A 20-plus year career dedicated to fine tuning his musical output has resulted in a surplus of awards and accolades, including a record 22 Grammy wins, tying JAY-Z for the most ever among Hip Hop artists.įor as long as I can remember, I’ve always been pro-artist, but these days I’m even more so due to the fact that the majority of streaming services feel it’s acceptable to pay artists meagre sums per stream (it’s estimated that in some countries, Spotify pays $0.0035 per listen). What Ye does creatively isn’t easily mimicked. Ye feels he’s at this same point, in a different stratosphere to many of today’s artists, and I can’t argue with it. They’re apples and oranges and involve two different disciplines. Leonardo da Vinci isn’t going to stick a £20 price tag on the Mona Lisa just because there are thousands of artists doing caricature paintings on street corners for less than a meal at Nandos. I know it’s easy for people to forget that music is art because of how readily available and (offensively) cheap it’s become, but rest assured, it is art – and it takes time, talent and money to produce high quality art.

Those same people, in my opinion at least, are complicit in rendering music a disposable art form. This has caused a lot of debate online, with many accusing Ye of pricing people out of hearing it.

Yeezy music device