Fans will have to shell out some cash if they want to hear Kanye West’s next album ‘Donda 2’, because he says it will only be available with purchase of his Stem Player gadget, which costs $200.
Kanye West took a break from talking about Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson to give fans an update about his highly-anticipated new album Donda 2 on Feb. 17. “Donda 2 will only be streaming on my own platform, the Stem Player,” Kanye wrote on Instagram. “You can download new music from StemPlayer.com. You can play four different elements of the track: vocals, drums, bass and music. It also has a MP3 player available. We currently have 67,000 available and are making 3,000 a day.”
Stem Player is a music gadget that ‘Ye helped create. The player allows you to listen to music and also manipulate the tracks as you hear them. Donda 2 is set for a Feb. 22 release, but those who want to hear it will have to shell out some cash in order to listen — because the Stem Player costs $200! Plus, as Kanye pointed out himself, supplies are limited.
Kanye further explained by he wont be releasing Donda 2 on streaming platforms like Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify or YouTube in another Instagram post. “Today, artists get just 12 percent of the money the industry makes,” he wrote. “It’s time to free music from this oppressive system. It’s time to take control and build our own.”
Kanye West out and about. ( J M HAEDRICH/SIPA/Shutterstock)
While a lot of fans were supportive of Kanye’s innovative vision for the album release, the decision to only release Donda 2 on Stem Player upset a lot of fans, too. Many fans also said that they planned on waiting for others to leak the album online so they could listen to it anyway. “Kanye, I am not spending $200 for Donda 2,” one person tweeted. “I’ll find that s*** online.” Someone else wrote, “Guess I ain’t listening to Donda 2,” and another fan said that Kanye “has lost his godd*** mind” for only dropping the album on Stem Player.
To get fans excited about the album release, though, Kanye also teased the track list on his Instagram account. He had some edits made to the list, which was handwritten. It’s not surprising to see Kanye changing up his track list with just days until the release, as this has become quite common for him. “Like we always do at this time,” he captioned the track list photo. Kanye has also been known to flake on dropping his albums on the previously-announced release date, so fans will be anxiously be waiting to see if Donda 2 actually is available come Feb. 22.
