Tidal Accused of Falsifying Beyonce and Kanye West Streaming Numbers | Hacker News Reader

Tidal Accused of Falsifying Beyonce and Kanye West Streaming Numbers

variety.com

143 pointsspking82 comments

FTA: Tidal, which has rarely shared its data publicly, had a streaming exclusive on West’s album for its first six weeks of release and continues to be the exclusive streamer for Beyonce’s album. It claimed that West’s album had been streamed 250 million times in its first 10 days of release in February of 2016, while claiming it had just 3 million subscribers — a claim that would have meant every subscriber played the album an average of eight times per day; and that Beyonce’s album was streamed 306 million times in its first 15 days of release in April of 2016.

Does anyone believe those numbers on face?

As I understand it the 250,000,000 number refers to total streams of all tracks on the album[1], it does not refer to plays of the entire album, so the article is wrong. The album is 20 tracks which means we're looking at 12.5 million streams per track. There were (and still are) many offers for a free Tidal trial, which were shared all over the internet at the time the album became available, so I do think it's possible that Tidal could have had those numbers. Paying subscribers? No, but users? You could sign up to Tidal for free, and Kanye albums are very highly anticipated... Is it reasonable to expect ~3 million people to each listen to an album ~4 times through on average? I certainly listened to it at least a dozen times in the first 2 weeks and know many friends who did the same.

For comparison Taylor Swift's album Reputation did ~500,000,000 streams in the first few weeks after it launched, granted that was available on all services and not just Tidal: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42564917

I'm a little suspicious of the numbers, given Taylor Swift has a wider appeal than Kanye and her album was on all services but you could sign up for Tidal for free and the article is clearly wrong when it says "a claim that would have meant every subscriber played the album an average of eight times per day" so I'm inclined to say Tidal are telling the truth because if they did inflate the numbers then they would not have needed to inflate them from, say, 25 million to 250 million which is what the report seems to suggest.

[1] See the BBC Taylor Swift article for an example of how the figures are calculated

At this stage, I think as far as for metrics of this nature, it is time to stop quantifying album streams and focus on streams of tracks within the albums (in the example you gave, someone streaming the entire album should count 20x). I, myself, still buy albums in full, but I think there's a significant number of people who go for singles at this stage. Streaming, probably just as much of a divide.

To focus at the track level is about the only way to quantify for both cases.

>it is time to stop quantifying album streams and focus on streams of tracks within the albums

They already do this (or at least the RIAA does)

>In the new structure, 150 streams of a song equals one paid download, and ten paid downloads equates to an album download. So, an artist’s music will have to be streamed on any of the approved, included services 1,500 times for an album “sale” to be counted. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2016/02/13/now-tha...

> ten paid downloads equates to an album download.

But it gets fuzzy here. If the album has 10 tracks, it makes sense, but for ones with less than that or more than that, it doesn't hash out.

I'm just saying for these kind of metrics they should, now, stick to the track level but group them by album (ie Taylor Swift would have x streams/downloads from 1989 and y streams/downloads from Reputation).

Albums in these metrics just muddies the water too much and doesn't really quantify for those who go for singles. Say an artist releases a really, really popular song on a terrible album that no one buys/streams. That song performs well, lots of streams and lots of downloads or buys. Should the album be considered a hit if it is just a single track on it that performed well? Even if no one, or relatively few, streamed or bought the album proper?

> for ones with [...] more than that, it doesn't hash out.

Chris Brown released an album last year exploiting this fact. He released a fourty track double album. If that album is streamed in it's entirety a thousand times, he gets four sales on the charts. Many hiphop act did the same last year. The last Migos album had 24 songs and their label had just released a 30 songs compilation 2 months prior. Drake's last project was dubbed a 'playlist' and had 22 songs.

Well if these others are exclusive Tidal releases then those numbers might be a little loose but are relatively within the ballpark because they've narrowed access down to a single source. The bigger question is whether artists benefit from being on every single service or are better served by narrowing releases to a single distributor whether its tidal or something else or their own website.

I remember in an entertainment article a while back that Kanye West was upset with Jay-Z/Tidal during one of his concerts because he felt they were withholding money from him. I wonder if the potentially (likely) bogus numbers vs reality were the cause for his frustration (believing the numbers).

As I log in to Tidal right now, and got to top 20 albums, Kanye's The Life of Pablo is at #8 and Beyonce's Lemonade is at #9. TLOP has consistently been in the top 20 since it came out (over 2 years ago!) as has Lemonade (also over 2 years ago!). I don't buy any of it.

No.

ANECDOTE: I've never heard anyone mention Tidal in real life even once.

It's not very well known but very surprisingly, it's the only legal place I found (for a US customer) to buy FLAC albums of obscure metal bands. Yes you read that right, we're not talking about current pop stars. For example, try finding a legal way to purchase FLAC versions in the US for the following:

Korova - A kiss in the charnel fields

Dissection - Storm of the light's bane

Bishop of Hexen - The nightmarish compositions

Things that I already considered before I found Tidal:

1. Buying the physical disc and ripping it to FLAC works except it's generally (for those albums above) significantly more expensive than getting the FLAC from Tidal. discogs.com market is the best place for obscure metal CDs but most ship from Europe and the shipping costs are considerable.

2. 7digital.com has all those albums (in FLAC) for customers in Canada or the UK, not on the US marketplace...

3. bandcamp, my favorite FLAC source, doesn't have any of that (it's mostly for recent indie artist releases and not a good resource for music released a few decades ago)

Did you do a frequency analysis to check if it is truly lossless? I feel like for some more obscure music there's really no guarantee that the artist ever released in anything higher quality than MP3. I know that Bandcamp requires uploading lossless files but even those are often from laptop mics recording on GarageBand (especially if you listen to bedroom pop).

Very good question and something I worried about too. I actually verified this in audacity against some lossless samples of the same albums I already had and the decompressed wav were bit identical for what I checked (interesting enough, they were at a slightly different offset, I had to use audacity, zoom in to the numerical sample values and shift the waveform until they matched identically).

There's also the issue that if Tidal were selling FLAC copies (which cost twice the MP3 version) that are just FLAC encoded MP3s I imagine there'd be a lot of complaining and/or lawsuits.

From my experience, Tidal has been good with this. They don't do transcodes. If they don't have an actual lossless version of a track, they indicate it in the UI.

On the other hand, even a laptop mic would be better than MP3 wouldn't it? Granted, the quality of the recording would be bad, but the point of FLAC is to get an authentic reproduction of the original recording (however bad it may have been), without extra compression artifacts.

Well they likely did at least a CD if old enough. The question is whether the FLAC was sourced from one.

I gave them a chance and I am highly disappointed. Not because of quality of music, or their mobile app (which is average at most). But because of their web app. I am using it when I work, so on my laptop. Here is few reasons why its so bad:

-Flash first - yup, it tries to force you to use Flash version of the site. You need to use a trick to disable their messages about it.

-Recommendation/Discovery is missing completely from the web app. On the mobile app, I will get recommended albums based on what I have listened to. On Web App, I will be given only latest, popular albums. No personalization at all.

-Manual discovery is broken - I do not know about their algorithm, but for example, when I listen to some electronic music and click to get tracks similar to that I am up for a surprise. I can get some metal track, popular top chart song or niche rap. Most of the times it is nothing related to what I am listening currently.

So yeah, for a free app its cool, but once my paid account expires, I am moving to Spotify.

And about the numbers - in Europe, many major mobile brands offer 1-year Tidal for free with a contract signed. Talk about inflated numbers.

I know more people who still use a Zune. (1)

A lot of the draw for Tidal is the lossless streams. That is a big deal for audiophile people, which you and your friends are not a part of.

It's a big draw for clueless people. It would take Superman to tell the difference between lossless audio and a modern codec with a decent bitrate. I would be surprised if you can prove that a single person has ever done so on an ABX test.

The only reason to use lossless audio is for archival. Obviously streams are useless for that.

Does it matter? Why is the anti-lossless crowd even louder than the lossless? What is it to you exactly? If people would rather pay $20 for lossless, vs $20 for not lossless, what is the issue? Sounds like you're getting more for your money in the former. While standard music CD's may be less noticeable, I can absolutely tell TrueHD / DTS Master Audio vs their earlier lossy counterparts on movie soundtracks. Of course this comes down largely to whatever you're playing it on, and most people really don't give a shit about sound to even invest in it. Personally, I think sound is 90% of the movie. Your super ultra turbo street fighter edition 8K tv doesn't make as much of an impact to me.

> If people would rather pay $20 for lossless, vs $20 for not lossless, what is the issue?

This is remarkably similar to the argument people make when backed into the corner for pseudoscientific health claims.

> pseudoscientific health claims

Such as the long-term benefits of anti-depressants? (What is and isn't pseudo-science depends on who you trust)

I can't hear the difference between a CD and a phonograph.

I can definitely hear the difference between an iTunes stream and a CD (maybe not in a car though).

Out of curiosity, what components are in your system that brought you to that conclusion? Hopefully you're not just restating something you read on someone's blog.

Well I can...but how can I prove that to you?

I think you'd have to be able to consistently pass tests along these lines - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...

Where's the evidence that they didn't cherry-pick examples that are intentionally hard to tell apart? It's also dishonest for them not to emphasize how important speakers/amps/etc matter in the test. Of course someone with Apple earbuds or "Beats by Dre" won't be able to tell the difference.

I didn't mean to suggest that the npr article presented _the_ authoritative objective test on the topic. I was only attempting to answer the original question of "how to prove it" - in that - I think its possible to construct such a test.

I've successfully ABXed a 320kbps mp3 (that I encoded myself with LAME) vs its original wav file, got it right 20 times in a row.

Although this was a specific audio file I downloaded that was a known pathological case for mp3.

That's probably why GP said "modern codecs", since MP3 has specific known flaws

I know 100% that you're wrong, but I don't blame you for making that statement.

The problem with "can't hear the difference" statements is that they're highly dependent on the system you're listening to. The vast majority of systems are not resolving to a degree that there is an audible difference between AAC or a lossless format.

On my system, there is a profound difference between FLAC (at any bitrate) and higher rate DSD. Is DSD magically better? Not necessarily, but in my case my DAC bypasses its internal filtering for DSD playback, which means I can move the interpolation filter over to my CPU, which, running at 4GHz, is better at it than a (SOTA) DAC chip running at a few MHz.

It's a complicated topic, and the only people I personally discuss it with are professional audio engineers or serious hobbyists. No one else cares.

On topic, TIDAL is great in the sense that it's not US-centric for billing (just take my money please) and streams lossless. It's like a CD store for ~$20 a month (the max they'll take from me). I'd gladly pay a lot more and given the economics of it I'm worried it will go out of business at some point.

If you're interested in the topic you can check out the Roon community, "minimum vs linear phase interpolation filters", "DSD upsampling" or check out the work of Ted Smith (MIT / software guy turned DAC designer).

You've got a 1-bit DAC at the end of the chain regardless. Making it sound "better" by filtering in a 4GHz processor is golden ear nonsense.

I second what the other poster said. Audiophiles are either pirates torrenting FLAC for archival purposes, or (if they are classical or jazz fans) they are still buying SACD physical media. I don't doubt that a few people have been attracted to Tidal for lossless streaming, but you can see for yourself just how little Tidal is discussed on audiophile forums, so just saying "audiophiles" doesn't explain where Tidal is actually a thing.

I dunno; I see Tidal discussed on Audiophile forums a lot, in no small part because they've worked out deals to be integrated with commercial lossless/"hi res" players like Roon and Audirvana. Tidal supports both lossless streaming and MQA streaming. (MQA being a kind of weird and controversial lossy-but-high-res audio format, whose biggest difference in practice is probably using different psychoacoustic models and theoretically accounting for theoretically audible timing differences. I've listened to it on good equipment and can't say that I really hear a difference between it and lossless recording.)

In any case, not even audiophiles are buying physical SACDs. There are digital downloads in DSD format, though.

Actually you find that Tidal is the recommended streaming site on most Audiophile forums.

Roon was marketed heavily to Audiophiles and the addition of Tidal was long sought-after. https://community.roonlabs.com/c/roon/tidal

I'd consider myself an audiophile and I exclusively use Tidal for all music-listening nowadays. I know lots of others who use it for the same purposes.

Shady business dealings aside, Tidal is the best and best-looking music streaming service I've used.

I'm a bit of an audiophile and for that reason I do not use ANY music streaming services. None of them have all of the music I want. I have a wide range of high-quality audio and for some artists I have very particular versions/performances of certain tracks that are my favorite.

I've tried streaming services, but it ends up over complicating my experience because I still have to rely on my own hard copies to complete my collection. Further, I am extremely wary of my library up and disappearing. I like to have full control over all of my tracks, meta-data, playlist organization, etc. I won't even buy from iTunes anymore because it's too restricted. Only online music broker I use is Bandcamp because they give me full control of the music I purchased.

Even among my hard-core audiophile friends, admittedly a very small sample, none of them use Tidal.

Actual audiophiles are going to moan about lossless, because its still PCM audio at its core, and not analog.

The source material is not analog either ever since 1995 or so -- 99% of recordings are into digital DAWs, not tape.

One of the funniest things to me in the prosumer audio world is NES sountracks or EDM released on vinyl.

Many if not most of the consumers of that music will never actually listen to the vinyl. They might not even own a turntable. Instead, they purchase the vinyl for music that they listen to elsewhere in order to have full-size artwork and use it as room decoration.

And until recently (and painting with a very wide stroke), the percentage that goes back to the band tended to be better for vinyl than the other formats. Since the record companies saw it as a dead medium, it wasn't really high on their list for negotiations. I've bought vinyl that I never intended to play for that reason.

Well edm was/is released on vinyl for djing purposes although these days most club djs use cds or usb or ableton.

There are still DJs that spin vinyl, but they're rare.

Not rare in the EDM world.

Serious audiophiles are all pirates at this point if they aren't into diving for vinyl. A losslessly-encoded stream is near-worthless compared to a lossless rip, which is actually useful as archival material.

My friends, especially my musician friends, are all pirates. It's by far the most practical way to do music.

I might change my tune if Tidal's streams are easy to save, but I haven't seen any technology for doing that.

The stream is LOSSLESS.

> The stream is LOSSLESS.

I think the word 'archival' is the key word in this sentence:

>> A losslessly-encoded stream is near-worthless compared to a lossless rip, which is actually useful as archival material.

GP isn't comparing on the basis of quality; rather, GP is pointing out that streaming services don't function as an "archive".

It's a reasonable point. Modulo reasonable backup procedure, owning a copy of the track is a more robust as an "archive" than a streaming service that might stop serving the track at any moment.

However, I'm confused by the rest of GP's post. First, I'm not sure why pirating is necessary to get a lossless rip. Second, and perhaps tangentially, I've never understood collectors (of cards, or of coins, or of music tracks).

> First, I'm not sure why pirating is necessary to get a lossless rip.

To rip an SACD, you either need a hacked PS3, or you need to download the rip through a torrent kindly provided by a pirate community member who does have a hacked PS3.

If you signed up for a pirate community to download those SACD rips, you might as well stick around and torrent lots of ordinary CD rips so that you don’t actually have to buy those CDs.

> Second, and perhaps tangentially, I've never understood collectors

I travel a lot, including in countries where mobile data is not cheap and wifi is thin on the ground. It’s nice to have my entire music collection with me on a small portable hard drive.

Secondly, film collectors are inclined to collect, not stream, because they have been bitten by films disappearing from release due to rights issues. Look at how many Criterion Collection releases are no longer available to purchase or stream, for instance, but it’s nice to have your own copy saved on a disk.

Artists upload lossless audio to the internet all the time. I don't understand how anybody can even be bothered to argue their opinion on this matter. A lot of you guys sound like jerks though.

> Artists upload lossless audio to the internet all the time.

It can, in fact, be quite difficult to obtain the 5.1 surround sound layer of an SACD as a digital download for many releases. That is why people are inclined to rip the SACD or torrent someone else’s rip.

It's not fair you're being down voted, because you're absolutely right. I subscribe to both Tidal and Spotify, and Tidal has vastly better quality music (plus a bunch of artists that are not on Spotify...).

If people are listening through some 'Beats by Dr Dre', or Airpods ,or linking to a bluetooth speaker, Spotify is fine.

If someone has a DAC and some decent headphones, or a decent hifi, you can notice the different easily, especially for certain genres. Not all music compresses well.

Because they only have 3 million subscribers

But they're not evenly distributed among the continental US, right? My grandma probably doesn't use them, but I'd expect my friends and coworkers to be their target demographic.

I even doubt that number.

Considering around 850 000 Norwegians have automatic free Tidal subscription through their cable TV, and they don't even bother to close your account or make you pay when you switch TV providers, it's probably accurate to within an order of magnitude.

Brought to you by graduates of the Trump school of accounting.

Your friends dont listen to beyonce, count yourself lucky.

Can someone explain a motive for this? If Jay-Z owns the service, and the service pays royalties to artists streamed on it, is this just Jay-Z transferring some wealth to his wife and friend?

Tidal exists to be sold to some other media company or online service so that Jay-Z can finally make billionaire status. I am sure seeing Dr. Dre up there on those lists motivates him more than anything else in the world at the moment...

They don't pay a fixed price per stream; they just take some portion of revenue and pay the artists in proportion to the number of streams each artist had. So it's a way to give more money to Beyonce/Kanye and less to other artists.

It makes the service seem more popular. Like it's supposed to fuel your fear of missing out.

The Beyonce and Kanye West exclusives were major selling points when Tidal launched, I think they also wanted other artists to do exclusives (Prince had an exclusive with them for a while).

And would this be merely a civil matter or potentially criminal?

Tidal was one of the sites I submitted music to last time I tried DistroKid. They took 6 months to get it up (vs the 1-7 days for every other store), and it had worse results than even the already weak results of the others.

That's really weird. I just submitted my first album to DistroKid about 4 hours ago and it's already up. Waaaaay quicker than I thought it was going to be.

Then again, it might be a genre thing. Mine is a chill piano album I put under "Jazz"

I meant Tidal specifically. DistroKid isn't the problem. I'm sure they send it to the store almost instantly.

It is foolish to trust Tidal's numbers... they're privately-owned by artists in a genre known for fictionalized details

"Falsifying" is a strong term... They probably just released some alternative stats

I plan to switch to Tidal. They pay artist the most. Only the top, top artist are making money on Spotify. I like to listen to indie/small label bands. I don't buy albums, go to concerts. Tidal seems to be the best way to support these artist.

Bandcamp is the best way to support indie/small label bands. Buy their albums with actual dollars, then stream them.

Anyone can make money on Spotify, and Tidal is owned by the "top, top artist"s. Spotify payouts are based on the number of streams, so obviously smaller artists will have less streams and thus get paid less. The same goes for any other music distribution platform including physical record sales. Also, artists are more likely to gain exposure on Spotify as their curated playlists and artist playlists allow bigger artists or Spotify's curators to give smaller artists exposure through their playlists. The discover algorithm does a great job of exposing me to small and new artists that I wouldn't have found without it.

I've tried Tidal, Apple Music, Google Music, Prime Music, Rdio (when that was a thing) and have always gone back to Spotify because the put a lot more effort into getting smaller/newer artists records in front of users.

This all day long. Spotify is the subscription I resent the least. I can find so many new bands as well as listen to the established ones in one app.

Mainly, music discovery is key. Someone says “have you heard X?” And I can be listening to the top 5 in less than a few seconds.

Who reads a story accusing a platform of spoofing streams and funneling royalties to top artists and thinks "Yeah, this is where I want to be"?

I'm sorry, but this reads like astroturfing. I don't think it is, but it 100% feels that way.

And, from what I can see, Tidal is a service owned by phenomenally rich artists who have been the best compensated by the existing record label structure (at the expense of indie artists), trying to throw their weight around and maintain their power in streaming as well. While fraudulently depriving other artists of revenue from Tidal, if this article is correct.

> I'm sorry, but this reads like astroturfing.

Without concrete evidence you should not make such claims.

Astroturfing accusation? Really? People profess their love or hate for things all the time. There is a comment below talking about how great Spotify is are you going to accuse it of Astroturfing as well?

Anyway if you simply Google which streaming platforms pay artist the most Tidal tops the list all the time.

> They pay artist the most

Do you have a source for this?

A simple Google search would have quickly gotten you your source:

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/07/24/what-streaming-m...

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