To coincide with their joint tour, Beyoncé and Jay-Z (listed as The Carters) surprise-released a new album, Everything Is Love, on Tidal on Saturday 16th June.

But by Monday, it was everywhere else – Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer, Pandora and even SoundCloud. It was, however, only initially available to Spotify premium users; but it is understood that it will just be windowed for a fortnight and then will be open to users on the free tier. So it had an extension of sorts to its “exclusivity”.

Much media mileage was drawn out of a line from ‘Nice’ on the album where Beyoncé – referencing her 2016 album that remains a streaming exclusive on Tidal – sings: “If I gave two fucks about streaming numbers, would have put Lemonade up on Spotify.” These are lyrics that will dog the marketing around the album as it seems Tidal – given Jay-Z is the face of the service – is not sure what to do with potential exclusives.

As we noted in the previous issue of sandbox, most services have washed their hands of exclusive albums but instead want bespoke tie-in content from artists so they have a point of differentiation from their rivals. Tidal was fast becoming an outlier – the only service taking a hard line on exclusives; yet some were fumbled (Rihanna’s Anti) or became a PR disaster (Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo). The only constant in all of this is Lemonade.

So is Everything Is Love a fumble? Or a PR disaster? It certainly got Tidal more coverage on traditional media and social media than it has seen in a long time – but that quantitative uptick was not necessarily glowing. There was such limited time to draw in new subscribers or even trialists, so one wonders what the point was.

And yet… maybe, just maybe, there is something else brewing. This could have been a warm up for something bigger, something bolder. If there is something more coming, this could be a great marketing sleight of hand. But if there’s not, then it’s the sound of one hand clapping.