Tidal Being Investigated For Fake Streams
Last year the Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Næringsliv posted a story about receiving information that the streaming platform Tidal inflated the play counts for 2 huge albums from 2016, Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo, by as many as several hundred million. The same publication is now reporting that Norway’s Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime division has begun a formal investigation of Tidal as a result.
Beyonce and Kanye West reported received more than 320 million fake streams, which resulted in royalty payouts of more than $4 million to the artist’s labels. How much actually came to the artists is a result of their deal with their labels, but superstar artists usually have 50/50 deal on streaming royalties.
What makes the streaming numbers especially suspicious is that Tidal reportedly has only about 1 million subscribers, while the platform has stated that the number is actually 3 million. The huge number of streams is out of line with the subscriber numbers, especially for only 2 albums, since they meant that every Tidal subscriber would have to play the Kanye album 8 times a day during the period when the fake streams were reported.
This investigation is serious, as 4 Tidal employees have already undergone 25 hours of questioning. 3 Tidal employees left the company together at the end of 2016 after discovering streaming irregularities.
The record business has always been somewhat shady behind the scenes, with fake accounting, unpaid royalties and stolen publishing among the more frequent irregularities. That said, the latest generation of music attorneys are wise to those pitfalls and guard an artist from making the terrible deals of the past. You would think that in this world of digital measurement it would be difficult to fake streaming counts, but if the streaming platform is owned by your husband or friend, it seems that anything is possible.
That may be less of a case these days, especially with Tidal. Sprint acquired a 33% interest in the company in 2017, and you can imagine that a large telco is not pleased to have one of its investments being investigated by law enforcement.
If it’s proven that Tidal is responsible for fake streams though, it deserves to be prosecuted.
