Will Ye’s Stem Player change the music industry forever?

Will Ye’s Stem Player change the music industry forever? | Soho House

The artist formerly known as Kanye West has bypassed major streaming platforms for his new album, 'Donda 2'

Wednesday 23 February 2022    By Thomas Barrie

Eat your hearts out, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Tidal: Kanye West, or Ye’s, latest release, the blisteringly anticipated Donda 2, will not be available on any of the traditional commercial streaming platforms. Instead, as the artist recently rechristened ‘Ye’ announced on 19 February, his 11th studio album will drop on the Stem Player, the $200 audio device he released late last year, and the Stem Player alone. ‘Today, artists only get 12% of the money the industry makes,’ he posted on Instagram by way of explanation. ‘It’s time to take control and build our own.’ 

As with all things Ye – and don’t misconstrue this; it’s the reason we love him and his music – it can be difficult to tell what’s bluster and what is, simply put, the reality of his whirlwind, freewheeling creative process. Among some of the reports coming from Kanye HQ (read: Ye’s social media channels) is the story that he allegedly turned down $100m from Apple for an unspecified deal. Then, on Saturday, Ye announced that he had already made $2.2m in Stem Player sales over the previous three days, claiming the album would have needed to be streamed nearly half a billion times to make that on Spotify (he’s not wrong). 

Will Ye’s Stem Player change the music industry forever? | Soho House

Even by Ye’s ozymandian standards, abandoning streaming is an unusual, bold move. His albums have been shrouded in a sort of nebula of combined secrecy and rumour ever since production began on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy back in 2009 when, at a nadir after a break-up, the tragic death of his late mother, and that infamous Taylor Swift encounter at the VMAs, he exiled himself to Hawaii and periodically summoned would-be collaborators to his island recording base via cryptic messages. Enigmatic promises and bombastic declarations coming out of his studio are nothing new, then. But over the past week, as Donda 2’s release strategy has coalesced, it has become harder and harder to deny that the Stem Player strategy is anything other than intensely collaborative, liberating for Ye, and empowering for his fans.

Distribution stunts are nothing new in modern music. U2’s deal with Apple to auto-load their album, Songs Of Innocence, onto all iPhones backfired back in 2014, but it threw the commercial possibilities of imaginative streaming into stark relief for the first time. Then, in 2015, Jay-Z launched his streaming service, Tidal. At $20 a month for the premium service, it flopped – but again, it showed that if done well, a big enough artist could potentially establish themself without the need for music industry support (Ye himself referenced this in a post on Instagram: ‘Jay-Z made Tidal and fake media attacked him. Well in the words of my big brother. Come and get me.’).  

Will Ye’s Stem Player change the music industry forever? | Soho House
Will Ye’s Stem Player change the music industry forever? | Soho House

That same year, Wu-Tang Clan went to the other extreme by printing a single copy of their album, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, and selling it to the highest bidder, the financier Martin Shkreli (and thank god Donda 2’s not sequestered in Shkreli’s vault). In short, artists who are sufficiently established have always been taking risks with how they let us listen (or don’t) to their music, usually with the understandable motive of securing a bigger slice of industry revenue for themselves.

Much more innovative is the fact that Ye is blessing fans with the opportunity to reinterpret his work however they want through the Stem Player itself. The device allows any music played through it to be converted into ‘stems’, i.e. separate audio streams of vocals, drums, bass, samples and loops, and then to manipulate them at will. So, if you want to listen to The Weeknd singing an acapella version of ‘Hurricane’ off Donda, or hear the isolated samples from ‘Praise God’, you can. If you want to chop and screw Ye, Fivio Foreign and Alicia Keys’ ‘City Of Gods’ on the Stem Player at your friend’s house party, you can do that too. In interviews, the Player’s co-creator, Alex Klein, has compared the device to an ergonomic open-source project; listeners can, in essence, remix albums on it at will. 

The implications for hip-hop in particular, as a genre that deliberately self-cannibalises and reinvents old musical concepts, are immense. In 10 years, there’s a chance that we will all not only be listening to Donda 2, but to our own, personally remixed versions of it. As the brainchild of someone who first shot to fame in the late 1990s as a wunderkind producer at Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records – long before the world knew Ye as the lyricist he is now – the Stem Player is the perfect vehicle for the album. Donda 2’s preoccupation with putting creative power in the hands of fans is about as authentically ‘Ye’ as can be. 
 
Stemplayer.com  

 

Will Ye’s Stem Player change the music industry forever? | Soho House
Will Ye’s Stem Player change the music industry forever? | Soho House
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