Jay Z Net Worth: How Rich Is Rapper After He Sells 33% Of Tidal Streaming Service To Sprint?

Sprint Corp. will acquire a third of rapper Shaun “Jay-Z” Carter’s subscription-based music app Tidal, the wireless company announced Monday, giving its 45 million customers “exclusive content” from the app, which boasts 42.5 million songs and 140,000 videos.

The acquisition came days after a Norwegian newspaper reported allegations that the music streaming service was falsely inflating its subscriber numbers. While Jay-Z tweeted in September 2015, for example, that Tidal had surpassed the 1 million subscriber mark, data obtained by the newspaper Dagens Næringsliv show only 350,000 people subscribed.

Jay-Z purchased Tidal’s parent company, the Swedish tech firm Aspiro, which also owns the music streaming service WiMP, for the equivalent of $56 million about two years ahead of the Sprint deal. The rapper launched his makeover of Tidal in March 2015 with tracks from 16 popular artists. He sought to use it as a tool to ensure musicians receive adequate payment for their work. Since then, it featured exclusive content—including his wife Beyoncé’s album “Lemonade,” which was shared weeks before it became available on iTunes, Apple’s music store. Additionally, Tidal offered hit songs and videos that were not provided by its main music service competitor, Spotify.

Less than a year before the Sprint buyout, Spotify, as well as Google and Samsung, discussed their own potential offers to buy Tidal. Samsung later backed out, telling Variety in March that “the rumor of Samsung acquiring Tidal is not true.”

It’s unclear how much the value of the streaming service has grown since Jay-Z spent $56 million on it in early 2015. The New York Post cited anonymous sources as pegging the value at approximately $250 million.

While Tidal gained notoriety since its 2015 launch, the app’s rise hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Tidal, along with rapper Kanye West, faced a class-action lawsuit in April alleging that subscribers were tricked into believing West’s new album, “The Life of Pablo,” was only available on the streaming platform in February 2016. More recently, it has become ensnared in a legal battle over rights to the musical content of late pop artist Prince.

Sprint did not include in its announcement the exact monetary cost of the 33 percent stake in Tidal. A company spokeswoman told International Business Times in an email Monday that Sprint would not be disclosing any further details of the acquisition.

Jay-Z’s net worth has certainly grown in the period since then. Estimated by Forbes to be about $550 million in March 2015, the rapper’s net worth has expanded to roughly $610 million as of March 2016, the most recent estimate.