Kanye's latest album, The Life of Pablo, which was released on streaming service Tidal back in February, was peddled by Kanye as an exclusive to Tidal. Due to his actions, in less than four five seconds Tidal's value increased by $US60mil and their subscriber numbers tripled. Great news for Kanye who has a stake in Tidal. However, earlier this month fans found out the hard way that it turns out the album wasn't so exclusive.
You have got to give it to Kanye. Couldn't have been a harder, better, faster or stronger plan to get people to subscribe to what is increasingly being described as a sub-par streaming service. One US fan thinks Kanye's actions were pretty heartless and has commenced class action proceedings against Kanye and Tidal. The difference here is the gold diggers might actually be messing with a broke Kanye.
Anyway, what does this all mean for Australian subscribers?
First things first, if Tidal and Kanye are making false and misleading statements on Twitter that are not accurate or correct this conduct is in breach of Australian Consumer Law. The issue is that the statements induced customers to sign up, where they would not have if they had known the album would be available elsewhere two months down the track.
We've also noticed Tidal's T&Cs state that Australian's aren't entitled to a refund and that any dispute has to be settled in New York. We think it is ridiculous to have consumers bound 2 these terms and think the ACCC or any Court would agree. The most likely outcome is that anybody that signed up to Tidal to get the album and paid a subscription fee will be entitled to get their money back. If you feel like Kanye has runaway with your money, we suggest lodging a complaint through the ACCC, who may just end up pursuing Tidal for millions in penalties.
Kanye is yet to comment and with no news from Kim Kardashian via Snapchat we figure the only fitting way to end this update is to rely on a previous nugget of wisdom from the great man himself:
"My greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live"
With all these lawsuits, we think Kanye may need to rethink that.
We do not disclaim anything about this article. We're quite proud of it really.
