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Tidal confirms it has served “legal notice” to service’s former owners

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 1 April 2016

Streaming firm Tidal has confirmed it has served “legal notice” to some of the company’s former owners over allegations they provided the Jay-Z led consortium which bought the digital music business last year with misleading information ahead of the acquisition.

Reports appeared in the Nordic press that such notices had been filed with the former owners of the originally Norwegian streaming service earlier this week, just as Tidal was celebrating its first anniversary as a Jay-Z led concern. It did so by bragging about the various exclusives it has scored in the last year, while also announcing that it now has three million subscribers, up from the half million (maybe, maybe not) it inherited from the original Tidal company, that mainly traded under the WiMP brand in Europe.

Confirming that those legal notices had indeed been sent, a spokesman for Tidal said yesterday: “We are excited that one year after Tidal launched, we have surpassed three million subscribers globally. The growth in our subscriber numbers has been even more phenomenal than we’ve previously shared”.

But, the spokesman added: “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”.

One of those parties, media firm Schibsted, has insisted that WiMP’s original owner, Aspiro, was a publicly listed business and complied with all the transparency rules that come with being a public company.

Tidal didn’t want to get into the specifics of the squabble, instead concluding that: “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”.