norway's National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Okokrim) has begun an investigation into data manipulation at Tidal. Though still in its early stages, Okokrim says that at least four former Tidal employees (including its former head of business intelligence -- responsible for analyzing streams) have been interrogated in front of a judge as part of the investigation. The quartet have faced a total of 25 hours of questioning thus far. Three former staffers reportedly recognized signs of meddling with the albums and contacted a lawyer before notifying Tidal. "All three individuals resigned from the company in 2016 after signing what a DN source called 'the gold standard of confidentiality contracts,'" reports Engadget.
In the wake of the report, a Norwegian songwriter's association known as Tono filed an official police complaint against Tidal. The Jay-Z-owned streaming service denied the accusations and subsequently launched an internal review to be conducted by a third-party cyber security company, which is still ongoing. Today, DN revealed that Norway's National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Okokrim) has begun an investigation into data manipulation at Tidal. Though still in its early stages, Okokrim says that at least four former Tidal employees (including its former head of business intelligence -- responsible for analyzing streams) have been interrogated in front of a judge as part of the investigation. The quartet have faced a total of 25 hours of questioning thus far. Three former staffers reportedly recognized signs of meddling with the albums and contacted a lawyer before notifying Tidal. "All three individuals resigned from the company in 2016 after signing what a DN source called 'the gold standard of confidentiality contracts,'" reports Engadget.
Tidal's major shareholder is (surprise, surprise) Beyonce's husband.
She is paying herself.
Both the artists wife & close friend of the Owner, so there is the incentive. Beyonce's album at least was also an exclusive to the service and was heavily promoted by new organisations as showing that the streaming service could compete with traditional outlets.
Things are being explained fine, people just don't know how streaming pro rata licensing works.
Common poll, divided according to total listens. You aren't guaranteed a fixed amount of cents per playback.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
corporation means it's corporated and can face fines and shit, even dissolution. usual reason would be running a cartel in the nordic countries(probably most usual). second would be some environmental crimes.
however, I'm not sure here of the motives. was the idea to suck up a higher percentage of the norwegian riaa equivalents radioplay etc fund?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Now if they put that on Tidal, I'd actually be interesting in joining.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Don't you think it strange (and very stupid) that Tidal would rig the numbers so that they have pay *more* money to artists?
They may be keeping two sets of numbers. One that's 'closer to the truth' to pay artists and another to 'upsell themselves' to other services. Plex just recently signed a deal with them for example, now ask yourself how much more valuable to Plex they'd be if they just fudged the numbers showing a much bigger draw on the market and in turn more people installing plex servers, and paying a monthly fee to them.
Om, nomnomnom...
That Jay now has 100 problems?