Jay Z should be thanking Kanye West.
At least that's what a TMZ report is suggesting. According to the celebrity news website, West's new album, The Life of Pablo, has helped give the Tidal a much-needed financial shot in the arm that could save the music service.
Sources with knowledge of Tidal told TMZ that The Life of Pablo's debut at Madison Square Garden earlier this month was streamed millions of times in less than two weeks, marking a record for the subscription-based music platform owned by Jay Z.
In addition to the impactful numbers around the debut of West's new album, sources connected with Tidal additionally told TMZ that subscribers for the service have jumped from 1 million to 2.5 million since the Feb. 11 night of the concert/album's first listen.
In total, The Life of Pablo has reportedly helped pump $15 million of additional revenue into Tidal, with the service even considering making a physical copy of the album available soon.
Part of the reason for the millions of streams that the The Life of Pablo received has to do with the album's first major public listening session playing out to a live Madison Square Garden crowd, in what doubled as a fashion show as much as a concert. Simply put — Kanye made the release of his new album an event, which drew, of course, Kim Kardashian, the rest of the Kardashian clan, Jay Z, 50 Cent and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
As much as people wanted to hear Kanye's new concoction of tunes — both as far as his rhymes and production — they wanted to see the event, which included models, and rappers as models, walking out to his music, sporting fashion from his clothing line.
It will be interesting to see if Tidal can continue riding the wave of this recent success and, more importantly, if it could exclusively nail down other big-artist projects like it did with West's new album. The exclusivity of the project was, of course, key to the service's success with it.
Also ... Kanye's ranting tweets over the past few weeks couldn't hurt the free promotion.
