Kanye West’s new album pirated over 500000 times

While many highly anticipated albums typically get pirated in large numbers shortly after their release, TorrentFreak says that they haven’t seen this level of piracy for a single album before. Kanye originally planned to stream the album for a week on Tidal before selling the album on his own site, which would eventually open streams and sales to everyone. But West shot that down quickly on Monday: “My album will never never never be on Apple”. And it will never be for sale… You just can’t buy it. Meanwhile, Kanye is going to get going on Twitter rants, complaining about being broke, proving once and for all that nothing in our world makes sense anymore. That’s a lot of intentionally limited exposure, although one can only presume this is a bid to promote Jay Z’s streaming platform, Tidal (or which Kanye is a shareholder).

Also all Good Fridays songs will be on Tidal. Along with his music, he is a co-owner of streaming service Tidal, and has his own line of Adidas Yeezy clothing, which he previewed at said show last week.

Kanye was successful with his antics and the iOS app is now the No. 1 spot on the App Store’s “Top Free Apps” chart in the US. If West had released the album exclusively on Spotify or Apple Music, there might not have been such a backlash, but people don’t really use Tidal.

The album has by far surpassed records of downloads online making it one of the most pirated albums ever and has grown to become the most popular music download on The Pirate Bay.

TorrentFreak has been charting the album’s popularity on peer-to-peer file sharing site BitTorrent and reports that an estimated 500,000 people had pirated the album a day after its release.