These days Tidal is less a streaming service more of a Aesopian parable. Launched with huge fanfare by 16 of the biggest artists in the world – including Madonna, Rihanna and Beyoncé – it promised to revolutionize music streaming by providing artist exclusives. Currently it is languishing around sixth place in the global streaming wars, with a tiny fraction of the users Spotify boasts. The fact that you can still only stream the most recent Beyoncé album on the service is mind-boggling – as if Disney announced the new Star Wars film was only going to be available to rent on Betamax from that last remaining Blockbuster in Alaska.
Tidal now has more to worry about than its tiny user base. It has just been accused by the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv of manipulating streaming data to inflate the number of times albums by Kanye West and Beyoncé have been played.
This is not the first time these suspicions have been raised. Two years ago, some questioned how Kanye’s album The Life Of Pablo, a Tidal exclusive at the time, could have been streamed 250m times in 10 days, when the platform itself only had 3 million users. There was similar confusion when Tidal claimed that Beyoncé’s Lemonade had been streamed 306m times in just 15 days.
Now, Dagens Næringsliv claims it has proof that the figures were manipulated. It says it has obtained a hard drive with Tidal’s raw streaming data, which has been analysed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The report, produced by the university, claims that Tidal used genuine accounts to play more than 150m duplicates of The Life Of Pablo tracks at exactly the same times, 2am and 5am, without users’ permission. It also claims that tracks from Lemonade were played repeatedly at exact intervals of six minutes – down to the millisecond.
Dagens Næringsliv has interviewed a number of Tidal users who, according to the data, have listened to hundreds of Kanye West tracks through the night. The users claim never to have listened to Kanye.
Tidal has strenuously denied the claims, suggesting that the paper has falsified information because of a vendetta against the streaming platform. “This is a smear campaign from a publication that once referred to our employee as an ‘Israeli Intelligence officer’ and our owner as a ‘crack dealer’. We expect nothing less from them than this ridiculous story, lies and falsehoods. The information was stolen and manipulated and we will fight these claims vigorously,’” a representative told Billboard. Tidal has not suggested why the university would falsify its analysis of the hard drive.
Tidal, partly owned by Jay-Z, the husband of Beyoncé and a long-term Kanye West collaborator, will have paid millions of unearned dollars to the record labels of those acts if the allegations are true. That money should have been divided more fairly between other artists on the platform.
If the analysis is correct, it would also suggest that a storm is brewing in the streaming industry. Streaming is now providing steady income for the music industry and Netflix is a huge investor in original programming. But for years, questions have been raised about the limited data provided by giants like Netflix and Apple Music. Last year, Stereogum did extensive reporting to suggest that Drake was receiving an impossibly high number of streams from Apple Music – although the site stopped short of specifically accusing Apple of massaging the figures as a thank you to Drake for exclusively premiering music on their platform. Netflix is desperate to keep its own streaming figures confidential and so disparaged recent attempts by Nielsen to estimate viewers. Many have sniped at Facebook for the way it overestimates the number of people watching videos on its platform.
So either the Tidal story is a huge fabrication, made up by a Norwegian business paper that has a terrible grudge against the company, or at least one streaming platform has developed techniques to massage figures and therefore revenues. If it is the latter, it could lead to a huge reckoning for the entire sector.
