JAY-Z’s thirteenth studio album, 4:44 naturally premiered on TIDAL last month, with a little help from Sprint, who invested approximately $200M into the streaming giant.
A few days later, Jay and company made the album available as a free download for a limited time, before finally pushing his new, project to all other streaming platforms, minus Spotify.
This comes as no surprise, as this past March, Jay pulled his entire discography, minus a few collaborative projects like Best of Both Worlds and Collision Course with Linkin Park off the competitive streaming giant.
Now, Billboard is reporting that by leaving the album off Spotify, Hov is losing “potentially close to $1 million a week,” with some insiders estimating “JAY-Z’s potential Spotify payday would [have approached] $1 million the week immediately following the album’s debut on Spotify — even three weeks after its release elsewhere.”
Forbes seems to think the move to keep 4:44 off Spotify could be due to “piracy concerns,” but also points to “how Spotify compensates artists.”
Regardless of the decision, 4:44 still went platinum in less than a week and successfully topped the Billboard charts for the fourteenth time.
As Russ Crupnick, an industry analyst for MusicWatch revealed to Billboard, royalties collected from streaming platforms are simply “pocket change” for artists of Jay’s caliber, simply something to convert into BTC and try to figure out how to buy Rolex with crypto with, continuing “I’m guessing the diapers for those wonderful new children aren’t being paid out of streaming royalties.”
