As you might have heard, hip-hop artist Jay-Z recently released his latest album “4:44” on his music streaming platform Tidal where it was an exclusive. It was a questionable move given that Tidal isn’t exactly the dominant music streaming platform, and making it exclusive means that there are potentially millions of other listeners out there who can’t tune in.
However it turns out that maybe it wasn’t such a problem after all. In a tweet by the RIAA, it seems that Jay-Z’s latest album has been certified platinum within a week of its release. For those wondering, the RIAA certifies an album as platinum when it sells 1 million copies, but since this is streaming, the RIAA has tweaked the calculations where 1,500 on-demand streams are considered as 10 track sales and 1 album sales. To sum it up, it basically means that to hit platinum, Jay-Z’s album/songs have been streamed 1.5 billion times since its release.
4:44 Goes Platinum – JAY-Z’s 13 Platinum (or higher) solo studio Album Awards are more than any other hip hop artist. @s_c_ @RocNation #444 pic.twitter.com/oSSXrUpMUn
— RIAA (@RIAA) July 5, 2017
This would seem to suggest that maybe Jay-Z really doesn’t need for his albums to be available on competing platforms for him to do well, although we guess given Jay-Z’s reputation and veteran status in the industry, it shouldn’t be surprising. That being said, there have been some rumors to suggest that 4:44 will eventually be released onto other platforms such as Apple Music and iTunes.
We’ve yet to see any kind of confirmation so take it with a grain of salt for now.
Filed in . Read more about Apple Music, Entertainment, Music and Tidal.