Kanye West Fights Tidal Subscriber Class Action Lawsuit Cert. Bid

Kanye West has asked a New York federal judge to not certify a proposed Class of Tidal subscribers who filed a class action lawsuit against the rapper over an allegedly misleading tweet.

This week, West’s lawyers argued that the Class of consumers should not be certified because it would be too difficult to determine if each Tidal subscriber in the Class had really signed up for the music streaming service only because West had tweeted that his album, “The Life of Pablo,” would be released exclusively on Tidal, when it was later widely released.

An attorney representing both West and Aspire AB, the company that owns Tidal, said that “the only way to establish which, if any, of the class members were (1) aware of the tweet; and (2) relied on its contents when subscribing to Tidal, is to conduct individualized inquiries of each class member’s subjective experiences and motivations. That would outweigh any benefits of a class action, and is precisely why consumer fraud actions such as this are inappropriate for class certification.”

In 2016, plaintiff Justin Baker-Rhett filed a class action lawsuit against Kanye West and the music streaming service Tidal, saying that West made a false claim in a tweet that caused numerous people to subscribe to Tidal’s services.

Allegedly, West tweeted on Feb. 15, 2016 that “my album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale … You can only get it on Tidal.”

Baker-Rhett said that he purchased a subscription to Tidal because of this tweet, but merely six weeks later, the album was widely released, including on Apple Music.

The Tidal class action lawsuit claimed that hundreds of thousands of music listeners like him subscribed to Tidal only because they thought they could not listen to “The Life of Pablo” elsewhere.

Baker-Rhett said that he and these other consumers were financially injured by West’s allegedly misleading tweet, because had they known that the album would be more widely released, which was the case, they would not have purchased subscriptions to Tidal.

U.S. District Judge Gregory H. Woods preserved Baker-Rhett’s claims that West is an agent of Tidal, as he is part owner, and preserved the claim that the tweet was indeed misleading to consumers. However, the judge did throw out some claims in the Kanye West Tidal class action lawsuit.

Last week, West and Tidal’s attorneys said that it would not be as simple to determine that consumers were similarly injured, because the consumers place different values on Tidal’s service, because Tidal’s value “is subjective and cannot be determined without individualized analysis.” Based on this, the lawyers say that consumers cannot be accurately compensated in a class action lawsuit.

Baker-Rhett is represented by Jay Edelson, Benjamin H. Richman, and Sydney M. Janzen of Edelson PC and Fred D. Weinstein of Kurzman Eizenberg Corbin & Lever LLP.

The Kanye West Tidal Subscription Class Action Lawsuit is Justin Baker-Rhett v. Aspire AB, et al., Case No. 1:16-cv-05801, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.