Kanye West’s botched album release has cost the rapper over $10 million.
Kanye West’s release of his latest album, The Life of Pablo, has cost the rapper, fashion designer, and self-described genius, at least $10 million in sales, according to a new report.
Website TorrentFreak, which tracks music piracy and file sharing, reported that West’s album was illegally downloaded more than 500,000 times in the first 24 hours of its Feb. 14th release.
That makes it the most pirated album on The Pirate Bay and other file-sharing websites. In fact, the top-selling album on the billboard charts the previous week, only sold 124,000 units.
Tidal, the subscription music-streaming company owned by Kanye’s friend and “big brother” Jay Z, handled the rollout of “Anti” for streaming and downloads. Tidal was also supposed to do the same for The Life of Pablo.
Kanye planned to offer album downloads for $20 on his kanyewest.com site. If each of the 500,00 persons illegally downloading the album would have bought it for the $20, Kanye would have made $10 million in revenue.
However, Kanye West changed his mind 24 hours after releasing The Life of Pablo and the album was not offered for downloads, even though fans have paid for the album in advance.
By then, social media websites featured thousands of complaints from customers who had paid Tidal for a download of The Life of Pablo but never received it.
Many frustrated fans even claimed they were double-billed, adding insult to injury.
Later, Tidal admitted the download was unavailable yet promised a final version of The Life of Pablo would become available in the next “several days.”
In addition, Tidal offered customers a refund if they wanted one.
Kanye West later tweeted on Monday: “My album will never never never never be on Apple And it will never be for sale…. You can only get it on Tidal.
Adding confusion to the album release, Kanye West went on several Twitter rants in which he claimed to be $53 million in debt, called himself “this generation’s Disney” and asked for money from Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook.
But, a single tweet from Kanye West begging for his fans to subscribe to Tidal helped make the Tidal app the No. 1 download on iTunes. However, that piece of good news was short lived.
new subscribers to Tidal – which costs $10 or $20 a month, depending upon the type of service – can get a 30-day free trial of the service, meaning Kanye West will probably not receive a single dollar from those fans for a month.
However, some believe The Life of Pablo could help Jay Z’s struggling business as it fights to compete with Pandora, Apple and Spotify.
