Out in Norway, TIDAL is being investigated because of questions that some of the company’s streams never even happened. Norway’s National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime is behind the investigation, which comes after reports claimed that millions of streams for Beyonce‘s Lemonade and Kanye West‘s The Life Of Pablo were nothing but fraud.
The platform is also accused of inflating subscriber counts from 350,000 to one million.
The investigation has been ongoing since last fall, and according to Dagens Næringsliv, four former TIDAL employees have been cross-examined for about 25 hours.
Though it’s not much of a surprise that streaming numbers have been inflated, the problem comes with the royalty pay outs. When stream are artificially increased, each artist receives more money for those “sales” but in this case, TIDAL has been behind paying three major record companies.
TIDAL argues that a data breach was what caused these allegations and a former employee manipulated the data. They claim to be cooperating with authorities.
“Tidal is not a suspect in the investigation. We are communicating with Økokrim [the Norwegian authority]. From the very beginning, DN has quoted documents that they have not shared with us in spite of repeated requests. DN has repeatedly made claims based on information we believe may be falsified. We are aware that at least one person we suspected of theft has been questioned. We cannot comment further at this time and refer to our previous statement, which still stands.”
[Source]