Numbers Lie: TIDAL Has Been Accused Of Inflating Stream Numbers For Beyonce And Yeezy, And It’s “Stealing” Money From Other Artists

(Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images For Roc Nation)

Norwegian Newspaper Alleges TIDAL Has Stolen Streaming Money For Beyonce And Kanye West

A Norwegian newspaper called Dagens Næringsliv (DN) is calling foul on TIDAL’s claim Beyonce and Kanye West broke streaming records in 2016. The publication has reportedly gone out of it’s way to recover a hard drive that is said to contain all the streaming data from TIDAL (times and song titles, user IDs and country codes’)…and reportedly the stream numbers don’t add up to reports.

Their main accusation is ‘Beyoncé’s and Kanye West’s listener numbers on TIDAL have been manipulated to the tune of several hundred million false plays… which has generated massive royalty payouts at the expense of other artists.’

On the hard drive, which TIDAL is refuting it’s veracity, TIDAL customers supposedly listened to a total of 758,745,952 to The Life Of Pablo in the first month. They are saying it’s metaphysically IMPOSSIBLE. They even reached out to specific subscribers who allegedly listened to TLOP and Beyonce’s Lemonade and the subscribers denied the numbers.

One of these subscribers, Copenhagen-based composer Halfdan Nielsen, is informed he supposedly listened to songs from Lemonade on more than 50 occasions. He denies it, calling the figures “nonsense”.

DN also tracks down a law student in Washington D.C – Tiare Faatea – who, according to the data, played tracks from Beyoncé’s Lemonade 180 times within 24 hours.

Faatea is perplexed. “No, that can’t be right,” she says.

Another TIDAL subscriber, music critic Geir Rakvaag, supposedly played tracks from Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo 96 times in a single day – with 54 plays in the middle of the night.

“It’s physically impossible,” he says.

The list goes on.

Yikes! Music Business World Wide reports the paper went even further, and contacted Norway’s Center for Cyber and Information Security (CCIS), and they forensically investigated the data that the news source has obtained on TIDAL’s plays.

“We have through advanced statistical analysis determined that there has in fact been a manipulation of the [TIDAL] data at particular times. The manipulation appears targeted towards a very specific set of track IDs, related to two distinct albums.”

This is nutty. They allegedly found that TIDAL used “various methods” to bulk up plays of The Life of Pablo and Lemonade, including manipulating existing user accounts to play songs hundred of times, with out their knowledge. TIDAL has strongly denied ‘manipulating streaming figures or tampering with royalty payments’, according to DN.