Yesterday, TIDAL celebrated the one year anniversary of its widely publicized rebranding with 16 artist owners that include J. Cole, Rihanna, Daft Punk, Calvin Harris, Madonna and Beyoncé. It has been a tumultuous year and to keep with the theme of ups and downs, the big man upstairs, Jay Z has launched a lawsuit against the former owners of TIDAL's parent company Aspiro AB for lying about business practices, notably subscriber numbers when he purchased the company for $56 million last year.
In the papers filed by Jay Z and his legal team, he hones in on subscription numbers that he say were misleading. The numbers were listed at 503,000 at the time of the purchase in January 2015.
"It became clear after taking control of Tidal and conducting our own audit that the total number of subscribers was actually well below the 540,000 reported to us by the prior owners," said TIDAL in a statement via Billboard.
According to Dagens Næringsliv which first reported the news, there could be a disparity in the numbers. Since Aspiro was a public company, its subscriber numbers were public record. It's public number was only 112,000, which could have been direct subscribers. However it bundled a lot of its users with European telecoms companies, which could have made up for the additional 391,000 users.
Despite the looming legal battle for Jay Z against TIDAL's former owners, there has still been plenty to celebrate. They announced new numbers for the service that include 250 million streams on Kanye West's The Life Of Pablo exclusive album release in the first 10 days. The service also managed to eclipse 3 million subscribers globally, 1.35 million of them dolling out $19.99 for the hi-fidelity audio quality option.
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