Kanye West/Peter de Potter

From calling out President George W Bush after Hurricane Katrina, to his recently and gloriously erratic tweets, Kanye West is no stranger to viral outrage. The release of his seventh album, The Life of Pablo, has been no exception -- and it's been making waves outside of the media, too.


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Kanye has been a vocal supporter of Tidal, Jay Z's music streaming service, since it first launched in 2015 -- so much so, in fact, that he recently claimed that TLOB will "never never be on Apple". "It will never be for sale," he tweeted. "You can only get it on Tidal."

But Tidal is a paid service -- so where can a Kanye West fan hear his latest work of art? And what impact has it actually made?

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Tidal Wave

Most obviously, Kanye keeping his album exclusively on Tidal, at least for now, has given a boost to that service.


Although Tidal requires a paid subscription, it definitely got a boost from Kanye -- searches for the streaming site leapt up around 14 February, when Kanye first discussed streaming The Life of Pablo, according to Google Trends. It also translated into downloads: according to App Annie, an app analytics platform, Tidal jumped several hundred places in the Apple Store's charts. On Saturday 6 February, Tidal was a paltry 847th overall and 51st in the UK music app download charts, on the iOS App Store. By Monday, it was 1st in the music charts and 13th overall.

The boost wasn't as obvious for the Play Store -- it's only 34th in music and 440th overall, currently -- but overall downloads did increase.

Torrents


For those unwilling to sign up for even a free trial of Tidal, there was another option -- torrenting.

According to TorrentFreak, around 500,000 copies of The Life Of Pablo were illegally torrented on the first day it was available. At the time of writing, over 10,000 copies of the album were being torrented on the Pirate Bay at once. "Kanye torrent" also increased significantly on Google Trends. According to TorrentFreak, it's not the only way the album is being distributed. "Aside from torrent sites, the album is also being widely distributed on various direct download services and hosting sites, increasing the overall piracy numbers even further," they wrote. A DMCA notice has been issued, but copies keep popping up.

As for Kanye? Social network hype balloon Ello still exists -- maybe he'll release his next album there? It could probably use the boost.