The rapper who was once hip-hop’s biggest star has a new album, 4:44, that seems like a play to prop up Tidal and put business before music

No one can accuse Jay-Z of not ploughing his own furrow. At the precise moment when everyone else is starting to wonder if streaming and download exclusives actually do more harm than good, he’s doubling down and making 4:44, his forthcoming album, exclusive on Tidal. A streaming service in which he has a significant stake. Convenient.

Naturally, he wants to support his own service and you can’t really fault him for that. If we are being brutally honest, Tidal needs all the help it can get as it lags miles behind Spotify (50m paying subscribers), Apple Music (27m subscribers) and Deezer (12m “active users”). It last gave out official figures in March 2016, when it said it had 3m subscribers, but the Norwegian business publication Dagens Naeringsliv claimed it was massaging its subscriber numbers and they were under half of what it was claiming.

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The rapper’s new album is due for release on 30 June, but there seems to be some uncertainty over just how exclusive this “exclusive” will be. It is being done in partnership with the US mobile company Sprint, which – what serendipity! – acquired a 33% stake in Tidal at the start of this year for an estimated $200m, and seems to be as much about propping up Tidal as it is about a customer land grab by Sprint.

“Jay-Z is a global icon and we’re giving customers an incredible opportunity to be among the first to experience his new album, 4:44,” enthused Marcelo Claure, Sprint president and CEO, in a statement. It’s the use of “among the first” that raises the skepticism levels somewhat. Does that mean it will get a CD and download release? Or will it eventually make its way on to Tidal’s (much, much bigger) rivals? No one’s saying anything for now.

We’ve been here before. Several times. And it’s never worked out brilliantly, as Tidal and Jay-Z have a far-from-glowing track record with exclusives. Back in 2013, Jay-Z gave away 1m downloads of his Magna Carta Holy Grail album to Samsung customers who had a particular handset. Samsung will have paid handsomely for the exclusive, but there was a sense that it was more about giving Jay-Z a huge upfront payment rather than worrying about what would please the fans. Plus, as they were free downloads, they did not count towards the album’s chart position, so, after the sulphuric explosion of the release hype, the promotion in effect became undetectable.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from Frank Ocean’s Endless, the release of which saw Universal swear off exclusives Photograph: Youtube

After a consortium led by Jay-Z bought Tidal (previously known as WiMP) in January 2015, it had a star-studded launch where many of the biggest pop acts on the planet pledged to give it exclusive material first. That amounted, initially, to a Madonna video that soon appeared on YouTube. After that came Rihanna’s Anti, in January 2016, which ended up being released early by mistake, then 1m copies were given away to appease fans while Tidal blamed Universal Music Group for the error. UMG countered by saying it was actually Tidal’s fault. The album eventually ended up on other streaming services.

The release of Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo did no better. Despite West’s assurances that it would never be on Apple, a matter of a few weeks after its Tidal debut it was available on … Apple. And Spotify. And everywhere else. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one exclusive may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two or more looks like carelessness.

That said, Beyoncé’s Lemonade remains a streaming exclusive on Tidal over a year after its release. But the knock-on effect was to send fans to pirate sites as well as CD retailers and iTunes to spend their money there rather than taking the carrot and joining Tidal. The fact that Lemonade, according to IFPI numbers, sold 2.5m copies globally last year to become the biggest album in the world would suggest that it was downloads and CDs that accounted for the bulk of that. The “album equivalent streams” of Lemonade on Tidal will have barely touched the sides here.

Universal, smarting from the Frank Ocean debacle last August – in which Apple Music got an exclusive for the contract-fulfilling album Endless and then, the next day, Ocean put out Blonde himself – reportedly imposed an embargo on exclusives. Warner Music Group and most indie labels were always against them. That leaves Sony, which has hinted exclusives will be considered on a case-by-case basis, the unspoken subtext being they have fallen in line with all the other labels.

There will be the occasional outlier, such as the totally autonomous Chance the Rapper’s two-week exclusive with Apple Music for his album Coloring Book in May 2016, for which he claims he was paid $500,000; but everyone else is increasingly of the belief that exclusives dangerously impede the reach of an album and, as such, only annoy fans at a time where loyalty can no longer be presumed and has to be earned again with every new release.

Jay-Z has an allegiance to his own service and one of its biggest investors, hence this Tidal–Sprint deal; but it feels like a message beamed in from a different place and a different time. In an age of digital ubiquity, exclusives are an anachronistic bet on a roulette wheel where the only pockets are marked as either “invisibility” or “irrelevance”.