Kanye West is getting ready to drop his latest album, but don't look for it on the major streaming platforms.
West announced on Instagram his upcoming album Donda 2, which is expected to be released on Feb. 22, won't be available to stream on Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, or YouTube. Instead, he said the album will "only be available on my own platform," the Stem Player — appearing to suggest fans will have to buy this device that costs $200.
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"Today artists get just 12 percent of the money the industry makes," West wrote. "It's time to free music from this oppressive system. It's time to take control and build our own."
West's upcoming album is a follow-up to Donda, which was released in August 2021. The album had nearly 100 million global streams on Spotify in its first day of release, "the second biggest album debut of all-time," according to Chart Data. It also had 60 million first-day streams on Apple Music, Billboard reported.
West's boycott comes after Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify for three years beginning in 2014, taking issue with the way artists are paid. "I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music," she told Yahoo at the time. West also previously released his 2016 album The Life of Pablo as a Tidal exclusive, though it later came to other platforms.
But West's Donda 2 announcement quickly drew pushback from his fans, even as some speculated he might mean the album will be available on the Stem Player website without the $200 device. But if not, one fan on Reddit wrote, "There's not a f---ing chance in hell I'm paying $200 to listen to one of his albums."
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