In April 2016, Beyoncé launched her sixth studio album "Lemonade" worldwide. While the album was available for Apple users to buy for $17.99 on iTunes at launch, it was never put on Apple Music or Spotify and remained a streaming exclusive on Tidal for three years, until today.
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Now, both Apple Music and Spotify subscribers can listen to the 13 track album (with an original demo version of "Sorry") for the first time. Apple is highlighting the launch on the main carousel in the Browse tab on Apple Music, along with the live album of "Homecoming," the documentary about Beyoncé's 2018 Coachella performance.
More recently, Beyoncé and Jay-Z launched a collaborative album under the name "The Carters," which only remained a Tidal exclusive for two days and then launched across streaming services in June 2018. Before that time, Jay-Z quietly removed many of his albums from Apple Music in April 2017, but most eventually came back. His own album "4:44" had one week of Tidal exclusivity before appearing on Apple Music in July 2017.
Although it's three years old at this point, "Lemonade" was a huge bonus for Tidal and a way for the company to encourage fans to sign up for the service. The end of its exclusivity follows a rough year for Tidal, with numerous reports about late royalty payments to artists, inflated streaming numbers, and potential data breaches emerging in 2018. The news of late royalty payments and inflated numbers came from Norwegian site Dagens Næringsliv, which specified that Tidal had inflated streaming numbers for "Lemonade".
Top Rated Comments
I’d much rather a glass of lemonade
Oh and was I the only one who thought she was singing “single lettuce” rather than “single ladies” in her song Single Ladies?
Here come “I don’t like Beyoncé” posts.
Yep. The relevance to news about Apple is about the push and pull of dealings in the music/streaming industry, not about the album/artist in the story, but so many here seem to think we really want to know about their musical taste (and funny how the loudest ones are the ones who are in a hurry to tell us they don't like that music, thinking for some reason we care). As if the site was "news about Apple plus bonus music reviews from random people". Her music doesn't do much for me (not that that matters), but even I know that "Lemonade" was an album that had considerable impact - and the album becoming available on Apple Music is a small but valid bit of news about Apple and the streaming music business.[doublepost=1556052337][/doublepost]
Will MR show me love too, when I drop my 3 year old album on Apple Music?
Depends, are you as well known of an artist as she is? Was it a big deal, 3 years ago, that your album (which hit number one on Billboard) was on a new alternate service and not on Apple Music? If not, then why should MR show you any love?