Source: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

Now that one streaming service has been required to hand over documents about how they manipulate the numbers for songs, I expect the rest will be forced to do so too.

In the country leading the charge, there could be criminal prosecution too.

Tidal

Norway

TIDAL now officially a suspect in Norwegian data fraud investigation

In 2018, TIDAL became embroiled in an explosive alleged ‘fake streams’ scandal that came to light following a lengthy investigation by Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN) .

DN reported that it had obtained a company hard drive, belonging to TIDAL, which proved the streaming platform’s play-counts for two major albums from 2016 – Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo – had been grossly manipulated.

The illicit hard drive, reported DN, contained ‘billions of rows of [internal TIDAL data]: times and song titles, user IDs and country codes’.

TIDAL strongly rejected the authenticity of the contents of the hard drive, but DN reported that the play counts during the dates and for the albums in question corresponded exactly with other information it had received from record labels.

Then, in January last year, we learned that Norway’s National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Økokrim) – which can be thought of as Norway’s equivalent of the FBI – had launched an investigation into potential ‘fake streams’ at TIDAL.

This week brings more news in the ongoing saga.

DN reported yesterday (June 9) that a recent Norwegian Supreme Court Appeals Committee ruling has revealed that TIDAL has been an official suspect in a “serious data fraud investigation” by the Norwegian authorities since June 21 last year.

TIDAL’s lawyer, Fredrik Berg at the law firm Fend, declined to comment on the matter, reports DN.

The case to which this particular ruling refers, according to an official court document obtained by MBW, was “based on suspicion of serious data fraud in the form of manipulation of stream numbers”.

This resulted in Økokrim requesting to seize TIDAL documents in spite of them “containing business and operating secrets”. – Source

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