Livestream Kanye’s Donda 2 Premiere Event
Ahead of his Donda 2 release, Kanye West is holding a “Donda Experience Performance” premiere event at LoanDepot Park in Miami. For those not at the event itself, you can click (or tap) on over to Ye’s Stem Player website, where the whole shindig is streaming exclusively. Except that it also appears to be streaming via Amazon Music’s Twitch account and YouTube (embeds below), so who the hell really knows! (And, since semantics matter here, it’s worth noting that the event itself is not so much a “listening event” as it is “a live performance of Donda 2,” according to Pitchfork.)
Last week, Ye announced that his Donda sequel would only be available to hear on his Stem Player, the $200 gadget he launched in conjunction with Donda last year. He said he turned down a $100M offer to stream the album on Apple.
“Donda 2 will only be available on my own platform, the Stem Player,” he wrote on Instagram. “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.” Ye also revealed a 22-song tracklist for Donda 2 in a handwritten note he shared in a since-deleted Instagram post. Future is reportedly the album’s executive producer, and features include Travis Scott, Baby Keem, Migos, Jack Harlow, Fivio Foreign, and the Game.
In another since-deleted Instagram post, Kanye revealed that his Stem Player made $2.2 million in just one day, noting that his team would have never made the same amount of money if Donda 2 was available on streaming platforms.
“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. “We did more revenue on stemplayer, without the album even being out, than we would have done with the album being out on streaming.”
Watch the stream below.
https://twitter.com/XXL/status/1496299527308988419