Tidal Has Reportedly Been Inflating Subscriber Numbers Just Like You Thought

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Since the moment Jay Z and a slew of superstar musicians announced the inception of Tidal, the service has been met with a collective groan as users flocked to more established names like Apple Music and Spotify. Tidal has always existed on its own island, working with artists and almost never reporting their streaming numbers. One number they have consistently made public has been their subscriber numbers, but according to a report by Norwegian paper Dagens Næringsliv, those numbers have been a lie.

Hotnewhiphop translated the report and found that Dagens Næringsliv claims it has an internal report of subscriber numbers that don’t match the public reports from the company, including a Jay Z tweet back in September 2015. It was that Jay Tweet about Tidal hitting the 1,000,000 subscriber threshold, just a month before the first star-studded, Tidal X concert where the lies apparently began.

According to the report, at the time of that tweet, Tidal had only secured 350,000 subscribers, less than half of what Jay was reporting publicly. In March of 2016 Tidal reported it had grown to 3 million subscribers, another number Dagens Næringsliv says was embellished, as they report the company only had 850,000 subscribers at the time.

Reports of the company’s demise have been frequent in the past year, so this is nothing new. Beyonce and her album Lemonade apparently provided a much needed boost, but many still wondered about the validity of the numbers the company reported publicly, especially the absurd Life of Pablo numbers which literally made no sense.

This is not the first time Tidal has had a subscriber numbers controversy either. Last March, Jay Z sued Aspiro AB, the company’s previous owners, for lying about the subscriber numbers. So who knows what to believe when it comes to Tidal’s subscriber and streaming numbers.

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