Come on, Kanye
— 1 min read
Donda 2 will only be available on my own platform, the Stem Player. Not on Apple Amazon Spotify or YouTube. Today artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes. It’s time to free music from this oppressive system. It’s time to take control and build our own. Go to stemplayer.com now to order.
First off, it's been like a decade since a West album dropped on its expected release date, so color me skeptical of the February 22 date.
Beyond that, he is right to complain about musician payouts from streaming services being minuscule, but come on, to suggest the way he's fighting this is by releasing his new album on just his own music player is silly. I don't know what his record label situation is, but if he can choose to release an album on only his own music player then surely he could have chosen to go to iTunes, Amazon, and any other music store and get a much better rate than Spotify and Apple Music would get. Or you know, go direct to listeners and sell it yourself.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing this record get uploaded to every music piracy site out there within hours of its release, and given people won't have any other real options to listen to it, many will pirate their first music in many years.
Bonus guess: I would bet that he'll release the album many other places after the initial rollout since he, you know, wants people to actually listen. This may juice sales of the Stem Player for a couple days or weeks, but that's about it.