Don’t look to see Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo on Billboard chart this week. It seems Tidal – the exclusive location of TLOP – will not release its first week streaming numbers to be counted for the Billboard charts, according to The New York Times.
Billboard’s vice president of charts and data development Silvio Pietroluongo told the paper:
“Billboard has been informed that Tidal is not currently reporting streams for tracks on Kanye’s album to Nielsen Music. Therefore streams from Tidal for this title will not contribute to Billboard’s chart rankings at this time.”
Why the silence? Some assume that releasing these figures from such a limited release would invariably lead to an unimpressive showing on the chart for the rapper, whose last album Yeezus debuted at number one on the Billboard 200.
Industry insiders are even blaming Tidal’s newbie status on why the album was so easily pirated. According to published reports, The Life of Pablo was downloaded 500,000 times on the site, but that has yet to be confirmed.
Anyone following the piracy scene in recent years knows that The Pirate Bay has been the target of nearly everyone over the years, from world governments to high profile artists.
Should Kanye chose to sue Pirate Bay, he may meet a brick wall. Artists like The Village People, Prince and even Michael Jackson have all at one point or another tried to take on The Pirate Bay to get music they owned taken down by the site, to no avail.
Threats of legal action, unsurprisingly, often fails to move those running a pirate site, and one such Pirate Bay staff member relayed as much to the website TorrentFreak in the wake of this Kanye news:
“Kanye West is a blithering twat who has an incredible sense of self-importance. Even diehard fans are saying his new album sucks balls, but as for Mr. West suing TPB, good luck Kanye! Our legal department will be waiting.”
TorrentFreak itself summed up the issue in less colorful language:
“Kanye, the way you deal with The Pirate Bay is to stop giving fans a reason to go there. The notion of online exclusivity is so old fashioned it’s mind-bending. Easy access to all music for everyone at a fair price is what you should be aiming for – rant about that in a tweet when you get a minute.”
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