Two years on from TIDAL‘s ostentatious launch, JAY-Z‘s streaming service continues to face questions about its validity and viability.
Find out what the latest drama is below…
Hits Daily Double cite sources who claim that TIDAL is coming under fire in industry circles for the numbers it’s reporting to Nielsen SoundScan – the body whose data forms the Billboard charts.
So what’s the actual problem?
The following makes it clear using ‘4:44’ and ‘Grateful’ by DJ Khaled (two TIDAL powered LPs) as examples:
In the first week of wide release for 4:44, total reported streams to SoundScan were 122m, which was 68m more than the same streaming services reported to BuzzAngle. Similarly, two weeks prior, DJ Khaled won a race with Imagine Dragons for #1 when SoundScan logged 17m more streams than BuzzAngle. Industry insiders have confirmed that both Apple Music and Spotify, the leading steaming services with over 90% combined share, reported the same numbers to both chart services.
It’s clear. The insinuation is that TIDAL are ramping up their numbers to the data bank that determine the charts (SoundScan) and are less bothered about the others (such as BuzzAngle).
We must stress that this is all alleged, but does make for an intriguing development.
There’s murmurs about SoundScan making major changes to their counting format to combat such confusion moving forward; there’s also alleged talk of TIDAL to be stripped of the ability to report to SoundScan. The latter of which would effectively render the service powerless in the charting stakes.
Again, fascinating narrative.