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Tidal Continues To Struggle Thanks To Kanye West And ‘The Life Of Pablo’

By Stephen Jordan
Published on: 04:07 PST, Feb 16, 2016

Tidal is now the only place where you can exclusively listen to Kanye West’s newest album, The Life of Pablo. The Chicago rapper confirmed this via his Twitter account.

A week ago, Kanye West was on Twitter telling his fans that The Life of Pablo would be available on Tidal as well as his website as a download. West has since changed his mind, stating that the album will never be for sale. This was able to bring the Tidal subscribers numbers way up, making it the No. 1 app in the App Store, with Kanye thanking his fans on Twitter. However, The Life of Pablo has also recently become one of the most pirated albums of all time, reports Venture Beat. Not everybody wants to use Tidal, and it looks as if many have already turned to torrenting the project, or were able to download it from West’s website before it was pulled. Tidal was definitely in need of help and the big success Kanye West thought he was providing, but it seems as if this plan has backfired.

“At the time of writing close to 10,000 people were sharing a copy of the most popular torrent simultaneously, something we haven’t seen with a music release before,” TorrentFreak reports. “Aside from torrent sites, the album is also being widely distributed on various direct download services and hosting sites, increasing the overall piracy numbers even further.”

An estimated 500,000 people illegally downloaded Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo on the first day, as opposed to subscribing to Tidal in order to hear the album like the rapper intended. Plenty of Twitter users were mocking Kanye, as well as Tidal. But the struggling streaming service had some additional problems when the album launched.

Tidal saw a healthy of amount of new subscribers, specifically going after The Life of Pablo, but many went to Twitter with complaints that they never received the album after paying for it. Tidal apparently charged their credit cards for the purchase of the hip-hop project. However, fans never received an email from Tidal or a download link for the album.

By the afternoon of the next day, TechCrunch was able to confirm that less than 4,000 people still did not receive a download link for The Life of Pablo, which is quite problematic For Tidal and their public image. And just a couple of hours later, subscribers finally began seeing emails in their inboxes.

“Hello,

Our records indicate you purchased Kanye West’s ‘THE LIFE OF PABLO’, and did not receive the album. A partial version of the album is available for streaming on TIDAL.com, but the download is currently not available.

The final version of the album will be released in the next several days. Upon the new release, we will send you a download of ‘THE LIFE OF PABLO’ to this email address. However, if you would like a refund, please respond directly to this email and our customer support team will assist you.

Thank you.

TIDAL Support”

Rihanna’s latest album, Anti, received a pretty poor and problematic launch from Tidal when the album debuted, with the project accidentally leaking. The problem was being attributed to a simple “system error,” with Tidal blaming Universal Music Group for the screwup. Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show at Madison Square Garden was being live-streamed on Tidal, and even that was problematic. The live-stream suffered a number of glitches and eventually went down.

Kanye West also recently publically asked Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to invest $1 billion into his ideas, asking his followers to get a hold of him any way they could.

Tidal may be able to benefit from this if Kanye were to receive $1 billion in investments, though as he kept tweeting, his statements started to look condescending.

[Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Roc Nation]

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