Kanye West tricked fans into subscribing to Tidal, claims a new class-action lawsuit against the rapper for backtracking on his commitment to make ‘The Life of Pablo’ a Tidal exclusive.
Yeezus originally proclaimed that his highly anticipated new album would be available exclusively on Tidal and would never go on sale. In a Twitter rant a few days after the album’s release, West told fans the album would “never ever be on Apple,” only to turn around a month later and put it on Apple Music and Spotify.
It looks like it’s about to all fall down on Kanye, Jay Z and Tidal, now that some gold diggers are claiming it was all just a ploy to boost Tidal’s subscribers.
“By the time Mr. West changed course and broadly released ‘The Life of Pablo,’ the deceptive marketing ploy had served its purpose: Tidal’s subscriber numbers had tripled, streaming numbers were through the roof, and Tidal had collected the personal information, credit card numbers, and social media information of millions of deceived consumers,” the lawsuit alleges, according to a report from Variety.
Tidal may have added as many as 2 million new subscribers thanks to ‘The Life of Pablo’ and could have added about $84 million to the company’s value, claims the lawsuit which was filed against Jay Z, Kanye West, and Tidal in San Francisco today.
The lawsuit could be a serious blow to Tidal’s business model, which has struggled to compete with Spotify’s massive subscriber base, and Apple Music’s rising service which boasts more than 10 million paid subscibers.
Instead of looking for a big chunk of that Kanye cash, the lawsuit aims to reimburse Tidal subscribers for any fees paid from the Kayne album release. Tidal requires free trial users to provide a credit card number when signing up, so the group also wants Tidal to change its business model so free trials aren’t automatically converted into paid subscribers.
