There’s absolutely no debating that Kanye West has made his fair share of questionable decisions over the years, but charging £200 for his next album is not one of them.
Last week, the rapper, producer and fashion designer took to Instagram to inform fans that his upcoming 11th LP, Donda 2, will only be available to fans via his own Stem Player, a device that allows users to remix the album’s tracks using stems of vocals, drums, bass, samples and more.
‘Donda 2 will… not [be] on Apple, Amazon, Spotify or YouTube,’ wrote West, now legally known as Ye, captioning a snippet of new music playing through the device.
The cost of Ye’s Stem Player: £200.
This has caused a lot of debate online, with many accusing Ye of pricing people out of hearing it. Those same people, in my opinion at least, are complicit in rendering music a disposable art form.
I know it’s easy for people to forget that music is art because of how readily available and (offensively) cheap it’s become, but rest assured, it is art – and it takes time, talent and money to produce high quality art.
Leonardo da Vinci isn’t going to stick a £20 price tag on the Mona Lisa just because there are thousands of artists doing caricature paintings on street corners for less than a meal at Nandos.
They’re apples and oranges and involve two different disciplines. Ye feels he’s at this same point, in a different stratosphere to many of today’s artists, and I can’t argue with it.
What Ye does creatively isn’t easily mimicked. A 20-plus year career dedicated to fine tuning his musical output has resulted in a surplus of awards and accolades, including a record 22 Grammy wins, tying JAY-Z for the most ever among Hip Hop artists.
And if there was ever a question as to whether Ye’s music is high-quality art, you only need to look at his acclaimed 2010 album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. From the artwork to the rollout, to its beautifully shot, avant-garde videos, and of course the music itself, his maximalist fifth studio LP pioneered art-rap.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been pro-artist, but these days I’m even more so due to the fact that the majority of streaming services feel it’s acceptable to pay artists meagre sums per stream (it’s estimated that in some countries, Spotify pays $0.0035 per listen). Music is worth more than that – way more.
And that’s Kanye’s point: artists should be compensated much better than they currently are.
‘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,’ he added at the end of the aforementioned Insta post.
‘But won’t this high ticket price stop his fans from being able to hear it?’, many are asking.
I don’t think people quite understand how dedicated Kanye’s fan base is. These are the same people who queue all night in the cold just to buy a pair of his Yeezy sneakers, which often have a price point somewhere in the region of £200-£600.
So I don’t think a £200 music device – which by the way can be used to play/customise other music, and is likely going to last longer than a worn pair of sneakers – is going to deter them. In fact, I know it hasn’t.
Kanye announced on Saturday that he had sold more than 8,000 Stem Player devices in just 24 hours, with sales totalling over $2.2million.
A number of fans took to social media to announce they had copped one of Ye’s devices. ‘I support real independent moves,’ one fan tweeted, adding: ‘Don’t be mad at the price, be mad that you can’t afford it.’
Perhaps that’s it. Those who are disgruntled by the £200 price tag are just upset because they can’t afford it. If that’s the case, I can’t afford a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon, but I don’t take to the internet to complain about it and call out the German car manufacturer for its lack of affordability.
They believe it’s worth £100k; so that’s how much it costs. There are plenty of things in this world that are unaffordable for some. Unfortunately, that’s just how it goes.
Ye isn’t the first rapper to slap a huge price tag on their music. In 2013, the late, great Nipsey Hussle charged $100 for a physical copy of his eighth mixtape, Crenshaw.
Shifting all 1,000 copies (with help from JAY-Z, who bought 100 of them), Nipsey – who was unsigned at the time – made $100k from the venture.
Then there’s the much publicised one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. The group’s 2015 record, which is limited to a single copy, was initially sold to controversial ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli for almost $2million.
After it was seized by US marshals in 2018 after Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, it was sold to an undisclosed buyer for a reported $4million. Is it worth that? The person that bought it certainly thinks so.
The point is, art is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, and the creator is entitled to charge whatever they want. It doesn’t mean you have to buy it.
I wouldn’t totally rule out Donda 2 being made available on digital service providers at some point, especially if the rollout for Kanye’s 2016 album, The Life Of Pablo, is anything to go by.
When he first put out the record, he claimed it would remain a permanent exclusive to streaming platform Tidal. Less than two months later, it was made available on other platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
This incident, however, prompted a lawsuit, in which Kanye and Tidal’s JAY-Z were accused of false advertising. The lawsuit was later settled, with its terms undisclosed. So perhaps Ye might think twice this time around. Who knows? He’s been known to throw caution to the wind more times than not.
At the end of the day, Kanye is always looking to push the envelope, often with a purpose in mind, even if that purpose isn’t always in line with or recognised by the wider industry.
Maybe this Stem Player stance will make streaming platforms rethink how they compensate artists in the future; maybe it won’t. Only time will tell. But in the meantime, Ye is doing things on his own terms.
Donda 2 is released on February 22 via G.O.O.D Music
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