The Life of Pablo album has been illegally downloaded 500,000 times

EARLIER this week, Kanye West claimed he was broke and in tens of millions of dollars in debt.

This could likely have something to do with half million people who downloaded a pirated copy of his new album two days after its release.
According to an analysis from TorrentFreak, Kanye’s Life of Pablo has been dominating piracy websites since being made public.

The album has been on The Pirate Bay’s list of most shared music torrents with more than 10,000 people sharing a copy of the torrent simultaneously.Other various direct download services and hosting sites have also made the album available, which is increasing the overall piracy numbers.

Before the self-proclaimed “greatest living rock star of all time” lashes out at pirates for contributing to his growing debt, he should reconsider his business model.As the rapper is a founding member of artist-owned music streaming platform Tidal, the album was released — and will remain — exclusively on the service.

This angered fans who refused to sign up the service, which costs $11.99 per month in Australia for the standard service or $23.99 per month for the added benefit of high-fidelity sound.

“Kanye, and artists like him, are going to bring piracy right back to where it was before 2013. Tidal is awful. Torrent the Life of Pablo,” wrote one user.“kanyewest another reason to promote piracy. great job,” wrote another.

In an attempt to force people to join the service to stream the album legally, the Recording Industry Association of America has filed nearly 20 take-down requests for websites hosting the material.However, even the RIAA admit this will not stem the problem.

In an interview with Forbes last year, RIAA chief executive Cary Sherman said the approach was becoming increasingly ineffective.

“While the system worked when isolated incidents of infringement occurred on largely static web pages — as was the case when the [US copyright] law was passed in 1998 — it is largely useless in the current world where illegal links that are taken down reappear instantaneously,” he said.

“The result is a never-ending game that is both costly and increasingly pointless.”