Kanye West’s album Donda 2 will be released on February 22, 2022 exclusively on the Stem Player. At a time when artists are trying to create rarity with NFTs, Kanye West is appropriating a simple formula inherited from tech: owning the entire value chain, from material support to content.
In 2016, Kanye West launched The Life of Pablo exclusively on Tidal, arguing that the relationship between musicians and platforms was not fair. A few months later, the album was released on all platforms, from Apple Music to Spotify, signaling the failure of the exclusivity strategy. In 2022, Kanye West is trying the experience again on a whole new level: selling an album only through a physical object whose distribution he controls – the Stem Player, a kind of MP3 player allowing you to control the tracks of a piece of music to create remixes.
And for once, the day of the release of 2 exclusively on the Stem Player, we can estimate that Kanye West’s bet is rather successful. The artist announces on his Instagram account, permanently purged of his publications, that he has already earned $ 2.2 million with the Stem Player – in one day of sales. At $200, that means the device has sold 11,000 units. Kanye West also claims that he has a stock of 67,000 units ready to ship, and that 3,000 Stem players leave the factories every day.
Kanye West presents his experience as a way of reclaiming his own music. A theme that emerges very widely in the production of Kanye, never stingy with a word addressed to the industry which today relies heavily on streaming and listening. unlimited. Instead of talking about the costs taken by the platforms, Kanye West prefers to talk on Instagram about what artists really earn on music production: “ 12% of industry turnover,” he wrote in a publication dated February 18, 2022.
Donda 2, an Apple exclusive
At the time of a return to favor of artistic exclusivity and dematerialized property through NFTs, Kanye West is ultimately playing a completely different score, which leaves him in total control of his production. We are much closer to a marketing strategy Apple-like, controlling the entire value chain, from hardware to content, than a change in the way of selling a musical creation. It is also an inspiration that can be found in the world of video games, with exclusives dedicated to consoles – up to platforms like Google Stadia or the Epic Games Store. And it is by radicalizing the old formula of exclusivity to sell platforms that the artist achieves this, when a Neil Young clearly failed to sell his Pono on the basis of listening quality.
Because on the side of Kanye, we should not forget that the producer and rapper, whom we discover in a very new light in an exclusive documentary following 30 years of career, sells above all a new medium to listen to music. This is why the comparison of his income with the streaming “listenings” that Kanye West mentions on Instagram is not entirely convincing: the 2.2 million dollars mentioned, which ” would have needed 500 million listens », are not only the sales of an album, but of a product. The experience of the Stem Player makes it possible in practice to listen to songs, but also and above all to mix them. The one who made himself known as a music producer for the biggest names in American hip-hop now wants to bring the general public to the creation.
This is, perhaps, the whole attraction of this Stem Player associated with 2 : whoever listens to the music can become an actor in the piece. A notion of remix and reappropriation of cultural works which is not necessarily in line with the private club side of the whole, but with Kanye West, we are not close to a paradox.
In any case, the experience has sufficiently aroused our curiosity: we ordered a Stem Player and we can’t wait to offer you a test of this new kind of object on Numerama. Our order should take a little less than three weeks to arrive – yes, instantaneously, we are far from music streaming.