And the comedy of errors continues at Tidal.
After promising an extra, free month to trialling subscribers, Tidal has now mistakenly charged a number of credit cards held on file. A smattering of mishaps were shared with Digital Music News on Monday, including a charge on a DMN account itself. In response to an inquiry this morning, Tidal has yet to respond beyond their robo-responder:
“Due to high ticket volumes, we will try to respond to tickets in the order they were received. We appreciate your patience, and are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.”
The extension was prompted by a decision by Kanye West to modify his latest album, The Life of Pablo, a Tidal exclusive. The rework included a number of updated tracks, and some lingering controversy over the approach. Accordingly, the streaming platform announced an extra, free trial month roughly one week ago, designed to perk continued interest the service.
The Kanye exclusive worked wonders, with one report pointing to a massive leap in trial users to 2.5 million. It’s unclear how many of those will convert into bona fide, paying subscribers, though Kanye certainly seems to be bumping both awareness and exposure to the Tidal platform.
But that success is highlighting an endless string of errors, not to mention complications for part-owner Kanye. Despite searing success, Pablo didn’t even make the charts, thanks to a refusal (or omission) by Tidal to report figures to chart-tracker Nielsen. That, coupled with endless technical snags, recently caused the platform to become a punching bag for Saturday Night Live, whose skit included guest Ariana Grande singing missing tracks to compensate for Tidal file errors.
But all joking aside, a more serious question is whether Tidal’s relentless chopping of top-level executives could be stirring internal chaos and subsequent operational errors. And, creating competitive problems with near-flawless platforms like Spotify, which just announced its 30 millionth paying subscriber.
Image by B Rosen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC by 2.0).
They charged me a full ten days before the trial month should have been over… Tidal needs to go ahead and throw in the towel already
i canceled my account ( i was a paid member for 10 months) and then they charged me 2 days later. they refuse to refund the money too. and to top it off, they haven’t paid me royalties for 6+ months worth of streams. tidal is done. jay z, you fucked up big time on this one!
Not to mention their documented failure to pay royalties…
That’s one way to monetize a user base – charge their credit cards whenever you feel like it.
So many people want Tidal to fail, they are still relatively new. They will make a few mistakes, but doesn’t any business? Nobody or nothing is perfect, everything has flaws. I personally enjoy Tidal, and I understand what they are trying to accomplish. They also have a great deal for students. Which is amazing.
I left Spotify for tidal, I thought why am I paying these corporations money when I should be paying the artist. For once’s lets cut out the middle man. The man who becomes rich and has no talent, the man who came from a rich background and is just getting richer. Yer that man, the man who sits behind a desk and has never wrote a hit song in there life.
They charged me 67euros 2 days after I started my trial version(also I unsubscribed a day after I registered because I only wanted to watch one video)!!! It is a lot of money and they’re not replying to my requests! I’ll be lucky if I manage to get my money back and then never ever use their service again!