In January 2015, Jay Z published a press release through his company Project Panther Bidco Ltd, which he established to buy a music-streaming Web site. He had just one such service in mind—Aspiro—which he thought was “an innovative high-quality company with strong future growth potential.” He offered $56 million to buy the Scandinavian streaming company, and Aspiro’s biggest shareholder accepted on the spot. Jay Z renamed the company Tidal, and held a press conference two months later to publicly relaunch the company as a major competitor to Spotify and other streaming services. Less than a year later, however, Tidal has cycled through six executives as it struggles to find its footing. Its C.F.O. and C.O.O. were fired Tuesday in the wake of a dispute that prevented company artists Kanye West and Rihanna from making Billboard’s top 20 list.

From its earliest days, Tidal differentiated itself from other streaming services by suggesting that it was for artists, by artists: the majority artist-owned company would pay its performers double the royalties that they received from other streaming services. Jay Z leveraged his own celebrity prowess—another feature unique to Tidal—to bring on board a number of his friends, including Rihanna and West, in addition to his wife, Beyonce. When Tidal launched, other artists like Daft Punk, Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Alicia Keys, and Madonna lent their support.

Tidal was intended to deliver high-end, premium content for an audience that most valued it. The company offered exclusive content from its artists. (Kanye West’s recently released The Life of Pablo was only made available on Tidal, which bumped the app to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings.) It features higher-quality, lossless music, too. But the difference in quality between Tidal, Apple Music, and Spotify, the Verge pointed out, was hard to decipher. Despite all of Tidal’s promise, it still hasn’t taken off.

Tidal struggled from the beginning. Its launch was almost immediately overshadowed by the launch of Apple Music. Users balked at Tidal’s cost, too. In the beginning, its subscription streaming service cost $19.99 a month, double the price of Spotify Premium. Tidal’s app began crawling back down the Apple App Store chart from its top 20 spot to well below the 700s.

The executive team at Tidal also suffered a number of shake-ups. Aspiro’s original C.E.O., Andy Chen, left the company months after the acquisition. According to Swedish news Web site Breakit, Chen wasn’t the only one; at Aspiro’s Norway office, 25 employees were reportedly “forced to leave.” Tidal subsequently announced a new “interum CEO [sic]” named “Peter Norstad” in a press release. There was just one problem: there was nobody at Tidal named Peter Norstad. So the company issued a correction: a former Aspiro C.E.O. named Peter Tonstad would step up in the interim. Tonstad left the company in 2015, and was replaced by former SoundCloud chief business officer Jeff Toig.

Since then, Tidal has had several more shake-ups: a senior executive named Zena Burns left after just two months on the job. On Tuesday, Tidal fired its C.F.O., Chris Hart, and C.O.O., Nils Juell. While it’s been rumored that Hart left as the result of a streaming-data dispute, the company said in a statement that it’s relocating its operations and accounting teams to New York.

There have been other missteps, too. In October, Jay Z made an appearance in court over the allegations that his 1999 hit “Big Pimpin’” improperly used a sample of Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi’s “Khosara Khosara.” When Jay Z’s attorney Andrew Bart asked him to elaborate on how he makes a living, the mogul rattled off a list of occupations: “I make music. I’m a rapper, I’ve got a clothing line, I run a label, a media label called Roc Nation, with a sports agency, music publishing and management. Restaurants and nightclubs... I think that about covers it,” he said. Bart followed up: “I’m not so sure. You have a music streaming service, don’t you?” he asked. “Yeah, yeah,” Jay Z responded. “Forgot about that.” That same month, Jay Z was also photographed outside of Samsung’s offices.