What exactly is West trying to achieve? Could the gifted artist be on the cusp of a new trend in the music industry? Let’s find out.
What Is the Stem Player?
The Stem Player is a circular gadget that stores and plays music. It lights up brightly when playing music, making it kind of look like a flying saucer from the movie Independence Day. It’s called the Stem Player because those bright lights are actually sliding controls that allow you to isolate music into four different components, or stems.
So, for example, you can silence Ye’s vocals and just listen to the drums. Or you can silence the vocals and the drums and just listen to the instrumentals. It allows you to play a song in reverse, or loop it. Basically, the Stem Player allows you to interact with music like a DJ.
The Stem Player has 8GB of storage and supports all formats of musical data. Thus, in addition to Donda, it can host up to 2000 songs, which you can grab from your hard drive or even YouTube, and upload into the Stem Player through kanyewest.com or stemplayer.com.
In the future, there will also be an app, as shown on Streamable, where users can buy songs and albums to add to the Stem Player.
Why Has Ye Released Donda 2 Exclusively on the Stem Player?
With a $200 price tag, the Stem Player is expensive compared to other ways of listening to music. However, after Ye announced that Donda 2 would be exclusively on the Stem Player, it brought in $2.2 million in sales on its first day. To earn a similar amount on big streaming platforms, Donda 2 would have had to stream half a billion times, according to Ye.
By contrast, Ye released Donda on Apple Music, in August 2021. It only streamed 60 million times in the U.S on its first day.
On Instagram, Ye noted, “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.”
By selling his own music directly to the consumer, Ye also gets access to an important asset: customer data. Data is what big tech is ultimately interested in because they can then sell this data to advertisers and also use it to provide highly targeted content to their subscribers.
One can imagine the ever-creative Ye will constantly iterate new products and content for his fans, straight from the data he is collecting about them through the Stem Player.
Will Other Artists Follow Suit?
Jay-Z and other big names, such as Madonna and Alicia Keys, have tried to pursue the independent route with the Tidal platform. Although Jack Dorsey’s Square acquired it for hundreds of millions of dollars, Tidal makes losses and has never come anywhere close to challenging the dominance of Spotify.
The Stem Player will undoubtedly be very successful for Ye, and it will make him a lot of money. But he already has a lot of money, which gives him the muscle to invent new gadgets and independently release and market his own music, as well as turn down lucrative offers. The majority of artists, even the successful ones, just can’t afford to do that.
