Look away now, Daniel Ek and colleagues: website Vulture’s headline on Jay-Z returning his back-catalogue to Spotify is ‘For Jay-Z’s Birthday, You Can Gift Him Approximately $0.004 Per Spotify Stream’. Yes, Mr Beyoncé is celebrating his 50th birthday by making his classic albums available on Spotify, two years after removing them from the streaming service. He’d done the same from Apple Music, before returning the catalogue to that earlier this year.
Now Spotify is back in from the cold too. It’s the latest erosion of Tidal’s once-famed exclusivity strategy for some of its key artist-shareholders, with Beyoncé having finally made her ‘Lemonade’ album available on non-Tidal streaming services earlier this year too. There’s been no official statement, but Variety suggested that Jay-Z and Spotify have ‘been in discussions for some time’ about the return.
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