As Jay-Z’s 4:44 is poised to spend a second week at the top of the Billboard 200 charts, industry insiders are taking a longer look at the conversation surrounding the rapper’s unusual musical rollout and piracy concerns.
The first wave of release went to Tidal subscribers only or to Sprint users who were given a six month free trial for the music service that is owned by Jay-Z. Shortly thereafter, the album appeared on Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and Google Play. It still has yet to appear on Spotify.
In March 2015 the Songwriters Hall of Famer acquired Tidal for $56 million. (Then, Sprint bought into Tidal for the tune of $200 million, which is why Sprint subscribers had access to the album promotion for “free.”) Earlier this year he removed most of his albums from Spotify’s playlists. Jay never officially explained why he did this, but pundits say it’s largely due to how Spotify compensates artists. That 4:44 is available as a physical copy and on most streaming services save one, is a lesson for all aspiring artists and for many experienced ones, says Panos A. Panay, the founding Managing Director of the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship, hosted at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
“My view is that it’s purely a business deal influenced by the fact that Jay-Z is the owner of Tidal moreso than an artistically oriented business deal,” says Panay. “To move to Apple and Amazon and a few other services, in my opinion, is a reaction to the fact that – unsurprisingly – to have it only on one channel caused the pirate channels to skyrocket.”
The larger issue that Jay-Z has illustrated, adds Panos, is that piracy grows when there are obstacles to buying a copy of the music. “This is a very obvious example… Making music only available on certain providers is not working either for the fans or the overall health of the industry.”
This plays into a key issue for Panay's intiative at Berklee, called the Open Music Initiative, which aims to help resolve music rights and payments issues for artists by creating a searchable, open-source database linking artists or rights holders with each track they have created. This, in theory, will help sort out who should get paid what when music is played, sampled, streamed or sold.
Many music outlets reported that Jay’s album was illegally downloaded some one million times. And personally, I’ve run into at least 30 people that had the album on their phones the first day even though they were Verizon users. According to MUSO a company that measures piracy analytics 4:44 was downloaded 971,196 times in 72 hours of the June 29 release. The album still went certified platinum in a week’s time.
Meanwhile, even celebs bootlegged 4:44. Snoop Dogg said in a (not safe for work or children) Instagram video that he only had iTunes, so when a friend sent him the album he listened.
“I want to shoot a shout out to Jay-Z just dropped another hot album, 4:44,” Snoop says in the video. “But you know what? I don’t got Tidal, so a n***a had to bootleg it to me. I’m on iTunes and s**t cuz, I don’t understand that—y’all gotta explain that to me. I went to iTunes looking for his album and I couldn’t find it. But my homie sent it to me.”
Has piracy dropped now that, in theory, nearly everybody can buy it? It sure doesn't seem like it. Not that it's any official metric, but the number of people I know who have bootleg copies of the album have doubled since the initial release.
