In what could be considered as a drastic move to further demonstrate his decision to share his and other artists' music only through Tidal, Jay Z recently pulled out his Reasonable Doubt album from Spotify, reported Bloomberg on Monday.
The album, which was launched in 1996 and hailed as one of the rapper's best projects to date, was stripped off from the records of Spotify and transferred into another music sharing service and Jay Z's company, Tidal. Although Beyonce's husband is not the first music artist to pull out from Spotify, as Taylor Swift also recently made headlines following her decision to rid the service of her music, this marked the first time that the music sharing company is actually faced by the daunting possibility of fans abandoning their subscriptions with them and transferring to another service that offers more hits and albums.
Apart from Jay Z's decision to remove his debut album from Spotify in an effort to presumably strengthen the potential following of Tidal, other artists have already shown apparent support to this endeavor. One of his closest friends and a lady who is said to owe quite a big chunk of her success to the rapper himself, Rihanna, exclusively dropped her new single, American Oxygen, in Tidal recently. Beyonce, one of the most popular and highly respected musicians in the industry, also gave Tidal full exclusive rights to her new music, Die With You, which is reportedly dedicated to Jay Z. Meanwhile, Nicki Minaj recently sparked speculations regarding her involvement with the service as she hinted about projects that could be possibly distributed solely by Tidal in the future.
In an earlier interview with Jay Z and his Tidal partner, Vania Schlogel, the two attempted to shed some light on the reason behind their desire to establish their own music streaming service and the benefits they offer compared with those provided by the others in the same business.
One of the biggest advantages pointed out by the rapper is that, "currently we pay the highest royalty percentage." This may be quite attractive to some artists who believe Spotify serve as an avenue to demean the value of their music due to the compensation they offer. "If just the presence of Tidal causes other companies to have better pay structure, or to pay more attention to it moving forward, then we've been successful in one way," Jay Z added.
At present, no official statement has been released by either Jay Z or Spotify regarding the issue.
