PHOTO:Jay Z, Kanye and Tidal are being sued and it's Kanye's fault!LOL
According
to news report by Yahoonews, Jay Z and Kanye are being sued over album, and
according to the news: If you've been paying attention to news about Jay Z's
streaming music service Tidal, you could have seen this coming. After Kanye
West surprised fans earlier this month by releasing his album
"The Life of
Pablo" on every other streaming platform, a California man is taking legal
action.
Chicago
law firm Edelson PC has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Justin
Baker-Rhett, who accuses Tidal of using the promise of West's exclusive album
as a way to boost membership—which is exactly what it did.
It is unclear who at
Tidal, including Shawn Carter (Jay Z), knew West would make the decision to
fully release the album.On Feb. 15, West said on twitter that his
album
When
West released the album on other platforms, his decision was the dark cloud in
an otherwise big week of positive news for Tidal:
The company shared
subscription numbers, revealing that it had reached 3 million paying
subscribers; it said 45% of them (about 1.4 million) pay for the
higher-price $20-per-month
“HiFi” version of the service; and it signed on four
new artist equity owners. But West putting his album on other platforms ruined
Tidal’s good week, and would likely enrage anyone who had signed up for Tidal
specifically because it had the West album exclusively.
Baker-Rhett's
$5 million lawsuit invites other angry subscribers to join, and names S. Carter
Enterprises (Jay Z's holding company) and West as the defendants, known
together as Tidal for the purposes of the suit.
The firm, Edelson, has filed
class actions against other (much bigger) tech companies before, including
Facebook and Twitter.
Was
West's decision a change of heart? Or did Carter and Tidal know he planned it
all along? The lawsuit attempts an answer: "Neither Mr. West nor SCE ever
intended 'The Life of Pablo' to run exclusively on the Tidal platform,"
the filing, obtained by Yahoo Finance, says.
"To the contrary,
they—knowing that Tidal was in trouble but not wanting to invest their own
money to save the company—chose to fraudulently induce millions of American
consumers into paying for Tidal's rescue."
Because
the main claim of the suit is that consumers were tricked, it demands that
Tidal "delete the private information" of Baker-Rhett and any other
subscribers who decide to join his class action suit, and that Tidal
"cease any monetization efforts relying on the illegally obtained information."
Interestingly,
the lawsuit filing focuses a great deal on West's Twitter following and some
other accomplishments, such as appearing twice on a Time Magazine list.
"Mr. West has developed a robust and devout fan base, with nearly 22
million Twitter followers (although he himself only follows one person) and
tweets that are often widely reported on by the popular media," the
lawsuit states.
The filing includes photographs of tweets by Tidal promoting
the "Life of Pablo" exclusivity.
Tidal
has been in the news often since its launch, mostly for negative reasons. Most
recently, the service filed its own lawsuit, against Aspiro, the Swedish tech
company from which Carter acquired Tidal.
Carter is also suing Schibsted
Media Group and Verdane Capital, Aspiro's biggest shareholders. Separately,
there have been rumors reported of a potential Samsung acquisition of Tidal.
Tidal
did not immediately reply to a request for comment, and Carter, who has often
taken to Twitter to sound off on Tidal news and milestones, has not tweeted
about the lawsuit.
source:yahoonews
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