Kanye West Puts 'Life of Pablo' Album as a 'Tidal' Exclusive Boosting App Sales

After announcing that he has a $53 million debt, Kanye West released his new album, Life of Pablo, telling fans to subscribe to Tidal for a streaming exclusive.

Originally, the album which he released during a performance on Saturday Night Live, is available on his website but according to Apple Insider, West decided not to sell the album for another week by leaving it as a streaming exclusive on Tidal.

The talented hip-hop artist posted on Twitter to encourage his fans to subscribe to Tidal which gave the app a boost, sending it as the number one overall app on the iOS App Store for the first time ever, The Verge reported.

Prior to the plea of West, the app struggled to gain market share versus other similar apps like Apple Music, Pandora and Spotify. But when West released his album in the music streaming service app, it ranked 30th as the Top Grossing app.

Tidal is owned by rapper Jay Z which was launched last April. Owning small stakes of the company are 17 other artists and bands that include West, Usher and Nicki Minaj. Although it is similar to giants like Apple Music and Spotify, the app targets users who want to listen to a higher quality sound.

But there are thousands of users who had problems with their subscription since they paid for the album but did not get the download link. Tidal has responded to this glitch saying that they could either request arefund or wait for several days for the download link of the album, Tech Crunch reported.

Aside from that, the new album of West was uploaded by some users on piracy websites resulting into at least 500,000 illegally downloaded copies, according to TorrentFreak.

Tags

Kanye West, Tidal