Free 30-sec Tidal streams will now count towards album charts

Unless you have signed up for Tidal — which, let’s face it, you haven’t — when you attempt to stream a song hosted on the platform, you’ll be treated to a 30-second, lo-fidelity preview only.

If whispers shared by Hits Daily Double are correct (“source inside Billboard confirm” is a shaky phrase), it would seem that Billboard are planning to include such in-front-of-the-paywall streams in their album charts – which will skew things in an odd direction.

The first new release this will impact is Meek Mill’s album Wins & Losses; it will interesting to see how this charts next week, and whether the 30-second streams are included in the count. Or whether this information will be made public. Or whether Meek Mill includes a diss track about Drake on the album.

Hits Daily Double suggests that the use of bots to artificially inflate streaming counts would be a lot harder to trace without required logins, which is true – but if labels wish to game the charts in 2017, it’s a fairly easy process anyway.

As with police radar scanners, and video piracy, it’s those breaking the rules who are way ahead of the game. Over to you, Drake.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.