Jay Z is suing TIDAL‘s former owners, claiming they were untruthful about the amount of subscribers the streaming service had upon selling the company to the rapper.
According to Music Business Worldwide, Jay Z is seeking $15 million from the former shareholders of Aspiro, the parent company of TIDAL. This translates to about 100 million Norwegian Krone. The Rap mogul acquired the streaming service for a reported $57 million in January 2015. He was told that TIDAL had 530,000 subscribers at the time of his purchase and now says that figure was “misleading.”
Hov adds to his suit the fact that the owners were not transparent about the condition of Aspiro’s business structure, which the rapper says was much worse than reported.
One of the shareholders, Schibsted, says it did nothing wrong in the business transaction.
“We want to point out that it was a publicly traded company that was acquired, [which means] transparency of financial reporting [was required],” Communications Manager Anders Rikter said to Norwegian publication Dagens Næringsliv. “Otherwise we have no comments.”
Upon its one year anniversary, TIDAL reported three million subscribers worldwide. Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was reportedly streamed 250 million times in the first 10 days after its February release.
TIDAL has had its fair share of hiccups in its one year of existence, going through three CEOs, experiencing a leak of Rihanna’s ANTI album and facing lawsuits from Birdman over the release of Lil Wayne’s Free Weezy Album and a separate suit from independent artist John Emanuele for what he claims is unfair compensation.
For additional Jay Z coverage, watch the following DX Daily:
Yep… Yep… HOV keeps winning! Get them lawyers after them HOV! This way HOV keeps winning and Nas keeps losing. HOV will sue to get his money back from a failing business but Nas will just ignore and let the government put a lien on him.
On the contrary, this story validates that Hov is a great rapper, with no business sense. If he was unaware that the former owners of Aspiro never informed him about their current subscribers with the Tidal. Why didn’t he do an investigation with him and his brain trust ? That means he (Jay) was money hungry in wanting to jump into the audio streaming game without doing extensive research into the business
Youre clearly a Nas stan from what i’ve learned dude, but keep em comments coming cause i fuckin enjoy these! provide us with good laughs dawg, just bein honest.
Pay attention. He’s shitting on Nas. On what planet does that make him a stan? And anyway Nas is respected by anyone who respects lyricism. Thats a W he’ll always have.
Jay Z has always depended on other people to make his business decisions, until recently. That’s why Tidal is a failure
You’re clearly a jay z dick rider
Understand that great business people have great teams with them. Do you think any successful person has absolutly no help? Anyway dum-dum–here is the foundation of his business plan.
Studio albums
Reasonable Doubt (1996)–
In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 (1997)–
Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life (1998)–
Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter (1999)–
The Dynasty: Roc La Familia (2000)–
The Blueprint (2001)–
The Blueprint2: The Gift & The Curse (2002)–
The Black Album (2003)–
Kingdom Come (2006)–
American Gangster (2007)–
The Blueprint 3 (2009)–
Magna Carta Holy Grail (2013)–
—–Total Albums Sold Worldwide 55,000,000 (55 million for the dummies)
100% agree nothing more proves that HOV is a superior business man than by selling tens of millions of records. That’s why Nas will always be a lame he can never match HOV business acuity when selling records and that’s what matters in hip hop. Nas stans just don’t understand this fact.
Stan is a long outdated term. You sound like a Jay Z dick rider still crying bout ether. Nas has nothing to do with the subject of the article
All tht means us people like the music.. good music sells itself jus ask kanye. After damn near two years of ranting, his album is out to massive numbers. An we kno kanye has no business acumen. **see his clothing line**
Jay Z needs to go back to letting other people make money for him, he doesn’t have it to be a business man unless he has someone smart telling him what to do. Tidal has been a failure.
Can you really tell a person who is worth a half of billi what they need to do? I feel like you need to work on your wealth as well.
I don’t worship money like Jay Z. So wealth in money isn’t important to me
If money isn’t important to you then why are you commenting about how you think Jay Z is bad at making money?
streaming services are a farse….the quality is ass…I don’t get why everyone thinks streaming is the way to go…it blows my mind that you youngins will suck up anything this camel puts his name too. Im a jay fan…but the quality of the streams is questionable at best.
I’m a tell yall dummies a million times. Tidal was bought to exclusively put out the roc nation albums. Anything else was additional monies. Why go thru a middle man.
100% facts
What? If that was the case, what was the purpose of all the other artists being involved?
Seriously are u people STUPID!!! Is there anyone in this comment section with an education beyond tenth grade!!! The numbers were inflated meaning that the past owners did a work up that turned out to be false after the sale. There were probably competing buyers during the time of sale So his investment team, of highly qualified finance people and lawyers Etc., agreed that it would be a good acquisition. Unfortunately due to time constraints, it looks like it wasn’t enough time to do a thorough audit; which takes months sometimes a year or so! New businesses take time, the numbers have increased tremendously from being under 54,0000 to now over a million. A lot of you are to eager to give dramtically uninformed opinions! Jus shut the hell up!
I don’t know why people keep calling TIDAL a failure. It is always the sites that have parent companies who compete with TIDAL that report news negatively (like HIPHOPDX) Tidal has gone from less than 500,000 to 3 millions subscribers in less than a year.
What this is reporting is just that Jay-Z thinks he overpaid for what he has had to do in a year. So he wants the difference paid back. Happens ALL the time in business and after acquisitions. It just that its Jay-Z and media wants to see it fail. Remember when Apple’s beats service failed to get subscribers and was scrapt? Or how bad Google Play is doing? Media is not covering that?
in all fairness i tried using tidal and the interface was just sooo bad compared to apple music