So it looks like Ye’s (Kanye West) new album Donda 2 will be released on schedule (2-22-22) unlike the first one, but there is a slight catch. According to Ye’s Instagram, the new album will only be available on his self-released digital audio player, the Stem Player. By the way, it’s only available from Ye’s stemplayer.com site for $200.
According to Ye, this is his attempt to free himself from the “oppression” of streaming platforms, which give just a tiny portion of profits to the artists creating the music. As you can imagine, requiring people to pay $200 for a music player to hear your music has created quite a bit of backlash, with many people cursing the artist and vowing to pirate the music.
If you’ve never heard of Stem Player, I wouldn’t be mad at you. It was a project he shot out online last August, and I don’t think many people took it seriously. As you would expect from a Ye product, it has an eclectic design, consisting of a puck with a soft anti-static coating and four touch-sensitive light sliders. Those sliders are supposed to let you “remix” a song by “fading in and out” different parts of a song.
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The cool part of that feature is that it works on any song you download, even though it works best on material designed for the player.
Other specs include Bluetooth, a built-in speaker, 3.5mm headphone jack, USB-C, and 8GB storage. It also supports .AIFF .AIF .FLAC .M4A .MP3 .WAV .WAVE .AAC .ALAC and .MP4 music files.
Unfortunately, there’s no screen, space for additional storage, or specifics on internals which seems like a step back nowadays, but the novelty of mixing tunes may appeal to some folks.
While we don’t think this product would satisfy the needs of most audiophiles looking for a digital music player, I’m sure many people will buy one to be a part of Ye’s wave, and he will make a bunch of money as usual.
We also think this is a chance for Ye to move some Stem Players and eventually, Donda 2 will land on streaming services, Jay-Z’s TIDAL being chief amongst the landing places.
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