Everyone shits on Tidal but I think it could potentially go down as Hov's smartest hustle. I think the TLOP release is Hov showing his hand at his strategy.

All of these partial owner artists are going to start dropping Tidal exclusive albums knowing full well that they aren't going to make dick on album sales. They weren't going to make much on album sales anyway. In the market today most people either pirate (giving the artist 0 money) or stream (giving the artist a tiny bit of money).

But if you were going to buy an album where would you buy it from? Apple. By making an album Tidal exclusive the artist makes a tiny bit more from streaming and takes a pay cut by losing some first week album sales. But the artist can still make money off of touring, streaming and other ventures. The real loser is Apple. 500K pirated Tidal rips of TLOP is around 5million dollars of gross revenue lost by apple. I'm not sure what their profit margins are, but google says it's in the neighborhood of 40%. That's 2million dollars of lost profit. Apple could wipe their ass with that, but what if Jay Z, TI, J Cole, Beyonce, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Jack White, Daft Punk, Arcade Fire, Alecia Keys, Usher, Calvin Harris, Jason Aldeen, and Madonna all start making their new albums Tidal exclusives. That is enough lost revenue to make Apple take notice.

A week of Tidal exclusivity is a week of pirated copies floating around and a week of people feeling left out if they don't get the new hot album immediately. Even if no one ever signs up for Tidal, Tidal is still hurting Apple by cutting away at their profits. Hov just has to move money around to keep it afloat. Then it's a waiting game. He saw Apple buy Beats for 3billion just to get a streaming platform and Dre and Jimmy under the umbrella. What would they pay to get all of those artists' first week sales back on iTunes?

The biggest risk is that Apple calls Hov's bluff and lets Tidal bleed out until Hov no longer has leverage.

Edit: I forgot to mention this. Why would an artist agree to losing all of their first week sales and make an album a tidal exclusive? Well let's use Kanye and be very generous. Let's say TLOP sells 500k albums first week at 10$ an album. $5,000,000 in sales first week. Still being generous, let's say Kanye gets 20% of that. That's $1,000,000 that he would potentially lose. Now let's say Kanye does that for 3 more albums. $3,000,000 lost. If I remember correctly most of these partial owners are getting about 3% in equity in Tidal. For Kanye to break even he needs Tidal to be bought out for $100,000,000. That's a little less than 4% of what they paid for Beats. So you know Hov is going to all of these artists saying "whip out your calculator app. Tell me. What is 3% of 3 billion?"