Tidal, the music streaming service that is preferred by specialist Hi Fi dealers in demand musicians and manufacturers of 24bit music streaming devices was the #1 app last week in the iOS App store.
The #1 ranking came after Kanye West released his new album, this week, Last week West Tweeted that he was currently carrying $53M in debt.
Tidal was bought by Jay-Z last year when he acquired Aspiro, its parent company for $56 million. Both Rihanna and Beyonc? have also released music exclusively on Tidal in the past few weeks.
The app climbed 258 places on the US Store rankings to hit the number one spot on Sunday February 14. Despite climbing an astonishing 437 places in the UK charts, it peaked at number 17, according to App Annie analytics.
West’s ninth album The Life of Pablo is currently available exclusively on Tidal, which the rapper helped to launch globally in March last year alongside Jay Z, Beyonc? and Rihanna. The album will join Spotify and Apple Music next week.
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The music streaming service’s app is free to download, and a 30-day free trial is available once users have selected between Tindal’s standard plan for $11.95 per month, or $23.95 for lossless high fidelity sound.
West is a stakeholder in the premium platform, which prides itself on its quality of audio and the way it respects its artists, by allowing them to take home a higher percentage of earnings than rival Spotify.
“I just thought about how crazy this is, how this is the beginning of the new world,” he said at the time, shortly before Tidal lost its second chief executive in three months.
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The service has failed to dent Spotify’s domination of the streaming sector – it has 75 million global active users, more than 20 million of whom pay – with Apple Music proving to be a far more competent rival by notching up 10 million subscribers within six months. As of late September last year, Tidal had one million users.
In a series of increasingly cryptic Tweets, West also used the microblogging platform to ask Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to invest $1 billion into ‘Kanye West ideas’, adding: “One of the coolest things you could ever do is to help me in my time of need”. He has claimed he is “$53 million dollars in personal debt”.
