Interactive Music - Promotional Gimmick, or The Future of Album Releases?
Nick Hart, Director of Business Development
In 2006, Beck released an album called ‘The Information’ that included an interesting selling point. Rather than a traditional album cover, the cover was a blank piece of graph paper, and the album came with a set of stickers, which the listener was encouraged to assemble on the graph paper to create “their own” album cover. I have fond memories of getting together with my friends and comparing the covers that we had created. Considering Instagram was still years away from launch, and Twitter had only come online earlier that year, we can do little more than speculate on how contemporary social media would have affected this - but it was a great marketing tactic nonetheless.
At the time of writing this, if you head to Kanye West’s official website, you won’t see any information about his recently released, long-awaited album 'Donda’. You won’t find any links to any merch, no info on tour dates. The entire website is simply advertising a single product, the Donda Stem Player (pictured above). According to the tech specs listed for the $200 product, it will allow you to “customize any song” and “split any song into stems”. There’s not too much additional info on what this means besides controlling the volume of tracks and adding effects. There is also no specified date except that it will be available during “summer”, and will ship with ‘Donda’. Considering that summer is almost over and no physical release of the album has been announced as of yet, many people are already writing this off as nothing more than a publicity stunt. The device is actually something Kanye has been discussing in interviews for a few years now, and there are some videos on social media of it in use, so we know that it DOES exist, but whether or not it’s a game-changer for album releases remains to be seen.
Kanye is hardly the first person to experiment with releasing stems for tracks. Many other rappers during the rise of the mixtape era would release a capellas and instrumentals of their tracks for free to encourage fans to remix them. The experimental hip hop group Death Grips famously leaked their own album ‘No Love Web Deep’ in 2012 after disputes with their record label, Epic. They later went on to release the stems for that album and several others, including putting the stems out for their free 2016 album on the same day as the album’s release. Many of these kinds of acts were considered rebellious in some way, either by providing a view into the inner workings of music creation that is usually kept hidden from the general public, or by outright breaking label contracts.
In 2021, it’s a different game. Not only do we have the world’s biggest rapper seemingly prepping the release of a specialized product to experiment with the stems, but the conversations about ownership of artistic content have drastically changed with the onset of music streaming platforms, and are going through more (potentially even more extreme) changes as NFTs prove to be highly profitable. With the exception of vinyl collectors, physical media seems to be less important in the music industry than ever. And with artists unable to tour over the past two years because of the pandemic, it seems like streaming is all that’s left - a highly unsatisfying experience to a lot of music nerds who want to be able to connect more with their favorite artists so it makes sense to see people start to circle back to this idea of a customizable experience that Beck Hansen was flirting with 15 years ago.
‘The Information’ wasn’t Beck’s only foray into giving his fans some control. From the years of 2008 to 2014, Beck didn’t release any studio albums. We now know this is in part due to a spinal injury he sustained while shooting a music video in 2005, but at the time the mysterious absence was permeated by a single project: ‘Beck’s Song Reader’ in 2012. Inspired by a pre-recording era of music, Beck wrote 20 songs and released them as sheet music with lyrics, instead of audio recordings. In 2014 he released an album version of the Reader, but with a catch - only one of the songs was actually performed by him, the rest were recorded by an eclectic collection of artists like Jack White, Sparks, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and Norah Jones. Speaking to Pitchfork in December of 2012, Hansen had this to say: “In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically-- getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound-- and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins.”
It’s hard to say if Kanye West (or I suppose it’s officially Ye now?) is focused on “letting the musical idea win”, but if the product is actually released, and it’s actually cool, this may set off a new trend of allowing listeners to interact with music. A $200 physical product is unlikely to catch on for any artist that doesn’t have major label support and significant financial backing, but we may actually start to see stems and other interactive content released in a more legitimate and less controversial format than Death Grips leaking their own music against their label’s will.
In 2012, the same year as the ‘No Love Web Deep’ album leak, experimental electronic pop artist Dan Deacon had a very interesting mobile app he released that allowed the audience to become part of the performance. The audience members would download the app for free and hold their phones up in the air during the concert, and then the phones would display colored lights that synced up with the musical performance and the on-stage lighting. Although it was fairly rudimentary technology, the benefits of the app were three-fold: 1) It got people to stop using their phone to record everything for the whole show, 2) it allowed for the stage lighting to expand into the audience for a uniquely stunning visual effect, and 3) it created a communal experience between the entire audience and Deacon himself.
The potential applications of interactive music technology are practically limitless. In a post-pandemic age, listeners will certainly be looking for new and more intimate ways to interact with music after not being able to attend concerts for so long. Patreon is more profitable than ever, artists like Built to Spill are selling limited amounts of tickets for intimate Zoom performances, and there is an incredibly endearing amount of support for artists like Kanye’s formal rival Taylor Swift re-recording her own music because of rights disputes. Maybe Beck’s sheet music idea will have a revival, and an artist can give out an NFT or special prize to whoever comes up with the best rendition. Perhaps a logical evolution of the ‘Donda’ player will be artists giving out stems and encouraging users to participate in TikTok challenges where they remix songs. Maybe something along the lines of Dan Deacon’s interactive lighting app will be just the kind of communal experience needed to get people hyped about a return to concerts in these uncertain times. We’re still not 100% sure whether or not Kanye’s magic device will actually get released, but if it does, and if it’s successful, get ready for interactive music to enter the mainstream in a big way.