A month ago, I signed up for a 30-day trial with Tidal, a new music streaming platform, to listen to the new Kanye West album The Life of Pablo. I spent those 30 days forming my opinions of his new music before ending my trial with the streaming service. I already pay to stream music with Spotify, and I don’t need a second monthly subscription payment for this one particular album.
But then, Kanye announced he would be making adjustments to the album, tinkering with songs and fixing instrumentals. This is great news for Tidal as it may cause fans like myself to return to the platform. These adjustments to the album are hardly surprising — given Kanye’s recent manic behavior — but equally unheard of. Changing an album after its release hasn’t been possible to this extent before the age of streaming.
TechCrunch is calling Kanye’s The Life of Pablo the first “Streaming as a Service” album. What that means is by adding bonus tracks and updating existing songs, Kanye can transform The Life of Pablo from a static product to a fluid service. Treating albums like software — with minor updates, new artwork and additional content — redefines the album experience. Instead of streaming simply being a more convenient way to listen, its convenience enables albums to live and grow in real time on these platforms. It took an overconfident, experimental artist to show us an opportunity that’s been here all along. We’ve been too focused on streaming as a means to greater efficiency, rather than what that efficiency can make possible.
However, there are questions that need to be answered: How will this change consumer habits? Does having multiple versions of an album improve or detract from the value of an album? Could this be applied to playlists as well? In my opinion, the most important question is how to effectively display each version. Should new versions replace the old ones or exist concurrently? Should you be able to identify new updates similarly to annotations via SoundCloud and Google Docs? The answers are not intuitive because we haven’t historically thought about music in this manner.
Such a model, if it catches on, could mean that we are entering a more interactive era of music. At a time when experiences seem to be valued more than material objects, an interactive model could very plausibly have large-scale appeal. I expect some amount of resistance toward such a large philosophical shift.
People will argue that it diminishes the art in some way, evidenced by the fear that iTunes, for example, would disrupt the recording industry. However, if we can embrace a contemporary way to engage with the creative process of music, the economic implications of adoption are large.
This is good news for streaming services. Tidal has an opportunity to lock in subscribers and guarantee return users. This is even better news for artists if they can generate revenue throughout the process of building an album. This would not only potentially impact the way we perceive albums, but also how we think about album releases. Kanye is showing us that artists need not complete an album before capitalizing on it financially — that’s the untapped power of streaming.
Kanye is known for treating each album as an opportunity to do something completely new. His previous albums (i.e. 808s & Heartbreak and Yeezus) each took risks sonically that influenced how hiphop sounds. The Life of Pablo may change music in a much larger way. It’s possible that his decision to publicly change the album’s name and tracklist multiple times was part of an attempt to frame this album as the first of its kind. He has even acknowledged the project as a “living breathing creative expression.”
If Kanye were aware of the implications this innovation could have on the album format and contemporary music in general, perhaps his manic behavior was more calculated than we thought. Maybe his rants about the greatness of this project were not alluding to lyrical content or instrumentation — he’s still updating those elements anyway. I think Kanye knew what he was doing all along and we’re just realizing it now.
Zach Brown can be reached at zmbrown@umich.edu.