After making his loyal minions throw down big money to listen to his upcoming album Donda 2, a number of Kanye West fans were crestfallen when the hotly anticipated LP failed to materialize at midnight on the day of its planned release, Feb. 22.
Last week, West announced via his social media channels that “Donda 2 will only be available on my own platform, the Stem Player. Not on Apple Amazon Spotify or YouTube. 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.”
This left fans having to fork over around $230 total for a Stem Player—seemingly an updated version of the ’90s digital audio player HitClips, or “the first Yeezy tech product,” according to West—and an advance copy of Donda 2. The move proved to be quite lucrative for West, who took up a break from harassing his estranged wife and her new boyfriend to alert his followers that he had brought in $2.2 million in a single day from the gadgets.
ADVERTISEMENT
“To earn the $2.2 million we made on the first day on the stem player the album would have had to stream 500 million times,” he wrote on Instagram. “We did more revenue on stemplayer, without the album even being out, than we would have done with the album being out on streaming.”
Well, fans remain hopeful that the album will still be released sometime Feb. 22, or in the near future—even though West has a history of both not releasing his albums on the promised date and directing listeners to an alternative music service in order to listen to it, like when he made users sign up for the streaming service Tidal, of which he was a part-owner, in order to hear The Life of Pablo.
Perhaps a midnight release was a case of wishful thinking on the part of his eager fans, given that West has a listening party for Donda 2 scheduled for the night of Feb. 22 in Miami, Florida.
