When Kanye West premiered his album The Life of Pablo at Madison Square Garden back on February 11th
over 20 million people tuned in online for an early listen.
But the album wasn’t even complete yet.
Two days later, Kanye performed a few select songs on national television for SNL.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Kanye West.”
But the album still wasn’t done.
That night, Kanye released the album exclusively on Tidal…
“Album in store at kanyewest.com right now.”
“Tidal streaming right now.”
The first 10 days pulled in over 250 million streams, more than doubling Tidal’s subscribers
and shooting the music streaming service to the top of the Apple App store.
But even then the album still wasn’t final.
In fact, Kanye kept tweaking The Life of Pablo until it was released beyond Tidal a month and a half later.
So, what was he doing?
Some of the changes were tweaks to the mix…
bringing up the bass…
or boosting the vocals
Others added instrumentation, like a synth…
background vocals…
…or even a full choir…
And one even lost instrumentation, like these high hats
But ‘Ye also changed up some of the lyrics.
Adding an extra line from Chance the Rapper…
And replacing a line in “Famous”
Curiously, Kanye didn’t replace the most controversial line from that song…
Other tracks were changed to be more like versions released before the album.
Dropping the drums on “30 Hours”…
And removing Frank Ocean from “Wolves”
adding Vic Mensa and Sia back
completely reworking the track…
Along with all that, Kanye even changed the final track listing.
Frank Ocean’s outro to “Wolves” was turned into a completely separate track.
Releasing an unfinished album like this is unprecedented.
Some called it a messy release.
Kanye, however, called it a “living breathing changing creative expression.”
But there were some definite downsides.
Despite the massive amount of attention the album initially received
the streams from Tidal were not reported to Nielsen
and therefore not counted toward the Billboard Music Charts.
Billboard reported that the album could have sold up to 400,000 copies in its first week
if released traditionally.
On top of that, many fans will continue to play the old version.
An estimated 500,000 people downloaded the album on BitTorrent
in the first two days after the Tidal release,
and to this day the most actively shared version of the album on The Pirate Bay
is that original, unfinished draft.
But despite all of that, Kanye still won in the end.
The album still hit number one immediately after its final release in April.
You can learn more about The Life of Pablo on Genius.