JAY Z ALBUM DROPS 6/30

Jay Z, who became a father to twins just days after becoming the first hip-hop artist in history to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, capped off these milestones Sunday by confirming that the 4:44 teasers popping up all over NYC, L.A. and elsewhere during the past month were indeed referencing a new album.

The album news was shared via a video teaser on Tidal that confirmed the album’s release date of 6/30 and previewed a clip of the forthcoming track "Adnis."

4:44 will be available exclusively to Tidal subscribers during its first week in a joint promotion with Sprint that will support an initiative called the 1Million Project, which aims to assist low-income high school students in gaining access to the Internet at home. Sprint purchased a 33% stake in Tidal for $200m last year. (You may have caught a splashy Sprint TV spot touting the service over the weekend.) After that initial week, the album goes wide. Will it be a contender for #1 at that point?

4:44 is the follow-up to 2013’s Magna Carta...Holy Grail, which Jay dropped four years ago on July 4 via an exclusive Samsung promotion that gifted a million copies to fans who owned Galaxy phones.

Tracks from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, which has remained a Tidal streaming exclusive since its release, have been streamed about 370m times in 60 weeks, averaging 6m+ per week, or about 4k per week in SEA.

On the other hand, Drake’s Views, which was released a week later and was a two-week Apple Music exclusive, has seen its tracks streamed 3.3b times, averaging 56m+ streams per week, or more than 37k per week in SEA. In the week that just ended, Views collected 20m+ streams compared to 568k for Lemonade.

RTD SEA: Views 2.2m; Lemonade 247k