Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign appear to be leaning towards no longer putting their upcoming Vultures 2 album on

streaming services. Ye announced they were instead considering selling it directly on his Yeezy.com website for $20 a

copy. In their reasoning, the duo noted how DSPs often financially exploit artists, but it’s unclear if it’ll actually work.

The conversation kicked off on Sunday (March 10), with Ye saying in a DM conversation with the Kanye West fansite

YeFanatics that he may not put his Vultures 1 sequel on DSPs such as Spotify or Apple Music.

“We sell albums on Yeezy.com. I got 20 million instagram followers,” Ye wrote. “When 5% of my followers buy an

album [t]hat’s 1 million albums sold[.] That’s 300k more than the biggest album last year.”

West then went on to ask his YeFanatics supporters whether they’d buy a million copies of the album if he merely

made physical copies available.

“When we do that we won’t have the streaming companies in control of the artist anymore,” Ye added.

Ty Dolla $ign also argued this point after a fan sent the rapper a direct message. Ty said merely selling physical

copies of the project would just lead to “piracy.”

“That’s what these streaming services want u to believe so they can stay on top,” Ty replied, arguing that he and Ye

are merely making a “fraction” of a profit off Vultures 1.

“It’s time to figure out the unlock on how to bring the music straight to our audience and cut the middle man out,” Ty

added. “Artists are getting raped and that has to stop.”

Ye and Ty are correct in saying they’d make a significantly larger amount of money if they sold the album right on their website. The $20 price tag in particular harkens back to the days of physical CD sales, which Forbes noted in 2019 still makes artists significantly more money than streaming. The publication claimed streaming merely accounted for 38.4 percent of the industry’s total revenue that year, with physical product sales declining by a mere 5.4 percent. This shows that physical music still sells quite well even when up against the convenience of DSP’s.

This is why artists often still rely on—and sometimes exploit—merch bundles and physical vinyl sales. When Travis Scott released his Utopia album in July of 2023, the highly anticipated release still sold 185,000 album-equivalent units in its third week—93,000 of which were from vinyl sales.

How Much Do Artists Make From Streaming?
Artists have advocated for a change in streaming policies for years. Artists often makes $0.003 per stream, according to Spotify. The DSP then announced in November of 2023 that it’d be updating its streaming policy in the new year to allegedly support emerging artists “most dependent on streaming revenues as part of their livelihood.”

As part of this change, tracks must now reach at least 1,000 streams before they can generate recorded royalties. The hope is that this change will move $40 million that would have previously been given to songs with less than 1,000 streams to those with more than 1,000 streams.

While Spotify in particular notes this change is meant to combat AI-created music, a lot of rookie musicians don’t see this new change paying off in their favor. Across social media, musicians noted the difficulty of achieving 1,000 streams in general and said this policy would further hurt emerging artists.

Kanye has also remained one of the most vocal critics of streaming services, but other rappers like Snoop Dogg, Russ, French Montana and Jay-Z also previously condemned streaming practices.

Back in 2022, Ye had taken another stab at trying to direct all the profits to him by releasing Donda 2 strictly on his STEM Player. The move was controversial, in turn because a single STEM Player cost around $200, and led to mass pirating of the album instead.