Kanye West’s album is launching today — and unlike 2016’s The Life of Pablo this one will be available from Apple Music and other platforms right away.
Given the trouble that Tidal, which had early exclusive rights to TLoP, is reportedly in, that’s not a huge surprise…
The trouble with Tidal
According to one recent report, Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming music service is currently months behind on its royalty payments. In some cases, it has not made payments to record labels in more than six months.
Last year, Tidal supposedly lost $44 million before taxes, and is running out of money rapidly. Kanye reportedly parted ways with the service last July over money issues.
From the perspective of wanting to make his album available to the widest number of customers possible, it makes sense why Kanye would allow Apple Music and Spotify users access the album from day one.
Recently, Tim Cook announced that Apple Music has surpassed 50 million users. Spotify, meanwhile, has around 75 million paying customers and a massive 170 million monthly total active users. Tidal hasn’t revealed its exact number of users, but last time figures were reported they were around about just 1.2 million.
We guess the writing was probably on the wall the moment we heard that Kanye bought his wife Kim Kardashian Apple stock for Christmas!
Source: CNet
