Tidal Has Been Accused Of Fudging Their Streaming Numbers By Millions

It looks like Jay Z has one more problem: today, Tidal has defended itself against what its calling a “smear campaign” as an investigative report alleges it’s inflating streaming numbers by hundreds of millions of plays.

Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv are behind the claims, as relayed in English by Music Business Worldwide.

The report centres around two 2016 Tidal-exclusive albums, Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo and Beyoncé’s Lemonade, alleging that there are 320 million false plays between them.

West’s album remained exclusive for just six-weeks, while Lemonade remains painfully unavailable on other streaming services. Both artists are among the company’s many famous co-owners.

Allegedly, DN got their hands on a hard drive which allegedly contains Tidal streaming data that, when analysed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Center for Cyber and Information Security, consisted of several odd patterns.

Namely, users appear to listen to multiple songs at once. There is also a technically-possible-but-suss mass trend where users began playing a new song every six minutes, down to the same millisecond.

In addition, DN allege they matched the numbers to reports sent to record labels, and contacted several users across the world who rejected their numbers as “impossible”.

Admittedly, we’d probably all be a little defensive if we saw our streaming habits laid out in cold, slightly psychotic data, but listening to 180 Lemonade tracks in 24 hours is probably a bit much for even the biggest members of the Beyhive.

DN has long questioned Tidal’s streaming numbers, leading the company to dismiss the report “a smear campaign from a publication that once referred to our employee as an ‘Israeli Intelligence officer’ and our owner as a ‘crack dealer.'”

According to Variety, these comments were made in previous DN articles, referring respectively to Tidal COO Lior Tibon’s and Jay Z’s past lives.

“We expect nothing less from them than this ridiculous story, lies and falsehoods,” Tidal said. “The information was stolen and manipulated and we will fight these claims vigorously.”

It’s currently unclear how many subscribers the service has — the official number of over three million hasn’t been updated since March 2016, when Tidal had The Life Of Pablo as a six-week exclusive.

At the time, Tidal claimed the album had been streamed 250 million times in 10 days, which, by their user count, means everyone listened to the album around 83 million times.

In January, it was widely reported that Jay Z sold a third of his stake in Tidal to US telecommunications company Sprint for US$200 million ($169 million), having originally bought the company from Norwegian company in 2015 for US$56 million ($47 million).

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Jared Richards is a staff writer for Junkee and co-hosts Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.