Usher, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, Deadmau, Kanye West, Jay-Z,… the “kings” – “queens” of the world music industry at the launch ceremony of the Tidal application in 2014.

Specifically, since 2018, a major Norwegian economic and financial newspaper called Dagens Næringsliv (DN) began a long investigation surrounding the issue of “fake streams” from the Tidal platform. . Enterprise’s investigation showed that Tidal falsely declared the stream numbers of two major albums released in 2016, “Lemonade” by Beyoncé and “The Life of Pablo” by Kanye West, causing the actual stream numbers of these two albums to be inflated. many times.

At the time of its launch in 2016, Tidal did not publicize streams for songs and albums played on this platform, unlike Spotify. In 2016, the two famous albums of Beyoncé and Kanye West as mentioned above were released exclusively on this platform for several months to several years, before being brought to public platforms.

DN newspaper paid attention to the unusually large data that Tidal gave about these two exclusive albums. Specifically, Tidal announced that the album “The Life of Pablo” in 10 days brought in 250 million streams while this music platform only had 3 million users at that time. This number means: to get 250 million streams of Kanye West’s album in 10 days, all 3 million users would have to stream the entire 66-minute album at least 8 times a day – a real statistic. monstrous.

With “Lemonade”, Tidal also announced that Beyoncé had earned 306 million streams in the first 15 days, which is also a suspiciously large number. The company at that time coordinated with UK data company MiDiA to conduct an independent investigation and reported that: Tidal had inflated both the number of users and streams on the platform. The real number of Tidal’s user base is only nearly 1 million registered users compared to the 3 million number they informed the public about. In addition, this investigation also came to the conclusion: the Tidal platform falsely declared the number of streams by hundreds of millions – intentionally exaggerating the effectiveness of this platform to make money and harm the public. other artists.

The newspaper also said that the way Tidal cheats on streams is to wait for users to log out of the system or be in an inactive state so that they can push the streams of these accounts automatically using its technology. Surname. 

The company also tried contacting a Tidal user with an account named Tiare Faatea – one of the people whose account was used by Tidal to stream “underground” without permission – to investigate further. When DN informed that this user had listened to many songs in the album “Lemonade” with a frequency of “180 times in 24 hours”, this person confirmed that it was a completely fictitious data and denied that he had listened to it. heard so much.

Not stopping there, DN Newspaper has also collaborated with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where there are experts in data security and high-tech crime prevention to coordinate. with the Norwegian Court to further investigate this matter. Tidal’s representative immediately refuted the above information and said that it was a fabrication aimed at discrediting the platform. However, representatives of Beyoncé and Jay-Z – the owners of Tidal – have not yet made any further comments.

Synthetic