12 Reasons Jay Z's Tidal Is Going To Flop Hard

46-year-old Jay Z, real name Shawn Carter, has never made a bad move throughout his career. Over the past couple of decades, he has amassed a personal fortune of $650 million, turning him into one of the most financially successful hip hop artists in the world. The Brooklyn born businessman has sold more than 100 million records and took home 21 Grammys. Then in March 2014, he bought music streaming site TIDAL and things took a sharp turn for the worst.

A quick Google search of "TIDAL doomed" conjures up tons of articles online dismissing the music streaming service. So what went so wrong? Just months after it's a star-studded "#TIDALForAll" launch, executives have walked out, there have been issues with customer service, product failures and even legal issues. All this after just one year of TIDAL. Here we look at why this service could potentially flop hard.

12 Users Are Already Starting To Sue

On February 15th, the day after Kanye West's album The Life of Pablo was released on TIDAL, Kanye tweeted: "My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale… You can only get it on Tidal." A fan, who had signed up to the streaming service just for Kanye's exclusive album, has now filed a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court claiming TIDAL made fraudulent claims just to have people subscribe. The Life of Pablo was made available on both Spotify and iTunes just two months after Kanye's tweet.

The plaintiff, Justin Baker-Rhett, stated that the claims of exclusivity was just a ploy to add millions of subscribers to the TIDAL service. His lawyer Jay Edelson told The Telegraph, "You can't trick people into paying money and giving up personal information just because the company is struggling. 'Pablo' was streamed more than 250 million times within 10 days of release." Tidal have not responded to email requests for comment.

11 There Aren't As Many Subscribers As Originally Thought 

Even Jay Z is playing hardball when it comes to lawsuits - he is currently seeking legal action against the previous owners of the TIDAL service as he claims they inflated the number of subscribers to get him to buy. The Norwegian press reported he was seeking $15 million in damages from from Scandinavian company Aspiro who he originally bought the company from for $56 million last year.

TIDAL sent the following statement to USA Today: "It became clear after taking control of TIDAL and conducting our own audit that the total number of subscribers was actually well below the 540,000 reported to us by the prior owners. As a result, we have now served legal notice to parties involved in the sale. While we cannot share further comment during active legal proceedings, we're proud of our success and remain focused on delivering the best experience for artists and fans." You know you have purchased a bad product when you try to sue the company who sold it to you.

10 The Launch Was Just… Weird

When TIDAL had it's big star-studded launch in March last year - the result was well… just plain weird. Jay Z rounded up Beyonce, Kanye West, Madonna, Chris Martin, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Arcade Fire, Jack White and Daft Punk. Each star then stepped up to a podium to pledge allegiance to TIDAL. Shortly after Beyonce, Kanye, Rihanna, Madonna then all turned their Twitter accounts the color turquoise and TIDAL was officially a thing.

Alicia Keys then added to the overall bizarre occasion by delivering a pretentious speech for the press. She preached, "We're gathered… with one voice in unity in the hopes that today will be another one of those moments in time, a moment that will forever change the course of music history. Our mission goes beyond commerce, it goes beyond technology. Our intent is to preserve music's importance in our lives." We get it - you want our money.

9 It's More For The Artists Than The Users

Another problem with the launch was that the focus was more on the celebrity names who were present than the actual tech side. This was perhaps the beginning signs that TIDAL was always going to put the artists before the actual users who are paying for the service. The entire business model is set up to line the pockets of artists who are already multi-millionaires instead of unsigned or upcoming acts who need a break.

Jay-Z initially believed that launching TIDAL with this much celebrity endorsement would have users flocking to sign up for the service. This plan failed when people refused to believe that the likes of Madonna and Coldplay's Chris Martin were short of cash.

8 Users Find It Too Expensive

The official TIDAL website states the cost is either $9.99 or $19.99 a month. "Both pricing levels come with the same access to exclusive content and experiences, and the $19.99 tier has the added benefit of high-fidelity sound." Unlike Spotify, TIDAL doesn't offer a free listening platform.

Lily Allen criticized TIDAL last year when she complained last year, "I love Jay Z so much, but Tidal is (so) expensive compared to other perfectly good streaming services. He's taken the biggest artists and made them exclusive to Tidal. People are going to swarm back to pirate sites in droves sending traffic to torrent sites."

7 The Exclusives Do Result In Piracy 

When Kanye West announced that his album The Life of Pablo was going to be a TIDAL exclusive and not made available for sale on iTunes (a statement which later turned out to be a lie), the users downloading his album on piracy sites within the first week was around the half million mark. According to TorrentFreak, "an estimated 500,000 people have already pirated TLOP, and that number will only increase."

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) work around the clock to remove the piracy links they find, however those links that have been removed are just as quickly replaced by new ones. In the long war against piracy - exclusives are really not helping the issue.

6 Nobody Asked For Lossless Audio 

TIDAL's Lossless quality offers 1411 kilobits per second (Kbps), compared to Spotify's 320 Kbps and iTunes' 256 Kbps. Which is great - but can users tell the difference? Chris Ziegler wrote for The Verge: "I ran a good 10 or 15 blind tests on friends and coworkers between Spotify's highest-quality stream, 320 Kbps, versus Tidal's FLAC. People guessed TIDAL correctly every single time, using just mediocre headphones plugged into a MacBook. It's absolutely the real deal."

This is an impressive result - however if 100 users were asked how highly they rate lossless audio as a priority when comparing music streaming sites - it probably wouldn't be such a big deal in their decision. Riding on the lossless audio wave, as TIDAL initially did with their marketing campaign, hasn't proven powerful enough to drag in more subscribers.

5  Tidal Wants Immediate Success

Spotify has been operating since 2008 and despite having 75 million users - roughly only 20% of them pay for the service. The company also pays out 70% of its revenue to the artists before they can even consider paying their own staff or having any money left over for global marketing campaigns and expensive development projects. TIDAL believes they can operate the same business model AND pay artists almost triple the rate.

TIDAL has not been able to hold a steady position in the app charts since it's launch last year. It entered the free app download chart at no.20 after it's launch and then just a month later dropped to position 700. Currently, with thanks to Beyonce's Lemonade exclusive and Kanye West it sits modestly at no.37.

4 They Just Can't Beat The Competition

When it comes to beating the competition - Spotify has a practically unbeatable streaming catalogue and iTunes have a 15 year head start to their advantage. Spotify keeps users hooked by adding around 20,000 tracks a day to their catalogue and they currently operate in 58 countries around the world. The key to their success is to always be constantly updating.

Spotify's CEO David Ek didn't appear too worried when after TIDAL launched and all the big celebrity names were turning their profile pictures blue - he changed his own to bright green in order to mock the marketing campaign. That said, Jay-Z is willing to put in the fight, his close friend and performer NE-Yo told Billboard magazine, "Jay Z knows what it is from all three sides of the game: He's a writer, he's an artist, and he's also an executive. He knows the struggles; he's fought them himself."

3  The Customer Service Is Quite Shocking 

A string of complaints were filed by previous TIDAL users who were still being charged $19.99 for using the service months after they had cancelled. TIDAL sent customers an email stating they were sorry about the error, they refunded the amount and offered users three months free subscription as compensation. Excellent customer service, right? Well it would have been had TIDAL not have further charged customers for the three month trial they were supposed to have received as an apology.

Chris Welch wrote for The Verge, "Mistakes happen, but this "gift" really rubs me the wrong way. It almost seems like an intentional ploy to reel back in everyone who tried TIDAL and ultimately bailed for Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, or another streaming option."

In a last ditch attempt to try and sweeten subscribers, TIDAL executive Vania Schlogel claimed that Jay Z and other musicians have been personally ringing fans to say thank you for using TIDAL. Schlogel said one user commented, "This is the best customer service call I've ever received!" Whether or not this actually happened, or if it was just a marketing ploy, is still yet to be determined.

2  The Press Love To Hate Tidal

After it's official launch, Josh Constine at Tech Crunch ran with the headline: "Why Jay-Z's Music App Tidal Sounds Doomed." Gawker writer Sam Biddle said of the launch, "Only a few minutes ago, the entire music industry stood on a stage in a collective display of how rich and out of touch they are." One staff writer at Bossip reported, "Yesterday Jay Z got his rich music friends together to sign on to launch a new streaming service to compete with the likes of Spotify. Essentially, Jay and company are asking us to help line their pockets out of the kindness of our hearts and desire to see them get richer. The entire fiasco was a money grab and it reeked of desperation and pretentiousness."

This was just the first barrage of shade thrown at the streaming side. Jay-Z took to his Twitter to complain that the press were using "smear campaigns" against him because he is famous. However, it's more likely they are just not impressed with the "celebrities first" marketing campaign, the dodgy payment plans or the lack of previously promised exclusives.

1  They Can't Survive On Exclusives Alone

TIDAL's business plan depends on exclusives for a peak in users signing up. When Beyonce's sixth studio album Lemonade was released on TIDAL for 24 hours before it was available on iTunes, die hard Beyhive fans were grabbing at subscriptions and TIDAL rocketed into the top 5 position in the free app charts. There were others who thought that a monthly fee of $9.99 was a bit foolish considering the next day they could pay $8 extra and actually own the full album.

Alex Cranz wrote an article for Gizmodo titled: "Not Even Kanye Can Save Tidal” and found that TIDAL's popularity only peaks for 24 to 48 hours after an exclusive is released. These exclusives may appear lucrative when there is such a spike in subscriptions but it's now up to TIDAL to find a way to make these users actually stay.