Much has been said about the rollout and marketing for Kanye West’s latest project The Life of Pablo. The album was and still remains an exclusive to TIDAL where ‘Ye holds an ownership stake.
The album missed charting on Billboard entirely in the week after its release but who’s to be blamed? The step was probably taken because Kanye and his team did not want TLOP to be counted as a “studio album” but rather as a digital only project which is quite common in today’s climate. That explains why the presentation of TLOP was very mixtape-like.
The situation behind the scenes may be a little different than we know but it looks like TIDAL wants no blame in the album not making to any official charts (as a result of not sharing stats with Nielsen Music). The company has fired its CFO Chris Hart and COO Nils Juell, and are looking to move their operations and accounting divisions from Oslo, Norway to New York. But the company also released a very interesting statement to The Verge saying “it does share streaming data with Nielsen Music unless requested not to by an artist.”
This does have far reaching ramifications as it essentially means that the artist in this case, Kanye West was solely responsible for blocking TIDAL from not sharing the numbers with Nielsen/Billboard, thereby making sure TLOP doesn’t land (low?) on the charts.
His new album Turbo Grafx 16 is coming this Summer.
Previously: KANYE’S BARBER IBN JASPER SHARES UNSEEN FOOTAGE OF KANYE, MOS DEF, DJ KHALED & MORE