An interesting 24 hours for the rapper saw his album fail to launch on time and his Donda 2 listening party in Miami receive ‘mixed’ reviews.
KANYE hit the headlines again today after he staged an elaborate listening event at LoanDepotPark in Miami last night, intended to build buzz for the release of Donda 2, the rapper’s 11th studio album that was set for release on 22/02/2022.
The event was streamed on Kanye’s Stem Player website, but fans who tuned in from the beginning had to sit through two hours and 45 minutes of a continuous, pulsating heartbeat before the event properly began.
When the show finally did get going, it was plagued by sound issues and controversy. Fans heard about 45 minutes of music, including recent collaborations like Eazy with The Game and Diet Coke, with Pusha T appearing onstage alongside Ye. See the full live stream below:
Other unreleased tracks that played featured the likes of Migos and Jack Harlow, both of whom also appeared beside Ye as their respective contributions played.
Another guest in attendance was the now infamous Marilyn Manson, who was performing Jail 2 with Kanye when a noticeable glitch in the audio caused the rapper to throw his mic to the floor.
Things were not going swimmingly for Kanye at this point and went from bad to worse when Donda 2 failed to drop on time, and fans who had forked out $200 on Kanye’s Stem Player, the only place to access Donda 2, were forced to wait.
“Donda 2 will only be available on my own platform, the Stem Player,” the rapper wrote in an Instagram post last week. “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 has claimed he made he turned down a $100 million deal from Apple, choosing instead to release the album via his own platform. Taking to social media, Ye said: “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 continued: “We did more revenue on stem player, without the album even being out than we would have done with the album being out on streaming.”
At the time of writing, fans are still waiting for Donda 2, but the tracklist has been announced and can be found here. Episode 2 of jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy is also out on Netflix and documents how the rapper dealt with the fallout of his near-fatal car accident in 2002.