There may be trouble brewing between streaming service Tidal and the team running Prince’s estate, at least if you believe celeb-gossip website TMZ, which has been following the relationship between the two entities. In October, it claimed that Jay-Z had made a $40m offer to the estate to buy the rights to Prince’s unreleased songs, but now it claims the offer has been knocked back, with no interest in a deal for “Roc Nation to exploit any of the intellectual property assets of the Estate”. But there’s more: “The estate is calling out Tidal for making 15 Prince albums available for streaming a couple months after his death. Those releases were unauthorised according to the estate,” claimed TMZ’s story, which says Tidal did have a deal for Prince’s ‘HitNRun Phase One’ album. It’s a puzzling development, because Prince was certainly pro-Tidal before he died. “Hit N Run sounds like today. Tidal is sinking money into it, and they need it. And my heart is always on because I want them to do well,” he told Ebony in December 2015. More context: a Page Six story last week suggesting that Tidal had “a one-year deal to stream Prince’s music” rather than longer-term, exclusive rights.
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