“My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale… You can only get it on Tidal.” With this tweet from Kanye West on Monday, we gained a true vision of what Tidal can and will be in the future of the music industry: a dictator’s dream of exclusive titles and monopolistic marketing.

When the streaming service’s owner Jay Z introduced Tidal last year, he asked for our loyalty, telling us that this would be beneficial for the music-makers. But what is right for the powerful industry titans is not always right for the consumers and fans.

Kanye has since backtracked off the tweet a bit, allowing his new album, “The Life of Pablo,” to stream for free on his website, but as of now, it is still a Tidal exclusive.

Similarly, when Rihanna’s much-anticipated album “ANTI” dropped out of nowhere last month, fans quickly found out that it was only actually available through a subscription to Tidal. Many people who were eager to hear the album ponied up and got a Tidal free trial. Engadget reported that the Tidal app went from a ranking of 147 to 13 in the iTunes store during the week of Rihanna’s release. One million copies of the album were also released for free through Tidal and Samsung, a move that gave “ANTI” immediate platinum status from the Recording Industry Association of America and gave a million fans some amount of gratitude to Rihanna.

This release strategy, which is becoming more and more popular among big-name artists (especially those connected to Tidal), aims to prevent leaks before an official release. But, more than that, they work to create a monopoly over the idea of a release. “ANTI” wasn’t available on iTunes until a day after (a century in the social media age) as a deluxe version. Tidal, therefore, owns the release and the first listeners and controls the public response.

While elements of the release include free downloads and mass availability, it’s everything that music fans have been fighting against since the dawn of the internet music age.

In 2007, Radiohead became the first major band to release an album (“In Rainbows”) through a “pay-what-you-want” option. You could get it for free if you wanted. It was an offering of trust to their fans. If you felt obligated to send some money their way to show your support, you could.

Years later, Spotify promised free music for all. For a while, the service delivered on this (albeit with limited play counts and ads later on). And regardless of these “legal” options available, people were pirating music. The maxim remains that, like a musical Murphy’s law, anything that can be pirated will be pirated.

Similarly, Louis C.K. has been quietly changing the pay-per-content landscape in television and movies. He sells his stand-up specials, movies and new web-series, “Horace and Pete,” through his personal website. While each piece of content has a set price, he justifies his strategy through conversational emails. It’s a simple setup: you give him a few dollars, and he gives you the funny. It’s a clear bond of trust, and you know your money is going directly to the artist, not through a corporate giant.

So that brings us back to Tidal’s most recent effort at “exclusivity”: “The Life of Pablo.” It’s perhaps the strangest bid at “exclusivity” in the music industry for a few reasons. One is that West seems to have a good understanding of how the modern “free for all” music industry works. The very concept of this year’s edition of “G.O.O.D. Fridays” (which began in 2010 before the release of “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”), where West releases tracks via SoundCloud approximately every Friday, is an effort at giving the music directly to the people. In a tweet, West even asked that those who wanted to rip his track “Real Friends” from SoundCloud should wait until he uploaded an updated version.

And yet, here we are with “The Life of Pablo,” available only through streaming on Tidal. Good Friday has come and gone, and the savior is still locked in the tomb. Fans have responded by finding a way to rip the album from Tidal anyway. According to Pirate Bay, a peer-to-peer sharing network, it’s been ripped half a million times.

Yet there’s another paradox in the saga of “The Life of Pablo.” The true hero here is not West but his young protege Chance The Rapper. Chance aims to get his music to as many people as possible, releasing it all for free via his website, iTunes, SoundCloud or any other service he can get his hands on.

Last week on the “Saturday Night Live” stage, Chance set out his manifesto during “Ultralight Beam,” rapping about his much-anticipated third mixtape, “I hear you gotta sell it to snatch the Grammy/ Let’s make it so free and the bars so hard/ That there ain’t one gosh darn part you can’t tweet.” He’s right, in fact, that the mixtape will be ineligible for a Grammy unless it’s commercially released. But Chance doesn’t care, because he’s the forbearer of the new generation of music producers. He knows that if you get the music to all the people (free of charge) they’ll love you unconditionally. They’ll come to your shows, buy your merchandise, sit-in your mentions while you tweet your soul out. Hopefully, the industry (and Tidal) starts to take notice.

For now, Tidal’s strategy is concerning, as it treats albums purely as commodities, rather than valuing the interests of the consumer like Chance or Louie C.K. Tidal didn’t create a better service; it just pulled together a bunch of powerful friends to control the means of distribution. Those in power claim to be working in the interest of all artists, but only established stars with connections have the ability to use the marketing system to their benefit. In Orwellian fashion, Tidal’s powers that be have declared themselves the animals on the farm that are more equal than the others. Perhaps it’s time they started paying attention to the rest of the farm before the revolution catches them.