Amongst the CCIS's findings: "We have through advanced statistical analysis determined that there has in fact been a manipulation of the [TIDAL] data at particular times. The manipulation appears targeted towards a very specific set of track IDs, related to two distinct albums."
The CCIS team usually works on developing digital intelligence methodologies, and is led by Professor Katrin Franke.
Its findings suggest that "various methods" were allegedly used to bulk up plays of The Life of Pablo and Lemonade.
In the case of the former, TIDAL is accused of accessing genuine user accounts to play more than 150m 'duplicates' of TLOP tracks at exactly the same times: 02.00 and 05.00.
"According to the logs, every single user supposedly listened to a large number of tracks at precisely the same second in time," reports DN.
More than 1.3m subscriber accounts were reportedly subject to this alleged 'manipulation'.
With the Beyoncé album, TIDAL is accused of repeating subscribers' own streaming patterns to fatten up the play-count.
"The duplicates are logged at different times, differ from one user to the next, which makes them more difficult to detect," reports DN.
There is some fishy evidence, however.
"The number of minutes elapsing before the track is re-entered in the log varies, but the time interval is always a variant of a figure multiplied by six minutes (6, 12, 18, 24, …). In addition, the tracks are restarted at the same second and millisecond," reports DN.
