5 Times Streaming Services F*cked Up a Celeb Music Premiere
It’s always a big deal whenever celebrities decide to release new music. More often than not these days, they get paid undisclosed amounts of moneys to exclusively premiere their music on a streaming service like Spotify.
Sometimes this goes off without a hitch, but sometimes it’s a low key disaster.
And when it is a disaster, it’s all the streaming service’s fault. Here are five celebs who’ve been burned in the process.
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Selena Gomez
Selena did a GREAT job at teasing her new single “Bad Liar” but Spotify did a really bad job at letting people hear it. And they did an even worse job at letting people see the music video that went along with it.
As the clocks struck midnight, Selena announced “Bad Liar” would be available exclusively on Spotify.
But in order to have access to either you had to be signed up for Spotify. And the only way you could watch the video was in the opposite of full-screen.
Like the music video was basically avatar-sized.
Kind of a buzzkill.
READ ALSO: Selena’s “Bad Liar” Premiere Was Kind of Wack
Kanye West
The release of Kanye’s latest album “The Life of Pablo” was a super exciting time for Yeezy stans, but its rollout wasn’t even CLOSE to being seamless.
For starters, Kanye’s album release at Madison Square Garden was a giant mess.
Even though Kanye’s a massive star, somehow he ended up debuting his album by hooking his iPhone up to a speaker system and pressing play. The sound was about as distorted as you might expect and the Tidal live stream was so pixelated it was practically unwatchable.
Kanye said he would be releasing the album later that night, but midnight came and went and nothing materialized. Although Kanye’s website did accidentally sell the album to a handful of fans.
Then Kanye decided he didn’t want to actually sell the album. He just wanted to put it up on Tidal for everybody to stream.
While this was kind of nice for his fans, Marketwatch estimates this decision cost Kanye $10 million in sales.
And people wonder why there’s bad blood between Kanye and Jay Z.
U2
Back in 2014, U2 came out with a new album called “Songs of Innocence,” and Apple decided it would be a fun surprise to gift it to everybody with an iTunes account.
People were super pissed Apple violated their privacy like that and then the album didn’t even chart well. In the US, it only spent 8 weeks on the Billboard 200.
Yikes.
Rihanna
Shortly after Rihanna debuted her single “Work,” Tidal accidentally released her new album.
Even though they deleted it after 20 minutes, the damage was already done. Bootlegs started circulating the internet so Rihanna had no choice but to say “fuck it” and let Tidal re-release the album again in a few hours.
TBH Anti still went platinum overnight and went on to become one of Rihanna’s most successful albums to date, but still. There’s nothing worse than working on an album for YEARS to get it right only to have its premiere get botched by your friend/boss’s streaming service.
Drake
When “Hotline Bling” came out, Drake somehow still hadn’t had a #1 song and really REALLY wanted to check that off his bucket list.
But “Hotline Bling” didn’t make the cut — and it’s probably because he released it as an Apple exclusive.
See, for some reason Apple doesn’t report music video views to the company that calculates how many time a song’s been streamed soooooooo it just didn’t happen for him.
Rough.
