MufasaChoppa
The Rise & Fall Of Mufasa Choppa
They've refused to release stats on their streaming numbers and similarly refused to tell people if the album they paid for is every dropping, but today they dropped their veil of silence to declare that Kanye West's The Life of Pablo album drew in a record-shattering 250 million streams in the first ten days.
250 million in ten days! That's amazing, so amazing that number defies any rational, objective sense. Or to be more blunt, I just can't take those numbers at face value. They're the North Korean grocery store of streaming numbers.
All you need to do to raise some doubts is zoom out a little for some perspective.
Before these numbers were released, the streaming record belonged to Justin Bieber, whose recent Purpose album garnered 205 million global streams on Spotify in a week.
Spotify has a base of 100 million active users (approximately 30 million of whom are paid subscribers). Let me be annoying and write that again in all caps. SPOTIFY HAS 100 MILLION ACTIVE USERS.
Before the release of TLOP, TIDAL had 1 million subscribers, which it claimed jumped up to 3 million after Kanye's release.
So you're trying to tell me that The Life of Pablo brought in approximately 50 million more streams than Justin Bieber's album on a service with literally 1/97th the number of users? It took two weeks for Adele to rack up 250 million views of "Hello" on YouTube, a free service anyone has immediate access to, but Kanye did the same in less time on a service people had to complete a sign up form to get to?
This isn't about doubting Kanye as an artist or trying to downplay his accomplishments, it's about using some basic critical thinking skills and not just swallowing everything companies try to spoon feed us.
So far TIDAL's refused to release TLOP's numbers (and only TLOP's numbers, they've released stats on every other release) to a third party that can verify them like Billboard, and so if that happens I'll have the distinction of being publicly wrong forever. I'll gladly eat a heaping slice of humble pie. But in the meantime I just don't recognize the picture TIDAL's trying to paint as anything resembling real life, not when we get so many "**** TIDAL" messages every day.
I'm just not buying TIDAL, literally or figuratively. You need more people.
By Nathan S, the managing editor of DJBooth and a hip-hop writer. His beard is awesome. This is his Twitter. Photo via Instagram.
* Credit to Brendan Varan for the TIDAL = N. Korea joke.
TIDAL NUMBERS: THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE.
Just in time for its one-year anniversary—and April Fool's—Tidal has announced that it has garnered more than 3 million global subscribers, adding 2.5m to the 540k it had at launch, presumably from the prior version of the service before Jay Z acquired it. (The company also says nearly half of these have ponied up for the $20/month hi-fidelity version.) What's more, Tidal asserts that exclusive album The Life of Pablo by Kanye West was streamed 250m times in its first 10 days of release.
We're not math wizards, but we took off our shoes and socks so we could count on both fingers and toes and our rough calculation is that 3m goes into 250m about 80 times. Which means that every single one of Tidal's paid subscribers have played Pablo in its entirety eight times a day every day for 10 days.
Damn, people really like that record. They're giving up work, meals, sleep and bathroom breaks to listen to it. Come to think of it, people are singing the songs wherever we go.
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Rumor Mill - TIDAL NUMBERS: THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE.
#BlackExcellence
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