🔘Kanye West's $200 Streaming Disruption
Frustrated with being taken for a ride by the Music Industry over the years, Kanye West is set to drop his next album: Donda 2, exclusively on a $200 Stem Player
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Happy Monday everyone!
If you’re active on Instagram, Kanye West’s theatrics over the past one month on the platform isn’t something that is going to be news to you.
The 44-year old rap mogul uses the platform like a trigger-happy kid, often to talk about his family issues, dissing on other rappers and Pete Davidson (obviously), taking on the music industry norms and promoting his next album Donda 2 🗣
However, one such post last week raised eyebrows from pretty much everyone in the ‘Music Industry’ and beyond, as West announced that Donda 2 would not drop on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, but be exclusively available on his $200 Stem Player 🔘
What is the Stem Player really?
Announced last year in partnership with Kano Computing, the Stem Player is a circular device that fits in your palm and lets you manipulate any song using the touch-sensitive light sliders embedded in its beige shell.
While the product looks super cool in prototype and is priced at the $200 mark, what’s the commercial feasibility for Ye to launch this on scale?
In yet another one of his cryptic Instagram posts, he explained this:
“You can download new music from stemplayer.com. You can play 4 different elements of the track: vocals, drums, bass and music. It also has a MP3 player available.
We currently have 67,000 available and are making 3,000 a day”
What does the demand for this actually look like?
So far, West claims that they have sold $2.2 Million worth product already 💰
To put that in perspective, it would've taken the traditional model of uploading the album on streaming platforms at least 500 Million streams to rake in the same amount, and the album has not even dropped yet 🤯
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In yet another one of his tirades against the music industry, Ye went on to explain what motivated him to take up this non-traditional approach to drop Donda 2:
Tech companies made music practically free so if you don’t do merch sneakers and tours you don’t eat.
Jay Z made Tidal and fake media attacked him. Well in the words of my big brother. Come and get me.
I’m willing to die standing cause I ain’t living on my knees no more. God please cover me. I run this company 100% I don’t have to ask for permission. This is our 2nd generation stemplayer We have more things we working on.
I feel like how I felt in the first episode of the documentary.
Kanye’s Netflix documentary titled: ‘Jeen-Yuhz’ dropped earlier this week, and stills like the one above make it an instant classic 🎬
Love him or hate him, the fact that Kanye is willing to put himself up against so much hate, when he could easily coast along as a Billionaire rap mogul for the rest of his days, is something worth lauding about 👏🏻
Our take on this?
Look, how so ever ambitious this effort by Kanye to go direct and skip middlemen might be, discounting the distribution that music streaming platforms have currently is not a wise move 🤷♂️
While this entire decision to go direct with his $200 Stem Player might get him the free press that Kanye is looking for Donda 2, if I was a betting man, all my money would be that he’d soon the album on all streaming platforms within a month.
If anything, the guy knows how to market his product like no other rapper ever.
Just ask his representatives at Adidas and Gap 💸
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