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Norwegian report suggests Beyonce, Kanye streaming stats were ‘manipulated’ on Tidal

Streaming numbers of Beyonce and Kanye West's respective albums on rap mogul Jay Z's music platform Tidal have been manipulated, allowing the stars excessive royalty payouts, a Norwegian newspaper said on Wednesday.

Published: 11 May 2018 10:19 CEST

Norwegian report suggests Beyonce, Kanye streaming stats were 'manipulated' on Tidal

Photo: s_bukley/Depositphotos

In its investigative report, the financial daily Dagens Naeringsliv (DN) claimed the streaming numbers for Kanye West's “The Life of Pablo” and Beyonce's “Lemonade” were inflated through manipulated user play counts on Tidal.

Jay Z bought the online service, which has its roots and significant activities in Oslo, through his holding Project Panther for $56 million in March 2015.

His wife Beyonce and his former protege West both launched their albums exclusively on the streaming platform in 2016.

DN's revelations suggest that West and Beyonce, along with their record companies, received a disproportionate share of royalty payouts at the expense of other artists on Tidal.

This could put the service in a tricky situation, as it has promised to pay rights holders more money than its other streaming rivals including Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer.

Based on an analysis provided by the Norwegian Center for Cyber and Information Security (CCIS), DN reported more than 320 million false plays of songs from the two albums over short periods, a manipulation which affected more than 1.7 million users.

User accounts and play counts obtained by the newspaper revealed suspicious listening patterns, such as simultaneous playbacks of multiple songs by the same user or repeated playbacks of the same song at regular intervals.

For example, the tracks were restarted every six minutes at the same second and millisecond.

Two of the Tidal users contacted by DN appeared to have listened to tracks in “Lemonade” 180 and 251 times, respectively, during 24 hours. They both denied doing so to the paper.

Tidal's lawyer Jordan Siev told DN that it denies any manipulation and claims its data has been stolen and that the media report is false.

Contacted by AFP, the platform was not immediately available for comment.

READ ALSO: Jay-Z's Tidal reportedly posts huge losses

Louvre creates new Beyonce and Jay-Z art tour

Photo: Screenshot/Youtube

The R'n'B stars' hit song “Apeshit” — which used some of the museum's greatest masterpieces as backdrops — has been viewed 56 million times on YouTube alone since it was released a fortnight ago.

Now the Louvre, which already has a tour based on the US rapper will.i.am's hit “Smile Mona Lisa”, has created another based on the Carters' night in the museum.

It follows the video through 17 paintings and sculptures which feature in the six-minute clip, going from the monumental white Greek marble “Nike of Samothrace” to Marie Benoist's “Portrait of a Negress”.

The choice of works which they used or posed in front of has been taken as a celebration of black bodies and empowerment in an institution which was built on the spoils of conquest and imperialism.

“Portrait of a Negress” was painted in 1800, six years after revolutionary France had abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies only for Napoleon to reinstate it two years later.

But perhaps the most striking image is of Beyonce at the centre of a line of black dancers in front of David's “The Coronation of Napoleon I and the Crowning of the Empress Josephine” singing, “I can't believe we made it..”

The song is part of their surprise joint album, “Everything is Love” — their first — which they released under their real family name, The Carters.

Sonic black power manifesto

It is a celebration of African-American identity and their marriage, whose problems and Jay-Z's infidelity Beyonce detailed in her 2016 album “Lemonade”.

The self-guided 90-minute tour is for now only available in French at https://www.louvre.fr/routes/jay-z-et-beyonce-au-louvre but other languages

are likely to follow.

The guide describes in detail each artwork in the video but stops short of explaining what it is used to signify in the video.

But Professor James Smalls, of the University of Maryland, described the video — directed by Ricky Saiz, who also made the Beyonce clip “Yonce” — as

“arresting… I would even go so far as to say brilliant.”

He argued that it “appropriates, exploits, and reinterprets Western paintings and sculptures as a way to chart and celebrate the Carters' success, and black bodies in an artistic canon inextricably linked to histories of colonialism.

“The video is an unapologetic visual and sonic manifesto about spaces, power, and control,” he wrote in Frieze magazine.

“It is all about bodies — an orchestrated contrast of energetically writhing and animated black physiques set against frozen white forms of the past.”

The Louvre has refused to say how much the couple paid to shoot their video in front of the “Mona Lisa”, the “Venus de Milo” and Gericault's “The Raft of the Medusa”, in which Jay-Z poses looking up at the muscled black hero at the apex of the canvas.

The Louvre's director Jean-Luc Martinez has said that he wants to make the museum's vast collection “more readable” for a wide, global public.

Last year more than two-thirds of its 8.1 million visitors were foreigners, half of whom were under 30.

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