Is Tidal Starting Beef with Apple Over a Drake Concert?

Drake was one of the top secret guest performers at Lil Wayne's Lil Weezyana Fest in New Orleans last night, and although the event was streamed on Tidal, the only people who got to see Aubrey's appearance were those physically in attendance. Tidal's no stranger to streaming live events or quirks in exclusivity; earlier this year they streamed Jay Z's deep cut mining "B-Sides" concert to subscribers only, and audio of Prince's Baltimore Rally 4 Peace show was streamed to the public… for the first hour.

When Drake came on last night, Tidal blacked the screen with a message suggesting Apple, who recently signed the OVO head as a brand ambassador and tapped him for an exclusive music filled Beats 1 radio show, had done some meddling. "Apple is interfering with artistry and will not allow this artist to stream," the on-screen message read. "Sorry for Big Brother's inconvenience." The message was parroted on Tidal's official Twitter account.

1/2 Apple is interfering with artistry and will not allow this artist to stream. Sorry for Big Brother’s inconvenience.

— TIDAL (@TIDALHiFi) August 29, 2015

2/2 We'll be back after the performance.

— TIDAL (@TIDALHiFi) August 29, 2015

The same night, the New York Post's Page Six said that Apple had threatened to sue Tidal for $20 million if the two-song Drake performance played on the Lil Weezyana strem. It seems perfectly plausable that a tech mammoth like Apple that has just charged full bore into the streaming music industry would want to make sure its assets are secure, and it suits the beleaguered, artist-oriented Tidal to be seen struggling through proprietary red tape to bring music to the masses. But that's not what happened.

Buzzfeed reached out to Drake's management and found out it was their decision to pull him from the stream and that Apple can't even tell them where not to perform. "We wanted to make sure the stream represented us in the right way, and we didn’t have much insight into what they were doing,” Drake's manager Future the Prince said. “Aesthetics and quality are important to us and we didn’t have any control over that or time to investigate it."

It looks as though Tidal's Apple beef is a gimmick to scrounge up some favorable press and goose the little engine that could narrative that has characterized the last few months of the service's media thrust. One wonders how close Page Six's unnamed source was to Tidal and whether this was just a misunderstanding or something more deliberately manufactured. Using the occasion of a Hurricane Katrina tenth anniversary benefit concert to splash mud on the competition is not behavior fit for a company still struggling to get out of the shadow of giants. Say it ain't so.