Summary: A music publisher and an artist have filed a $5 million lawsuit against rapper Jay-Z and his fledgling music company, Tidal.
Jay’z Tidal has been hit with another wave of problems. This time the music-streaming service has been served with a $5 million lawsuit last week from Yesh Music Publishing and John Emanuele of duo The American Dollar, CNBC reports.
The lawsuit seeks class action status. It alleges that Tidal licensed over 100 songs from American Dollar without permission or payment and that Tidal deliberately miscalculated the streams of the band’s songs by millions of hits.
Tidal has said that it has already removed all music from Yesh and Emanuele, but the plaintiffs had yet to respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Tidal launched in 2015, and it is a direct competitor to streaming giants, Spotify and Apple Music. At the time of its launch, Jay-Z had pledged to give artists, writers, and producers the whopping royalty fee of 75%. That pledge along with his own relationships with top artists such as Kanye West and Rihanna seemed to give Tidal an edge over its competitors.
Forbes reported that rapper T.I. came aboard in February as a co-owner and pledged to provide exclusive content for the service in hopes of bringing in more subscribers.
However, trying to create an opposing music service to Spotify turned out to be more difficult than expected. Vanity Fair reports Tidal has about 1 million subscribers. One million is a decent number until you compare that to its competitors like Spotify which has 30 million and Apple Music which is about to wrangle 100 million. Additionally, according to CNBC, the company has had three different CEOS in less than a year, and its chief investment officer and senior vice president of artist and label relations have already left.
Another setback for the company was the release of Tidal co-owner Kanye West’s new album “The Life of Pablo” which came out weeks ago. It was released exclusively on Tidal, which angered some of his fans who refused to pay for the company’s $9.99 to $19.99 monthly service. While the release gave Tidal a boost, 500,000 copies also ended up being pirated through another music source, Pirate Bay.
With all the writing on the wall, rumors of Jay-Z ending the service are floating about. Vanity Fair reports that Jay-Z is considering selling the service to Samsung.
Source: CNBC
Source: Vanity Fair
