On the Carters’ new song “NICE,” just before interpolating Guillermo Díaz’s famous Half Baked tirade, Beyoncé hocks a fat loogie at a longtime nemesis: “If I gave two fucks about streaming numbers I would have put Lemonade up on Spotify.” To this day, over two years later, her crowning achievement remains unavailable to Spotify’s 170 million monthly users, marked by a diplomatic notice on her artist page: “Beyoncé’s album ‘Lemonade’ is not currently available on Spotify. We are working on it and hope to have it soon.”

Everything Is Love, her new album with JAY-Z, is in part a celebration of the couple’s purported victory over the streaming giant, not to mention the music business writ large. Among the most significant developments in Bey and Jay’s industry ascent is their ownership of Tidal, the first musician-owned streaming service of its kind. The idea behind the company is to align the now-dominant mechanism for recording revenue with the interests of artists by putting the means of production in the hands of music’s biggest stars, ostensibly eliminating the middlemen. En route to this idealistic aim, Tidal has accumulated a mere ~1 percent of all paid streaming subscribers and has been accused of faking hundreds of millions of streams, a claim the company has denied.

So why then, if Beyoncé doesn’t give two fucks about streaming numbers, did she and Jay put Everything Is Love up on their competitors’ platforms less than two days after releasing it exclusively on Tidal?

It’s hard to know without hearing from the Carters, but it’s telling that other streaming services with significantly deeper pockets, like Apple Music, have either phased exclusives out, or, like Spotify, avoided that path in the first place. Tidal, on the other hand, has leveraged exclusive releases from their marquee crew in order to bootstrap subscriber growth; JAY-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Rihanna, and others have put out records, singles, or videos on the platform. Apple Music’s Jimmy Iovine pointed at labels to explain his company’s big change of heart on exclusives. After an early flirtation with the practice, the major labels were smart to abandon the strategy: Exclusives fundamentally undermine the new business model of music.

In 2016, Universal CEO Lucian Grainge forbade his labels from granting exclusive releases to streaming providers. Frank Ocean had just fulfilled his Def Jam contract with the release of Endless and then summarily, shockingly eclipsed it with a second and far superior album, Blonde, independently released as an Apple Music exclusive. While a caught-off-guard Def Jam mulled legal action, something more interesting was happening out in the real world. Both of Ocean’s albums were pirated voraciously, being illegally downloaded 750,000 times in less than a week after its release, and 2,300,000 times to round out the month.

From Blonde to Drake’s Views (another Apple Music exclusive) to, yes, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, releases initially exclusive to a single platform have triggered corresponding spikes in illegal downloading. In the most twisted example of exclusives gone wrong, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was not only voraciously pirated but is now embroiled in a lawsuit because Kanye tweeted that the record would remain a Tidal exclusive. The premise of using exclusives to steal subscribers from competitors seemed to have had the adverse effect of encouraging subscribers to steal the exclusives instead.