Kanye West’s latest album, The Life of Pablo, was originally supposed to be a short-time exclusive on the $20/month streaming service Tidal, but then the fickle artist announced over the weekend that it would remain a Tidal exclusive, with the implication that anyone who wants to hear it needs to ante up for the monthly subscription… or illegally download it like more than half a million people have already done.

Kanye made the Tidal-only announcement as he makes all of his important statements, through Twitter:

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/699376240709402624

In spite of Kanye’s apparent knowledge of this thing called the Internet, he doesn’t really understand it, or the fact that most Internet users will not pay $20/month just because of a single album from one artist.

It hasn’t even been a full 24 hours since Kanye made that statement, but the torrent freaks at TorrentFreak.com have calculated that 500,000 people have siphoned off free copies of Pablo, with upwards of 10,000 people currently sharing the album on The Pirate Bay alone.

That’s in addition to the countless direct download links that keep popping up faster than the RIAA can have them delisted from search engine results.

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