Petition To DOJ Aimed To Save Jay-Z’s Tidal Accuses Media Of Racism
Jay-Z’s Tidal service is a sinking ship that just keeps on drowning in bad publicity. The latest scandal involves people getting angry that despite the fact so many African-American artists are signed to the service, the staff is mostly white. We’ll let TMZ explain.
“Jay Z’s office photo at Tidal is kinda like playing Where’s Black Waldo? — and Jay Z is Waldo. The pic popped up on Beyonce’s website this week, and shows Jay and Bey mugging with a few dozen staffers at the HQ for the streaming service — and the ONLY black people in the pic are the owners.”
TMZ goes on to note that Jay-Z chastised the Black community for not backing up Tidal a couple weeks back. He was apparently angry that the Black community didn’t support Tidal the same way they support Apple, Nike, and Google.
It’s quite ironic that as Jay-Z and Tidal are being accused of hypocrisy, a petition has appeared online at Change.org in order to save the service. It’s not certain if the petition was created by anybody who works for Tidal, but its statement is rather interesting.
“Tidal is a service created by an African-American Jay-Z and supported by mostly African American artists. The white racist media made sure the service was a failure before giving it a chance to take off. We want the Department of Justice to investigate all the media outlets that bashed Tidal to see the underlying reason.”
The petition ends by claiming that if there is any wrongdoing found, the wrongdoers need to pay a price. That’s pretty harsh! So far, the petition has only received 12 signatures, but it has only been live since last evening. Some of the people who signed the petition are pretty angry.
“African Americans are discriminated against in the record industry. Tidal shows the discrimination,” says Aaron Lopez, who signed the petition.
“The media is always racist and doesn’t want to see black people or latinos [sic] be successful,” says Jesse Fuentes, who also signed the petition.
Forbes recently wrote an article on why the Tidal backlash could have nothing to do with racism.
“It’s hard to know what Jay-Z was thinking when he launched music streaming service Tidal. He certainly wasn’t thinking about his millions of fans. Most consumers don’t want to pay for music. Any streaming business that ignores that reality is doomed to fail,” wrote author Mike Montgomery.
What do you think is the true reason for Tidal’s failure. Let us know in the comments section.
[Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Roc Nation]
