Hey Ye,
I saw on Instagram you were thinking of excluding Vultures 2 from all streaming platforms and only having it available for $20 on yeezy.com.
I noticed you mentioned that if you can get 5% of your followers to purchase a copy of the album it would equate to 1 million albums sold which according to you is '300k more units than the biggest album last year'.
After selling 1 million items through your store after your viral low budget Superbowl ad. You'd think this would be an easy feat.
Yet, I've noticed shortly after the announcement the community beginning to complain about the possible exclusion from streaming platforms.
People weren't happy about the idea of having to pay $20 to listen to 'some music'. Yet they were more than happy to purchase your clothes weeks prior when they were all marked at $20.
It's sad that we as a society have been so influenced by streaming platforms that we've completely devalued music and online media.
If it isn't for free or close to it, it's considered a waste of money. Yet I'd argue the time and effort that goes into crafting an entire album exceeds that of any clothing item.
Some of your favourite songs stay with you for life, while most of the shirts we buy end up rotting away in the bottom of our drawers.
So why is it so hard for us as a society to wrap our heads around digital ownership?
Until NFTs came around owning and trading digital assets was practically impossible. If you bought a digital album before all you could do was download your songs and maybe put them on a hard drive or share them with your friends.
However, thanks to the blockchain you can now create digital scarcity and drive royalties for life back to the wallet of the token creator. You can now have a direct relationship with your audience and keep track of who owns what tokens.
Before the blockchain came along there was really no use for the consumer to download a digital copy of your album apart from wanting to directly support you.
However, if you were to put Vultures 2 onchain you could allow for the trading and selling of your music freely on the internet, while you get a percent of every secondary sale for life since everything is interconnected via the blockchain.
If you wanted you could reward all of the owners of the $20 album with VIP tickets or discount codes for Yeezy.com. Everything is traceable through the blockchain and there are an infinite amount of possibilities for your music online.
You could build token gated stem players that only allow users to play the songs they own. You would give the power back to the people to own what they truely love. All those songs we bought on iTunes forever gone simply because of a policy change is a reality that could never exist on the blockchain.
As you know ownership is power and as a consumer today we have none of it. By allowing your fans to truely collect your music you will open the floodgates to millions of other independent artists to follow your charge.
Now that you're independent this is the best way to build deeper relationships with your fans online while making sure you're getting paid what's right.
I don't want anything from you and I doubt you will even see this open letter. But in the odd chance you do all I ask is for you to do is look into blockchain technology and begin thinking about how you can integrate it into your work.
Thanks
Jet Williams