Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo, his newest album, has become somewhat of a sensation in the blogging and news world. It’s essentially the perfect fodder for new articles, considering how often he’s changing it up. At the same time, fans are subjected to hours, days, maybe weeks of waiting, creating organic (and masterfully crafted) hype around the release. However, there are a lot of darker elements lying beneath the surface tied into this whole story.
Kanye West initially put TLOP up on TIDAL but quickly took it down to make some minor tweaks to it.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/698971890581401600
He tweeted after his SNL performance that TLOP would remain on TIDAL exclusively for another week to help make up for his massive (alleged) $53 million debt that he has accrued from his fashion line.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/698699904303132672
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/698972107166892032
As a result, TIDAL has shot up to #1 on the iOS app store. But as we’ve seen from TIDAL in the past, the majority of those subscribers will likely end their free one-month trial before the renewal period, and all of that expected revenue will be gone.
And at the same time, many people are very angry with TIDAL because it is not sending download links to the album.
A reddit thread was created by /u/hansorg titled, “Why is almost no one talking about how Tidal has taken THOUSANDS of people’s money for a download of Kanye West’s new album, not given them the album, and are not answering their help and support tickets?” According to him and many others in the thread, people were paying for the album on TIDAL, and some glitch was preventing them from receiving any kind of download. TIDAL support has been egregiously slow or almost nonexistent in their help, and so many users have taken to platforms like reddit to voice their complaints.
That particular thread has since been “locked” by admins “due to excessive amounts of both hostility and violations of our piracy rule.”
Compounding the effect of his own personal debt and that of the relative failure of TIDAL and struggles of the album launch, Kanye has taken to Twitter to quite literally beg for investments from a variety of figureheads in the tech and financial world, including asking Mark Zuckerberg for a $1 billion investment “after realizing he is the greatest living artist and greatest artist of all time.” He also sort of reached out to Google co-founder Larry Page, because anyone would do at this point.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/698926987281371136
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/699108230371397632
The whole story surrounding TIDAL, Kanye West, and The Life Of Pablo almost seems surreal at this point, but that’s really what Kanye is good at, anyway. But then, there’s still this…
