News February 17, 2016

Kanye’s ’The Life of Pablo’: 500K pirated downloads and counting

Former Editor

Over a half million people reportedly downloaded a pirated copy of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo a day after its release.

Many are citing the album’s limited availability as a reason. West’s long-awaited seventh album was made available exclusively on Tidal and his official website with the hip hop artist tweeting his allegiance to the streaming service overnight:

My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale… You can only get it on Tidal.
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

The move sent the Tidal app to the top of the iOS App Store Chart for two days but was soon overtaken by mobile game Color Circle, a game developed by Queensland-based artistand entrepreneur Fortafy.

Tidal’s hi fi subscription rate is US$19.99, and 45% of its 1 million subscribers are paying the fee each month. However, the service has been blasted for its expensive monthly subscription in the past, an apposite protest when you compare Tidal’s price to the industry standard $9.99.

West’s loyalty to Tidal and his decision to never release it on Apple’s iTunes (Apple Music has 11 million users), or Spotify (which has 25 million subscribers) has resulted in a mass pushback from fans.

Hours after the album was released last Friday, unauthorised copies began popping up on torrent and direct download sites like The Pirate Bay and BitTorrent.

Torrentfreakreported an estimated 500,000 peopledownloaded The Life of Pablo on BitTorrent on the day of release. Most interestingly though, it said close to 10,000 people were simultaneously sharing a copy on The Pirate Bay at one point. That’s three-times more file seeders than the next closest album, Rihanna’sANTI. It should be noted that ANTI was also made available exclusively on Tidal, but has since been made available on Apple Music and Spotify.

Torrentfreak has access to The Pirate Bay’s primary data points; the publication’s Ernesto told BBC: “Generally we don’t track music releases closely, so I’m not calling any records. However, I haven’t seen numbers this high before for a music release – not with Adele either.”

The piracy spike comes as a kick in the teeth to West, who declared he’s US$53 million in debt and among his verbose Twitter tirades, asked Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page for financial help.