REPORT CLAIMS TIDAL HAS INFLATED ITS NUMBERS

Tidal has been exaggerating its subscriber numbers since Jay Z took possession of the premium service in early 2015. So says a report from the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv picked up by The Verge.

The paper says it obtained internal reports showing that Tidal only had 350k subscribers in September 2015, just as Jay Z tweeted that Tidal had had hit the 1m mark. Further, a March 2016 PR release trumpeting a subscriber base of 3m was belied by the company’s monthly report to the labels, which indicated just 850k subscribers out of 1.2 million activated accounts.

In a statement to The Verge at the time, Tidal told The Verge that it had conducted an internal audit and found the hyped-up numbers. “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,” the statement read in part. The service said it planned to sue the former ownership, but the newspaper found that those lawsuits have “not materialized” of yet.

Since its previous peak following the release of Beyoncé’s Lemonade in April, the subscriber rolls have declined, according to Dagens Næringsliv, noting that Tidal reported 1.1 million paying subscribers to the labels in October.