Jay Z’s Tidal Accused of Inflating Subscriber Numbers for Over a Year
It’s no secret that Tidal has been struggling to gain subscribers in the competitive streaming wars since its debut in 2014, but now comes news that Jay Z’s company might have been inflating their subscriber numbers.
According to an exhaustive report from the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (via The Verge), Tidal has not been doing so well within the past year. The newspaper was able to obtain internal reports from the service, which shows that Tidal only had 350,000 subscribers when Jay Z announced in September 2015 that the streaming company reached 1 million users.
Last March, when Tidal announced it reached 3 million subscribers it actually had only 1.2 million activated accounts and 850,00 subscribers. According to The Verge, Tidal acknowledged in the past that its subscriber numbers were exaggerated, but blamed the company’s previous owners and planned to filed a lawsuit against them. However, the Norwegian newspaper reports that no lawsuit has been filed.
Tidal’s subscriber figures have been on the decline since Beyonce released her Lemonade album exclusively on the service last April. According to reports, the streaming service has an estimated 1.1 million paying subscribers to the music labels.
Reps for Jay Z and Tidal had no comment on the matter.