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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

TorrentFreak [torrentfreak.com] and the BBC [bbc.com] report that Kanye West's latest album, The Life of Pablo, has been downloaded over BitTorrent at least 500,000 times due to limited availability and problems with the Tidal platform:

In a surprise move West released his album [wikipedia.org] exclusively on Tidal and his personal website. This limited availability angered many fans who refused to sign up for an expensive monthly subscription. And even those who signed up for Tidal had issues getting their hands on the album. Tidal's support desk has been flooded with complaints from people who failed to receive a copy due to issues with the service's payment system.

Then, a few hours ago, Kanye West fueled the controversy by claiming that his latest album will never be for sale. "My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale... You can only get it on Tidal," he wrote.

[...] TorrentFreak has been keeping a close eye on the popularity of the album on BitTorrent and after the first day an estimated 500,000 people have already grabbed a copy. The album is currently leading The Pirate Bay's list of most shared music torrents by a landslide. At the time of writing close to 10,000 people were sharing a copy of the most popular torrent simultaneously, something we haven't seen with a music release before. Aside from torrent sites, the album is also being widely distributed on various direct download services and hosting sites, increasing the overall piracy numbers even further.

[...] Thus far Kanye hasn't commented on the piracy issue, but the RIAA is working hard [lumendatabase.org] to take links to pirated content down. Many of the torrents that were uploaded yesterday have been removed [imgur.com], but these are soon replaced by new ones.

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