What Prince's Death Means For Jay Z's Tidal

 When Prince died suddenly late last month, millions mourned–and raced out to consume his work.
In the three days after news of his passing broke,
 Nielsen NLSN -1.81% tracked 579,000 digital and physical album sales for Prince’s music, a 42,000% increase over the three days prior. The Purple One sold a total of 2.3 million songs during that time frame.
But many fans looking to stream Prince’s hits quickly found they weren’t available on Spotify and other popular services. That’s because last summer, he pulled the bulk of his catalogue from all the usual suspects–except for Jay Z’s Tidal.

“Tidal is a new company, it’s brand new,” Prince told Ebony in a severely redacted interview last year (he apparently had a habit of refusing to let reporters record their conversations with him and then complaining about being misquoted). “When there’s a company like that, or the OWN network—situations where we finally get into a position to run things—we all should help.”

Tidal did not respond to a request for comment for this piece, but it seems that Prince was offered an equity stake in exchange for making Tidal his streaming home–much like Beyonce, Kanye West and the other artist-owners present at the service’s Avengers-style launch event last year.
Data on the number of streams tallied by Prince’s music in the days following his death is difficult to come by, but the precise total doesn’t necessarily matter. For Tidal, the value is not in the quantity, but in the scarcity.