i'm 99% sure the splitting AI in the stem player is based on an open-source software called "Spleeter." it was developed by the creators of Deezer around 3 or so years ago, and it takes just about as long to execute the same processes as the stem player (a 4-stem split). it also does so in the same order as the stem player. that means that, technically, the stem player technology has been commercially available for around 3 years at this point COMPLETELY FREE, and in a way more versatile capacity.
If anyone wants to recreate what the Stem Player does, just put some things through Spleeter and tweak the levels in Audacity or any other DAW of your choice. That way you don't have to buy something that looks like the hybrid of an alien scanner and an adult toy.
Yep, spot on. Used the websites before, and have been __mostly__ disappointed. The way this thing is priced for what this thing essentially does, which is free, almost feels soulja boy level scummy, if it weren't for the honestly pretty cool minimalist design, but still that ain't enough to justify the price.
everytime I hear about web3 I'm always so underwhelmed by what these tech guys think the future of technology is going to look like. I don't want digital goods I don't want cryptocurrency I don't want "unique" randomly generated art I don't want to live in a metaverse. none of that shit is cool or progressive to me. it feels so first world. these tech bros idea of the future is living in their crypto mansions with their thousands of monkey jpegs while millions of people starve and don't have clean water, it feels empty and dystopian to me. what happens to all these digital assets if the blockchain shuts down? you just lose everything? I don't want that to happen to music. if the stem player is the "future" of music, I'm gonna keep hoarding CDs and vinyls, thanks.
I feel like while Kanye releasing official stems for his songs is a good thing, the medium he chose to release it is completely unnecessary. I’m all for reasons to release official stems, but not in this way.
This video escaladed from "haha funny skin egg" to "...oh no" To give my honest take on this, the idea of letting the listener experiment with stems is actually intriguing. Cause then you could turn any song into a karaoke track, you can isolate one instrument to study or learn from it. I'd love to let my fans use the stems to go crazy with vocal covers, guitar covers, drum covers, or for remixes. But if Kanye and crew are gonna let musicians upload their song to the system's cloud (like a distribution website similar to DistroKid or TuneCore) then it would be cleaner to just upload the original stems yourself. The AI is still imperfect and can only doo so much with the locked in mix. As for the web3/blockchain/funny_monkey_jpg aspect, that's just gonna complicate it more, and I barely understand the basics.
It’ll be very funny once the website and apps go down and obsolete, rendering the foreskin egg useless and the only legitimate copies are completely lost to time.
I'm so glad you spoke about how Taylor and Kanye can afford to go against the system because they are rich. It's great that they are talking about how bad it is for artist's in the music industry but they have done little to nothing to change the structure of the industry they criticise. If artists as big as them are just paying lip service to changing things, what can smaller artists do?
about kanye changing the industry, go watch the future brunch. you talk like its easy to change a 200-year industry being black, turning a billionare not much time ago, having 20 year and something carrer.
Ye has done a lot to change music i.e. the stem player He is doing much behind the scenes that are not talked about enough The stem player is revolutionary
@@andrewjpalla i don't think Ye is perfect, but we need to look the reality like it actually is, what he's doing, what he can do, etc. this video don't really do it, as this Mic The Snare guy said in the final part of the video it's "a pessimistic speculation"... Kanye already is seen on this type of lens every fucking time in the news, why should we do the same? i think the web3 explaining part and talking about the (possible) Stem Player app being in the block chain was important, but look at this title, this thumbnail... fucked up
What I just find furious about the stem player is that they aren't even using a good stem ripper. There are plenty of better options, including LaLaLa AI, so I'm just all the more curious to know what they went with.
(SPOILERS) Nothing is a more perfect encapsulation of how little "web3" people care about art than that plagiarised article. It's an extension of the NFT community's rampant art theft. Move fast and break things, with an emphasis on break things.
The whole idea of limiting certain music to a specific device reminds me of the olden DRM days. That didn't work out well for artists, and I assume if Kanye insists on this strategy, all he's gonna get is a bunch of piracy. And if Kanye wants to give users "freedom" to mess around with his music, why not put the real, actual stems on a bloody CD and stick it into a deluxe box set, rather than using this half-baked AI stuff and tie it into an overpriced bit of electronics?
if its bad dont buy it, also half baked AI stuff is only for old songs from other people he doesnt have the real stems for. its impossible to get the perfect stems of songs he doesnt own. all of his songs are pretty good especially the newer ones
@@polishspy3088 so, what you're saying is: If you like Kanye, buy the egg, cus kanye sounds aight in the egg. Everybody else sucks in the egg, but you don't care, cus Ye said it's the future or something.
Wow, thanks for this video! I had no idea this existed. I might pick one up to feed it white noise - usually fun to hear the algorithms struggle to make sense out of that.
Content of the video aside, can I just respect how much you still present information in a purely unbiased way but then let your opinion be very visible by the end? I mean this genuinely, this isn’t in a “GOD, why did your OWN politics have to matter” thing, I think this a very awesome video essay practice where the watcher can slowly articulate the circumstances all the while you slowly build up your personal conclusions. Great video dude :)
Experimental electronic group, FM3, released all of their albums on physical, battery-powered music boxes they named the Buddha Machine. I believe their first Buddha Machine came out in 2005. The player had 2 controls - volume and pitch. People would buy multiple units and create new songs from the original material. FM3 began incorporating these remixes into their live performances and called it Buddha Boxing. They would invite audience members on stage to make remixes of their work. Artists have been experimenting with physical releases for their music for a long time. It's artistic expression.
@@joebidenjr5902 I think the exact video this comment is on does a sufficient job of explaining exactly why, but if not, it's because Kanye is obsessed with luxury brands and doesn't give a crap about helping smaller artists. knowing his track record, chances are if he were running his own Bandcamp-like platform he'd likely make it some overpriced luxury for the rich somehow and completely mismanage it in record time
I bought one exclusively to use in my music production work. It's simple and does the simple things I needed to do (I even made a song from loops I took from the player). It shouldn't be the only platform for Donda 2, and it shouldn't have been marketed beyond music hobbyists.
What can it play back though? Apparently it "can _upload_ AAC, AIF, AIFF, ALAC, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, WAV, and WAVE files." Does the service need to compress files into, say, mp3 for example, to work as stems? Just to super clear: if I bounce a wav file out of my DAW and upload it to their site does the software _always_ reformat it to something lossy? If so then imo the product and service is more like a toy or a practice-tool than an instrument that belongs in the studio.
@@jemmapellemma8185 to my understanding, it splits based on whatever files you upolad (WAV files stay the same) and you can upload stems directly into the player without modifying the file type. Also to be fair, I'm a one person producer on thier beginning steps of music production. Like I said, beginning hobbyist tool.
Nirvana + Foo Fighters in one video would be a cool Deep Discog Dive, especially since Foo Fighters recently made that movie Studio 666, Grohl released an autobiography, there's been several Nirvana reunions including Post Malone's tributes, Batman is into grunge now. I think it'd be a great video. Love your content!
I struggle to understand how techbros see the future. A world where all this stuff is the norm seems terrible Its more expensive less convenient and creates more problems then it solves
I'm 2:25 into this video and I just have to say, back in the 80's my mom got a home sound system that has a karaoke button that made the song sound exactly like that, so I'm already at awe with the people who made that thing thinking this could groundbreaking or even high quality because that technology has been there for decades and it hasn't gone too further on the domestic tech world.
The only thing that kept me interested in stemplayer was the dedicated community of developers creating tools to use the stem player with better AI, and offline support and other things that make the website actually usable.
I can't help but think this is somewhat related to wealth gap / income inequality, now affecting music consumers like us. We're basically going back to 90s or 2000s where we had to buy a casette or a CD of that album by an artist, now it will be like that but now it will be $200 for a device instead of 10 bucks a CD or whatever. In this inflationist world, music is also becoming less accessible to those with less income. As a massive Ye fan since 2009 myself, why cant I enjoy Donda 2 for a reasonable amount of money?
I buy records, I buy CDs, I buy lossless audio and WAV files from fellow djs and artists off beatbort/Dropbox etc… I love the idea of the stemplayer preloaded with music… makes me wonder why more artists haven’t made speakers with their music built in? I hate playing music off or through my phone… the phone wasn’t intended to be a music player..
@@JBanksy78 you said that you buy records and CDs, so why do you play music with your phone? Just use your CD player or record player.If you're using your phone for listening to music on-the-go, then use a good earphone/headphone. I dont think that the Stem player strategy will work out. People dont want to spend $200 for an artist or album they like. If i have 5 artists that i like and each of them use an exclusive music player, that would be around $1000 just for 5 artists. I would pass on that idea. Im happy with buying and collecting CDs.
Always a good video where Mic both nerds out about audio stuff while at the same time dishing out a harshly worded critique about our capitalist society. This is why I subscribed.
There are multitude of issues with this: *For the price point, the controls aren't very good, the audio is tinny and it's far too limited when trying to enjoy an artist's work as intended. *The look of the stem player reminds me way too much of the intentionally disturbing technoorganic interface devices from David Cronenberg's "Existenz" & the animated show "Æon Flux". *Bearing that last one, the thought of carrying a fleshy player just feels awkward & odd, especially in public where at a distance it can be mistaken for items with similar appearances that are used for more intimate reasons.
Hold up, did you just mention eXistenZ? I’m actually doing a project on that movie for my digital media and dystopia class right now! The first time I saw the movie my mind started performing metaphysical gymnastics. And yes, the stem player does look like that. Let’s just hope the 2.0 version doesn’t plug into our bodies!
I agree with all of this except for the last point because that’s so subjective and I doubt anyone would think you were weird for playing with a toy in public it’s not dildo shaped or anything.
I guess cuz this isolation is different EQ presets so it only isolates frequencies, it can't tell what the frequencies are so it's a smoother and cleaner cut.
Cause it's just sloppy. It's not done using any advanced ai the program is just isolating specific frequencies, and therfore completely loses the frequencies taken by say, the vocal when you heard the drums stem.
@@morty1504 yea, that's basically what I'm saying. this professional $200 stem player has the same audio isolation quality as a teenager fucking around with audacity that I downloaded for free lol
I see what you mean with the Swift comparison, but her case is a lot more sympathetic. Kanye wants to increase his own already substantial capital by making unsustainable toys that artificially limits your capability to use its primary selling feature; Taylor is re-recording her own music because she was screwed over (like many other artists) by business execs who were mad at her for - in part - calling out Spotify for underpaying their artists. Don't get me wrong: I'm not stanning a multimillionaire. Both artists chose to stand up for artists - and only artists. The labourers and technicians that actually made the albums and platforms are sidelined by intentional or unintentional class solidarity. Not a single worker mass-producing skin eggs OR vinyls is getting a cent more. Only those with access to music software and access to a computer can make music independently. The difference in motive is still clear. Kanye is choosing to embody everything wrong with the music industry: prioritising short-term greed and publicity over humanity, in both senses of the word.
Lmao what 💀, Taylor fans are fucking delusional, Taylor literally released 6 fucking versions of the same song so it could do more numbers released 4 fucking vinyls of the same album with a different cover so it could do numbers, Taylor is as money hungry as anyone else in the industry, also Kanye literally turned down 100 million dollars so he could do the Stem Player thing.
@@sheesh8831 Either way, I don't think you should automatically assume financial decisions made under the influence of manic spending are particularly rational.
Remember when NIN did this in 2007 with the album Year Zero? Remember when Year Zero Remixed came out later that same year? It was a cool novelty back then and I admit to having fun making awful mixes of those songs, but if that's what music could be trending towards with a bunch of web3 garbage on top, then I guess I'm glad I just got my old ipod out of storage
You'd think he would do the simple thing and just make a competing streaming service that just pays the artists better. Build in the Stem technology so artists can load in master tracks for even better quality mixes while they're at it. Sounds great! Although... We won't get to feel an egg.
@@mattgassenheimer There is a reason Kanye is a billionaire , why you are more successful than the average person and why the rest of these haters still live with their parents.
Also shoutout to cool artists like 100 gecs who have consistently put their original stems online free for everyone to remix or use or do what they please with them
I don't get it. These don't appear to me to be actual stems even. My understanding of Stems is that they are the individual tracks that make up the whole piece. I remember not so long ago where Black Midi offered up a one-day thing (I think it was just one day - might have been a week) where you could download all the stems and I mean ALL for the tracks on 'Schlagenheim'. You were then invited to pull the stems into your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and remix as you feel, for a bit of fun, and send some back to BM to showcase. This was a good example of inclusive interaction with listeners. But we are talking ACTUAL stems, not just separating out different frequencies, which is what the Donda player seems to be doing. God knows, as an ex-musician if I had a pound for every time someone asked me to remove the vocals from a track and me have to explain why that's not a simple thing to do without access to the stems, I'd have a few quid more by now. What I'm saying is, it seems to me that the device you have is not really dealing with stems, and had I purchased it on that basis I would have felt it was mis-sold to me without all the individual tracks that make up the songs. Cheers. Love your channel.
@Telephone Backgrounds On a Clear Day Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. Still seems cheap compared to my example or, indeed, yours re Lil NasX (I must listen to that album soon). And there's no way you can get the same creativity of what are essentially what we used to call bounced tracks. Cheers.
A stem is term used in recording for the wave files a stem can be anything from mono, stereo to surround sound to single tracks or multi tracks. It’s doesn’t separate frequencies at all it separates how ever many tracks like a Bus track were you take more then one wave file and make it one file this is done all the time in recording to make it easier. So simply it takes all the tracks and busted it down like a 4 track recorder. There no separation of frequency at all what I heard on the one track was what we call phasing which means two things are canceling each other out. That is not frequency either that is when both wave files have the same wave form that’s why there is flip phase to stop that in recoding.
I thought this thing played actual stems. This is like the old Karaoke effect that works by canceling the sounds that are mixed at the center of a stereo mix (vocals are usually mixed at the center, that is the same singal in both left and right channels) so most of the time you'd kill the drums too. You could remove the vocals on a Discman if you unplug just a tiny bit your headphones by the way
@@FranciscoBurrola not even remotely close to how this works. These are using neural networks and AI to isolate individual aspects of tracks not just vocals.
@@Vageta1999 But it is though: all the AI and neural networks are doing is "the karaoke trick" (and a few others) but optimized and not just for vocals. The point is *this thing does not isolate actual stems as we refer to them in the music production world* (except for Kanye's). If you put any normal song file into it (like an mp3 of your favorite song) it can *not* rip out the stems you would get if you asked the producer for them, _even if_ that producer did the entire mixdown on only 4 tracks. To truly test this you could: listen to the official release of Donda 2 on the stem player, bounce the official 4 stems out of one of Kanye's songs, recombine them in a DAW, bounce that out as one file, and then feed your new "master" into the website for it to _re-split_ it into 4 new stems. The only way you're going to get it to sound exactly the same is if the AI _realizes_ what you've tried to do and _instead_ plays you the 4 official stems and *not* the ones from what you just made. But if it works and the AI does *not* realize this then the resulting new stems *will be full of artifacts;* lossier formats having more artifacts, because that is how digital audio works. If you need me to go into further audio engineer nerdery or computer science I'm happy to do so. [edited for punctuation and a rogue "of"]
At first it sounded like an overpriced toy, then a 'you wouldnt steal a car'-anti piracy ad from the 2000's and then when it got to The Blockchain I just sat and went "oh.😔"
I like the idea behind the stem player, its a cool device but I agree its too expensive. On the topic of music exclusivity, its his music and the fact that he self released his album is empowering in a way (though he was only able to do so because he is rich) I don't think Donda 2 release was very well thought out. I hope he figures it out because I believe he can build a system that helps and rewards the artists. This is not it though.
@@piggytripper3704 kanye is at the point in his career where he doesnt have to put much thought in to rolling out the album as its not about sales and numbers to him. as of 2021 yeezy is a 6 billion dollar company, i dont think he gives 2 shits about roll outs of albums. as long as its out and hes happy with it, it ticks an album off his contract.
it’s so rare i can sit down and watch a video for 20 minutes without losing interest. but here i am, fully engrossed in a micthesnare video for its entire duration once again. excellent video.
Just wanted to say, kudos on such a great breakdown of how the Stem Player works, the pros and cons of it, as well as the greater context surrounding it. I will say though, regarding those last couple of sentences in his initial IG post announcing the exclusivity of DONDA 2 on the Stem Player, it left me with a question that I don’t think has been answered anywhere really. He talked about how streaming services pay out so little per stream to artists and producers when it comes to royalties, yet how are artists/writers/producers supposed to get paid if something’s made exclusive to the Stem Player? Overall, it seems like a cool idea for a music player, but it also seems like something that isn’t worth the $200 price tag considering its downsides.
so like... why on earth didn't they just make the thing play a special format where each stem is actually its own stereo track, and then sell albums in that format??
Just wanted to drop my 2 cents in here really quickly. I am a professional mixing and mastering engineer and the music industry IS BROKEN! We have found ourselves in a world where music has been completely devalued. While on the outside things like Apple Music and Spotify seem great (and they are..... for the consumer hahaha) they have caused music to become worthless. I also don't think people are emotionally attached to music as they used to be either which is a byproduct of having basically every song ever made at their fingertips, but that's another story for another time and I digress. It's almost impossible to make a living in this career anymore. I do mostly freelancing work and my rates have dropped DRASTICALLY in the last few years. I had to or no one would hire me and I was already on the cheaper side of the game. It's not fair to people who actually create the music. Now I don't think things should go back to the way they used to be either but they certainly can't continue like this forever either.
Maybe it's because my love for music crystalized during an era when you had to buy a physical copy of a song if you wanted to play it whenever you like, but I've always felt the Spotify model was wrong. Still, I think the genie is out of the bottle. It's tough to imagine the world ever going back. I have a turntable, so I spend a little more for the albums that are really special to me but we're going to need a different long-term solution to this problem. In the meantime, Spotify should start subsidizing my concert tickets because I know the bands need and deserve to make money, but you can't go to a show at Red Rocks for less than $80 now...
Jokes on you, I just uploaded this video into my stem player and I know what this WHOOLE THING IS ABOUT. After separating main voice track you can clearly hear in the background how Mic is screaming at his premiere pro subscription. I'll be minting that audio track on the block chain by the way bro
I would just like to differentiate Taylor swift’s case just because one of her main goals with the re-recordings is to spread awareness for this problem of artists not owning this music. She recognizes her privilege and is trying to use it for smaller artists to benefit from renegotiated contracts
Mic, this was some very (de)constructive criticism. I wouldn't want a Swiftie to be banned somehow by the blockchain from making a Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version) mix on the stem player. I enjoy much of Kanye's music, but your analysis really underlies a big problem with both these major platforms, labels & artists, basically going "rights for me, but not for thee". Additionally, this video made me realize that the decentralization of currency, on a monolithic & supposedly permanent blockchain, seems paradoxical/centralized.
There's theoretical/minor crypto that's properly decentralised, but ultimately, it's just capitalism and/or cloud storage with extra steps. And more malware.
I think it's a big jump to conclude that people with a stem players could replace mixing and mastering engineers. Donda would have been mixed and mastered to already sound good split in the 4 tracks. There's much more production than moving 4 faders.
I think people underestimate the power of polarizing artists. Kanye, T swift, drake, etc. Can definitely sell their music directly, regardless if people use apple music or spotify.
So if you played a song through Skype, and then play the result through Skype again, and then that one more time, you get the sound quality of this thing.
From what you're describing, it sounds to me like Kayne's attempt to give the ownership of music back to the people who create it is really just heavily monitoring things that already exist in ammeter form; in other words, his attempts to save one market is really just tapping another, untapped one. Further proof that capitalism, even when it's not flat-out evil, is a complete hinderance. Kanye is just another creative person with so much money that he never need to work on his ideas before investing in them.
@@theMoporter how so. Upscaling is adding detail that wasn’t there in a sloppy way while this allows you to see existing detail in a more granular way. Isn’t this kinda the opposite
Just saved me 200$ wanted to buy this to enjoy certain songs vocals only or instrumental only but sounds just like when you delete wave vocals for beats you can still kind of hear them in the background
It is loaded with official, studio-quality stems for Donda, Donda 2, and Jesus Is King. As a bonus, you can upload any other song to the stem player, and the platform splits the stems using AI, which can be hit-or-miss.
This thing kind of reminds me when I was a kid and I would pull out the headphone jack halfway and it would sort of isolate certain instruments in the mix like guitars
you are an upset guy. and frankly, i appreciate you being on my feed. everyone else grits their teeth and says hopeful positive stuff, which is great. but i feel upset a lot of the time too, and it's nice to hear someone else vent with the same passion XD cheers
I don't know if I agree without that getting potentially unlimited music for £10/mnth is am "Insane" idea, I've had Spotify Premium since It launched in the UK in 2009, and for the last 4 years I have upgraded to the family plan (£14.99/mnth), so In total from 2009 till the 3rd of this month, I have spent nearly £3000 on streaming music , That's not nothing. - I do agree that the cut the artist gets from streaming is insane, Ideally I would still get to pay my £15/mnth for access to the music I want to listen too. What's going to happen is were going to need to have ALL of the streaming services to get access to our favourite artists since they can choose which platforms get their music via their record label/management etc. All of that is before I have bought physical goods as well like vinyls/tour tickets etc. £10/mnth for the option to choose only the songs/artists I want to hear, potentially for the rest of my life isn't bad, Those artist not getting a fair cut of it is bad.
There's no way anyone could have ever convinced me that Kanye West, the man with the biggest ego known to man and who married Kim kardashian, a lady who is Rich and famous for no reason in particular, could ever truly care about the liberation of smaller artists. Everything he does is to inflate his own image.
I mean, im buying and collecting CDs and im okay with it. Its only like 10-15 bucks. But im absolutely not willing to pay $200 for an album with a portable music player.
It definitely doesn't seem to understand music mixing, and seems to try to overcompensate for the music section trying to be removed You can hear it in the compression of the reverb. Shame though I'm like hyperfocused auditorily and if this worked perfect I'd never but it down
I remember back in the day (like 10 yrs ago) there was an app that let you isolate every track on space oddity by David Bowie and remix it. It was fun to play with.
Anyone else desperately wanna hear the Fuser mix shown, which was an incredible mashup of All Star, Old Town Road and Hot Stuff?? Plz Mic the Snare, the streets need it!!
The splitting of the audio seems to just be done by reducing parts of the EQ. Music fans have been doing this for years to make instrumentals and acapellas of songs.
i've tried splitting audio tracks before for a quick mashup using an ai too (lailai if im not mistaken). granted that was a bit more simple in terms of the mix, i feel like ive gotten better results from those websites lol
The Blockchain stem player mobile app in the video isn't being made by or with the Kano or ye teams, BUT! Alex Klein has shown off actual official plans for some kind of blockchain-based music subscription integration with the platform; so all the stuff in that section of the video is still super relevant. Just wanted to note this before someone else does
Got one when it first came out with Donda 1 - I love it and use it a lot but it's definitely not the "future" like Ye and Kano are claiming. It's a unique piece of merch from one of my favourite artists that will last longer than his other similarly priced products (yeezys, hoodies etc - have never bought into those)
My least favorite thing about modern music is that it’s all digital and you can’t hold it in your hand. I think the stem player take a step in the right direction. It turns digital music into a physical product again and it is interactive.
What's with the fire emoji, WEIRDO? You think this guy is funny? Zooming in on your face isn't funny. If you find that funny, I've got some real good knock knock jokes for you. (GEEZUS)
@@jayverse222 Dude Hanson from the 90s is better than anything you've ever done in your life. Music isn't for you. It's time for you to take up BASKET WEAVING.
There's something infuriating about a billionaire like Kanye West waxing idiotically about Spotify's horrible system and treatment of artists, and selling a $200 piece of plastic with derivative software, while artists with nowhere even close to his level of clout, connections and resources have to grind and toil for crumbs on Spotify and even Bandcamp and pray to at least get slots in festivals.
And how is this device supposed to separate drums, bass and instruments from each other with something like experimental electronic music. As a producer and a musician, this makes me kinda angry, I don’t want people to listen to some kind of ai filtered and unbalanced version of my music.
Tbh, as soon as music becomes less convenient (i.e. Spotify loses artists), I'll just pirate whatever isn't on there. I'm never buying specific albums or tracks ever again.
Anyone unfamiliar with Dan Olson's work, the guy Mic links the nft video from, should absolutely go watch it. His whole chanel is amazing, but the nft video in particular is a masterclass. Its also over two hours and can be a pretty hard watch, so keep that in mind
i’m loving the stem personally. some songs it struggles to split cleanly. but i have about 60 songs downloaded (max storage) which sound pretty crisp and clear. i can play around on it for hours.
If that stem player app and things like it are the future of music the tech industry wants, it needs to be fought against as much as humanly possible. As a musician, all of this feels so bleak.
An alternative to mp3 where stems are somehow able to be separated for streaming would be awesome. Sequencing yourself will always lead to mediocre results
I was excited to hear about this because of how it could make chopping samples and mixing more accessible to people who either cant afford or cant use a daw. Then i learned it was more expensive than a daw. And had no UI and was harder to use than one and even if you did learn how to use it it doesnt transfer into daw knowledge because you dont know how to mix and produce you know how to rub an egg.
I do wish there was a feasible way to obtain the actual stems from the master recording of songs. The most frequently close we can come to that is the Rockband games, which is far from the stems all separated as it's about 5 different tracks (as a minimum depending on the track). And then the actual closest (which is rare and probably not legally sound) is when the stems get leaked, like with Linkin Park's In The End, Black Eyed Peas I Gotta Feeling etc.
if this didn't have kanyes name attached to it more people would think it's cool, but the snobbery in the production community means anything with hype behind it that gives everybody the ability to play around with music and change it into something different is bad because it makes their hobby feel less cool.. fucking pathetic
I can do everything the Stem Player can on my computer with a base program and a couple plug-ins that aren't all that difficult to learn how to use at a base level. The plus to this method is that a person also learns an actual skill, how to work an audio program, how to extract the various components of a song, how to sample and mix etc. The final result if I like it can be loaded to any device I choose and I am not locked into a nutsack device that is overpriced and dependent on a single website to work...a website prone to Kanyes whims and fancys which to be honest I don't trust to be stable.
the more people try to "solve" problems the more old solutions just seem like the best solutions, instead of doing this bullshit just go back to itunes and pay for an album you want and download it, or potentially even better, just buy it on CD or Vinyl, buy some merch, go to a live show.
The problems with digital music were solved back in 2009 when iTunes became DRM-free. All of the problems with streaming (artists not being paid enough) is from people (including me, I use Apple Music) not willing to pay full price for the music
As a musician, even I don't want to go back to the times I have to buy every single album. I think the core idea of streaming services is great - pay per play, and more money going to an artists if their stuff is listened ot more. Its just that 10 bucks a month plus millions of free users ain't cutting it.
From my experience the stem player actually does isolate stems really well. It’s also funny how most critiques always fail to mention all of the looping effects and fx options you can use to experience songs in a completely different way. I believe interactive music will be the future of music consumption. The stem player is a one time purchase of $200 where you can download and remix any song ever made yet we all pay $130 every year on streaming services.
@@shape8198 200 dollars is not worth having a software with a extremely niche uses in my pocket. Just practically that is never going to come up. I appreciate that you thought about it though.
it’s because music shouldn’t be isolated when it’s all together, the reason the donda album works so well is because it’s loaded with the studio stems. it’s kinda hard to do that with other artists. they would have to publish their own studio stems
I may be incorrect, but in most cases vocals are centered in a mix, making them easier to isolate using phase cancellation than various other components in a mix. This is not proprietary technology here.
i'm 99% sure the splitting AI in the stem player is based on an open-source software called "Spleeter." it was developed by the creators of Deezer around 3 or so years ago, and it takes just about as long to execute the same processes as the stem player (a 4-stem split). it also does so in the same order as the stem player. that means that, technically, the stem player technology has been commercially available for around 3 years at this point COMPLETELY FREE, and in a way more versatile capacity.
yeah exactly!!
Yea I've been using websites to do stuff like this way before this device.
If anyone wants to recreate what the Stem Player does, just put some things through Spleeter and tweak the levels in Audacity or any other DAW of your choice. That way you don't have to buy something that looks like the hybrid of an alien scanner and an adult toy.
Yep, spot on. Used the websites before, and have been __mostly__ disappointed. The way this thing is priced for what this thing essentially does, which is free, almost feels soulja boy level scummy, if it weren't for the honestly pretty cool minimalist design, but still that ain't enough to justify the price.
Sounds about right for a tech company
everytime I hear about web3 I'm always so underwhelmed by what these tech guys think the future of technology is going to look like. I don't want digital goods I don't want cryptocurrency I don't want "unique" randomly generated art I don't want to live in a metaverse. none of that shit is cool or progressive to me. it feels so first world. these tech bros idea of the future is living in their crypto mansions with their thousands of monkey jpegs while millions of people starve and don't have clean water, it feels empty and dystopian to me. what happens to all these digital assets if the blockchain shuts down? you just lose everything? I don't want that to happen to music. if the stem player is the "future" of music, I'm gonna keep hoarding CDs and vinyls, thanks.
Its easier to shut down a bank than it is to shut down the blockchain
@@JMartinJ ok? it still fucking sucks
@@berkeleyisonline160 economic collapse would suck more haha
You know what, I personally say fuck this lame internet shit, all I want is the fucking hoverboard we were supposed to get by 2015.
Preach!
I feel like while Kanye releasing official stems for his songs is a good thing, the medium he chose to release it is completely unnecessary. I’m all for reasons to release official stems, but not in this way.
This video escaladed from "haha funny skin egg" to "...oh no"
To give my honest take on this, the idea of letting the listener experiment with stems is actually intriguing. Cause then you could turn any song into a karaoke track, you can isolate one instrument to study or learn from it. I'd love to let my fans use the stems to go crazy with vocal covers, guitar covers, drum covers, or for remixes. But if Kanye and crew are gonna let musicians upload their song to the system's cloud (like a distribution website similar to DistroKid or TuneCore) then it would be cleaner to just upload the original stems yourself. The AI is still imperfect and can only doo so much with the locked in mix. As for the web3/blockchain/funny_monkey_jpg aspect, that's just gonna complicate it more, and I barely understand the basics.
You can upload your own stems to the device
@@thedesireguardian2470 you can upload stems to audacity and make a remix with that, and that's free
@@pentexsucks43 don`t buy it then, the design of the device makes playing w the stems a lot more fun than playing around with it on audacity
@@pentexsucks43 congrats ig?
@@INSYA thank you
Looking back at this year, it’s insanely funny that Ye’s last album before being deplatformed is stuck on a little speaker egg no one remembers.
Donda
It’ll be very funny once the website and apps go down and obsolete, rendering the foreskin egg useless and the only legitimate copies are completely lost to time.
vultures
@@thrownstairyeah don’t think that’s happening lmao
@@thehumanslimjimlmao
I'm so glad you spoke about how Taylor and Kanye can afford to go against the system because they are rich. It's great that they are talking about how bad it is for artist's in the music industry but they have done little to nothing to change the structure of the industry they criticise. If artists as big as them are just paying lip service to changing things, what can smaller artists do?
about kanye changing the industry, go watch the future brunch. you talk like its easy to change a 200-year industry being black, turning a billionare not much time ago, having 20 year and something carrer.
Ye has done a lot to change music i.e. the stem player He is doing much behind the scenes that are not talked about enough The stem player is revolutionary
@@natimorta_ Thank you for telling me about this. It’s some powerful conversations. Fair enough, I see what you’re saying.
@@andrewjpalla i don't think Ye is perfect, but we need to look the reality like it actually is, what he's doing, what he can do, etc. this video don't really do it, as this Mic The Snare guy said in the final part of the video it's "a pessimistic speculation"... Kanye already is seen on this type of lens every fucking time in the news, why should we do the same? i think the web3 explaining part and talking about the (possible) Stem Player app being in the block chain was important, but look at this title, this thumbnail... fucked up
Taylor only said that artist should participate in creating their art to give them publishing rights
What I just find furious about the stem player is that they aren't even using a good stem ripper. There are plenty of better options, including LaLaLa AI, so I'm just all the more curious to know what they went with.
Do you mean LALAL.AI?
stem player is far better than lalala ai bruh
lalal uses the same algorithm you donut
lalal is def not any better
I take back me calling u a donut I’m sorry…. Cyberbullying is #NEVER OK!!!
(SPOILERS)
Nothing is a more perfect encapsulation of how little "web3" people care about art than that plagiarised article. It's an extension of the NFT community's rampant art theft. Move fast and break things, with an emphasis on break things.
90% of articles you see on the internet are plagiarized. Definitely not something to attribute to “crypto journalists” or whatever.
How was this a spoiler when I didn't understand any of the words you just said
Um no you’re wrong. It’s like saying Jake and Logan Paul represent UA-cam. Dummy.
@@Commenter_69 It's a video about the Stem Player and then 2/3rds of the way through: Surprise! It was about crypto nonsense all along.
@@404T2K Well, they did when UA-cam went full force on having them as their poster children.
The whole idea of limiting certain music to a specific device reminds me of the olden DRM days. That didn't work out well for artists, and I assume if Kanye insists on this strategy, all he's gonna get is a bunch of piracy.
And if Kanye wants to give users "freedom" to mess around with his music, why not put the real, actual stems on a bloody CD and stick it into a deluxe box set, rather than using this half-baked AI stuff and tie it into an overpriced bit of electronics?
if its bad dont buy it, also half baked AI stuff is only for old songs from other people he doesnt have the real stems for. its impossible to get the perfect stems of songs he doesnt own. all of his songs are pretty good especially the newer ones
@@polishspy3088 If you don't like my comment, don't read it.
"If you think it's bad, don't buy it" is not a response to criticism.
@@Taschenschieber I guess you are right about that dont ignore the other stuff tho
Kanye west hasn't insisted on anything in the past 13 years. He has no forethought to do anything for more than a couple months
@@polishspy3088 so, what you're saying is: If you like Kanye, buy the egg, cus kanye sounds aight in the egg. Everybody else sucks in the egg, but you don't care, cus Ye said it's the future or something.
Wow, thanks for this video! I had no idea this existed. I might pick one up to feed it white noise - usually fun to hear the algorithms struggle to make sense out of that.
No. You PIRATE your music. You don't give them money. What are you, nuts? NO Hainbach. That's a BAD HAINBACH.
@@nirv hainbach isn’t talking about buying music, he’s talking about buying an electronic device for experimental music production
@@feelingevaporated2912 no kidding, but you're sending the message to these garbage companies that we want proprietary crap. No we don't.
Oooooh can't wait to see how you take apart this device
@@feelingevaporated2912 its a 200 dollar skin egg scam.
With how aggressively gentrified the internet is becoming, I’m beginning to wonder if physical media is on its way to a DIY comeback.
Content of the video aside, can I just respect how much you still present information in a purely unbiased way but then let your opinion be very visible by the end?
I mean this genuinely, this isn’t in a “GOD, why did your OWN politics have to matter” thing, I think this a very awesome video essay practice where the watcher can slowly articulate the circumstances all the while you slowly build up your personal conclusions.
Great video dude :)
Stem player more like this device will stem a host of issues for music industry consumers
Now with *4 TIMES* the mp3 artifacts! _Wow!_ Did you hear that? No? _NO!?_ That's hearing loss at an _incredible value!_ Order today. 😉
Regardless, good on Kanye for getting the kids into STEM.
Experimental electronic group, FM3, released all of their albums on physical, battery-powered music boxes they named the Buddha Machine. I believe their first Buddha Machine came out in 2005. The player had 2 controls - volume and pitch. People would buy multiple units and create new songs from the original material. FM3 began incorporating these remixes into their live performances and called it Buddha Boxing. They would invite audience members on stage to make remixes of their work. Artists have been experimenting with physical releases for their music for a long time. It's artistic expression.
god the idea of a replacement to Bandcamp being led by Kanye West is genuinely horrifying
Bandcamp is going to be run to the ground by Epic Games Ina few years. Lol 😆
why?
Why ?
@@joebidenjr5902 I think the exact video this comment is on does a sufficient job of explaining exactly why, but if not, it's because Kanye is obsessed with luxury brands and doesn't give a crap about helping smaller artists. knowing his track record, chances are if he were running his own Bandcamp-like platform he'd likely make it some overpriced luxury for the rich somehow and completely mismanage it in record time
@@TheWonkyAngle i can afford to spend money that doesn't mean I'm rich, if paying for subscriptions is too much for you then you are broke
I bought one exclusively to use in my music production work. It's simple and does the simple things I needed to do (I even made a song from loops I took from the player). It shouldn't be the only platform for Donda 2, and it shouldn't have been marketed beyond music hobbyists.
What can it play back though? Apparently it "can _upload_ AAC, AIF, AIFF, ALAC, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, WAV, and WAVE files." Does the service need to compress files into, say, mp3 for example, to work as stems? Just to super clear: if I bounce a wav file out of my DAW and upload it to their site does the software _always_ reformat it to something lossy? If so then imo the product and service is more like a toy or a practice-tool than an instrument that belongs in the studio.
@@jemmapellemma8185 to my understanding, it splits based on whatever files you upolad (WAV files stay the same) and you can upload stems directly into the player without modifying the file type. Also to be fair, I'm a one person producer on thier beginning steps of music production. Like I said, beginning hobbyist tool.
Nirvana + Foo Fighters in one video would be a cool Deep Discog Dive, especially since Foo Fighters recently made that movie Studio 666, Grohl released an autobiography, there's been several Nirvana reunions including Post Malone's tributes, Batman is into grunge now. I think it'd be a great video. Love your content!
......
Nirvana and Foo Fighters are two of my Top 10 favorite music artists so that would be awesome.
@@shiningnightmare5616 Pretty bold take, not sure if I agree completely. I'll have to come back to you on that one.
foos has such a boring catalogue to speak on
@@dumb-angel I don't disagree. Their first three or so albums are great, though.
I struggle to understand how techbros see the future. A world where all this stuff is the norm seems terrible
Its more expensive less convenient and creates more problems then it solves
One year later and literally nobody cares about NFTs anymore 😂
I'm 2:25 into this video and I just have to say, back in the 80's my mom got a home sound system that has a karaoke button that made the song sound exactly like that, so I'm already at awe with the people who made that thing thinking this could groundbreaking or even high quality because that technology has been there for decades and it hasn't gone too further on the domestic tech world.
Speak after you use it irl
@@Mk-qt2bl it sucks
The only thing that kept me interested in stemplayer was the dedicated community of developers creating tools to use the stem player with better AI, and offline support and other things that make the website actually usable.
I can't help but think this is somewhat related to wealth gap / income inequality, now affecting music consumers like us. We're basically going back to 90s or 2000s where we had to buy a casette or a CD of that album by an artist, now it will be like that but now it will be $200 for a device instead of 10 bucks a CD or whatever. In this inflationist world, music is also becoming less accessible to those with less income. As a massive Ye fan since 2009 myself, why cant I enjoy Donda 2 for a reasonable amount of money?
I've been pirating music on the internet since at least 1998. You don't have to buy anything. It's free. And Kanye blows.
you can just look it up on yt from people reposting it lol
This is not a trend. Just a one off.
I buy records, I buy CDs, I buy lossless audio and WAV files from fellow djs and artists off beatbort/Dropbox etc… I love the idea of the stemplayer preloaded with music… makes me wonder why more artists haven’t made speakers with their music built in? I hate playing music off or through my phone… the phone wasn’t intended to be a music player..
@@JBanksy78 you said that you buy records and CDs, so why do you play music with your phone? Just use your CD player or record player.If you're using your phone for listening to music on-the-go, then use a good earphone/headphone.
I dont think that the Stem player strategy will work out. People dont want to spend $200 for an artist or album they like. If i have 5 artists that i like and each of them use an exclusive music player, that would be around $1000 just for 5 artists. I would pass on that idea. Im happy with buying and collecting CDs.
Always a good video where Mic both nerds out about audio stuff while at the same time dishing out a harshly worded critique about our capitalist society. This is why I subscribed.
There are multitude of issues with this:
*For the price point, the controls aren't very good, the audio is tinny and it's far too limited when trying to enjoy an artist's work as intended.
*The look of the stem player reminds me way too much of the intentionally disturbing technoorganic interface devices from David Cronenberg's "Existenz" & the animated show "Æon Flux".
*Bearing that last one, the thought of carrying a fleshy player just feels awkward & odd, especially in public where at a distance it can be mistaken for items with similar appearances that are used for more intimate reasons.
😐😐😐😐😐
Seriously, Kanye's color choices are either bland or outright gross looking.
Hold up, did you just mention eXistenZ? I’m actually doing a project on that movie for my digital media and dystopia class right now! The first time I saw the movie my mind started performing metaphysical gymnastics. And yes, the stem player does look like that. Let’s just hope the 2.0 version doesn’t plug into our bodies!
that last part is definetly your secret insecurities speaking lol wtf.
I agree with all of this except for the last point because that’s so subjective and I doubt anyone would think you were weird for playing with a toy in public it’s not dildo shaped or anything.
I've played around with trying to isolate vocals/drums/other stuff in audacity, and it usually ends up sounding how it does on the stem player here
I guess cuz this isolation is different EQ presets so it only isolates frequencies, it can't tell what the frequencies are so it's a smoother and cleaner cut.
Cause it's just sloppy. It's not done using any advanced ai the program is just isolating specific frequencies, and therfore completely loses the frequencies taken by say, the vocal when you heard the drums stem.
@@morty1504 yea, that's basically what I'm saying. this professional $200 stem player has the same audio isolation quality as a teenager fucking around with audacity that I downloaded for free lol
@@soaribb32 knob km
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I see what you mean with the Swift comparison, but her case is a lot more sympathetic. Kanye wants to increase his own already substantial capital by making unsustainable toys that artificially limits your capability to use its primary selling feature; Taylor is re-recording her own music because she was screwed over (like many other artists) by business execs who were mad at her for - in part - calling out Spotify for underpaying their artists.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not stanning a multimillionaire. Both artists chose to stand up for artists - and only artists. The labourers and technicians that actually made the albums and platforms are sidelined by intentional or unintentional class solidarity. Not a single worker mass-producing skin eggs OR vinyls is getting a cent more. Only those with access to music software and access to a computer can make music independently. The difference in motive is still clear.
Kanye is choosing to embody everything wrong with the music industry: prioritising short-term greed and publicity over humanity, in both senses of the word.
The man turned down 100 million dollars from apple to do the stem thing, i dont get how the goal is just short term profits
@@sheesh8831 they think too much 😂😂
Lmao what 💀, Taylor fans are fucking delusional, Taylor literally released 6 fucking versions of the same song so it could do more numbers released 4 fucking vinyls of the same album with a different cover so it could do numbers, Taylor is as money hungry as anyone else in the industry, also Kanye literally turned down 100 million dollars so he could do the Stem Player thing.
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
@@sheesh8831 Either way, I don't think you should automatically assume financial decisions made under the influence of manic spending are particularly rational.
Remember when NIN did this in 2007 with the album Year Zero? Remember when Year Zero Remixed came out later that same year?
It was a cool novelty back then and I admit to having fun making awful mixes of those songs, but if that's what music could be trending towards with a bunch of web3 garbage on top, then I guess I'm glad I just got my old ipod out of storage
You'd think he would do the simple thing and just make a competing streaming service that just pays the artists better. Build in the Stem technology so artists can load in master tracks for even better quality mixes while they're at it. Sounds great! Although... We won't get to feel an egg.
He did that already tho
@@mattgassenheimer There is a reason Kanye is a billionaire , why you are more successful than the average person and why the rest of these haters still live with their parents.
@@SaintPablo. huh
@@mattgassenheimer average Kanye fanboy brains
@@MikoyanGurevichMiG21 huh
Also shoutout to cool artists like 100 gecs who have consistently put their original stems online free for everyone to remix or use or do what they please with them
There’s plenty of mainstream artists who clearly leak their own stuff too, even if not officially/legally.
They can keep 'em. XD
i love that death grips has released a lot of their stems, its like sampling and remixing gold
I don't get it. These don't appear to me to be actual stems even. My understanding of Stems is that they are the individual tracks that make up the whole piece. I remember not so long ago where Black Midi offered up a one-day thing (I think it was just one day - might have been a week) where you could download all the stems and I mean ALL for the tracks on 'Schlagenheim'. You were then invited to pull the stems into your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and remix as you feel, for a bit of fun, and send some back to BM to showcase. This was a good example of inclusive interaction with listeners. But we are talking ACTUAL stems, not just separating out different frequencies, which is what the Donda player seems to be doing. God knows, as an ex-musician if I had a pound for every time someone asked me to remove the vocals from a track and me have to explain why that's not a simple thing to do without access to the stems, I'd have a few quid more by now. What I'm saying is, it seems to me that the device you have is not really dealing with stems, and had I purchased it on that basis I would have felt it was mis-sold to me without all the individual tracks that make up the songs. Cheers. Love your channel.
@Telephone Backgrounds On a Clear Day Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. Still seems cheap compared to my example or, indeed, yours re Lil NasX (I must listen to that album soon). And there's no way you can get the same creativity of what are essentially what we used to call bounced tracks. Cheers.
A stem is term used in recording for the wave files a stem can be anything from mono, stereo to surround sound to single tracks or multi tracks. It’s doesn’t separate frequencies at all it separates how ever many tracks like a Bus track were you take more then one wave file and make it one file this is done all the time in recording to make it easier. So simply it takes all the tracks and busted it down like a 4 track recorder. There no separation of frequency at all what I heard on the one track was what we call phasing which means two things are canceling each other out. That is not frequency either that is when both wave files have the same wave form that’s why there is flip phase to stop that in recoding.
I thought this thing played actual stems.
This is like the old Karaoke effect that works by canceling the sounds that are mixed at the center of a stereo mix (vocals are usually mixed at the center, that is the same singal in both left and right channels) so most of the time you'd kill the drums too.
You could remove the vocals on a Discman if you unplug just a tiny bit your headphones by the way
@@FranciscoBurrola not even remotely close to how this works. These are using neural networks and AI to isolate individual aspects of tracks not just vocals.
@@Vageta1999 But it is though: all the AI and neural networks are doing is "the karaoke trick" (and a few others) but optimized and not just for vocals. The point is *this thing does not isolate actual stems as we refer to them in the music production world* (except for Kanye's). If you put any normal song file into it (like an mp3 of your favorite song) it can *not* rip out the stems you would get if you asked the producer for them, _even if_ that producer did the entire mixdown on only 4 tracks.
To truly test this you could: listen to the official release of Donda 2 on the stem player, bounce the official 4 stems out of one of Kanye's songs, recombine them in a DAW, bounce that out as one file, and then feed your new "master" into the website for it to _re-split_ it into 4 new stems. The only way you're going to get it to sound exactly the same is if the AI _realizes_ what you've tried to do and _instead_ plays you the 4 official stems and *not* the ones from what you just made. But if it works and the AI does *not* realize this then the resulting new stems *will be full of artifacts;* lossier formats having more artifacts, because that is how digital audio works. If you need me to go into further audio engineer nerdery or computer science I'm happy to do so. [edited for punctuation and a rogue "of"]
At first it sounded like an overpriced toy, then a 'you wouldnt steal a car'-anti piracy ad from the 2000's and then when it got to The Blockchain I just sat and went "oh.😔"
I like the idea behind the stem player, its a cool device but I agree its too expensive.
On the topic of music exclusivity, its his music and the fact that he self released his album is empowering in a way (though he was only able to do so because he is rich) I don't think Donda 2 release was very well thought out. I hope he figures it out because I believe he can build a system that helps and rewards the artists. This is not it though.
The rollout of Donda 2 is not made to be finished. Kanye knows the album is not done and him and Mike Dean will be working to master the tracks.
@@valvman888 I was referring to Donda 2's release on the stem player. Ik the music is not finished
@@piggytripper3704 kanye is at the point in his career where he doesnt have to put much thought in to rolling out the album as its not about sales and numbers to him. as of 2021 yeezy is a 6 billion dollar company, i dont think he gives 2 shits about roll outs of albums. as long as its out and hes happy with it, it ticks an album off his contract.
Kanye doesn’t really care if Donda 2 flops or blows up, he’s a fucking billionaire and he didn’t even make his wealth from music
it’s so rare i can sit down and watch a video for 20 minutes without losing interest. but here i am, fully engrossed in a micthesnare video for its entire duration once again. excellent video.
Just wanted to say, kudos on such a great breakdown of how the Stem Player works, the pros and cons of it, as well as the greater context surrounding it. I will say though, regarding those last couple of sentences in his initial IG post announcing the exclusivity of DONDA 2 on the Stem Player, it left me with a question that I don’t think has been answered anywhere really. He talked about how streaming services pay out so little per stream to artists and producers when it comes to royalties, yet how are artists/writers/producers supposed to get paid if something’s made exclusive to the Stem Player?
Overall, it seems like a cool idea for a music player, but it also seems like something that isn’t worth the $200 price tag considering its downsides.
so like... why on earth didn't they just make the thing play a special format where each stem is actually its own stereo track, and then sell albums in that format??
Just wanted to drop my 2 cents in here really quickly. I am a professional mixing and mastering engineer and the music industry IS BROKEN! We have found ourselves in a world where music has been completely devalued. While on the outside things like Apple Music and Spotify seem great (and they are..... for the consumer hahaha) they have caused music to become worthless. I also don't think people are emotionally attached to music as they used to be either which is a byproduct of having basically every song ever made at their fingertips, but that's another story for another time and I digress. It's almost impossible to make a living in this career anymore. I do mostly freelancing work and my rates have dropped DRASTICALLY in the last few years. I had to or no one would hire me and I was already on the cheaper side of the game. It's not fair to people who actually create the music. Now I don't think things should go back to the way they used to be either but they certainly can't continue like this forever either.
Welcome to capitalism
Maybe it's because my love for music crystalized during an era when you had to buy a physical copy of a song if you wanted to play it whenever you like, but I've always felt the Spotify model was wrong. Still, I think the genie is out of the bottle. It's tough to imagine the world ever going back. I have a turntable, so I spend a little more for the albums that are really special to me but we're going to need a different long-term solution to this problem. In the meantime, Spotify should start subsidizing my concert tickets because I know the bands need and deserve to make money, but you can't go to a show at Red Rocks for less than $80 now...
i was so excited about the stem player app
*but then i heard the word "blockchain"*
Jokes on you, I just uploaded this video into my stem player and I know what this WHOOLE THING IS ABOUT. After separating main voice track you can clearly hear in the background how Mic is screaming at his premiere pro subscription. I'll be minting that audio track on the block chain by the way bro
Still waiting for a Spoon Deep Discog Dive, especially since their last album fucking rules
ive been spamming to that video for quite some time
You and Mic both lol
@@nobodyburgen4594 well I hope so!
@@szymondudzinski6661 No he’s repeatedly said that they are his favorite active band and shown remorse when they were near the bottom of his polls.
@@nobodyburgen4594 im not surprised at all, i really like them too
I would just like to differentiate Taylor swift’s case just because one of her main goals with the re-recordings is to spread awareness for this problem of artists not owning this music. She recognizes her privilege and is trying to use it for smaller artists to benefit from renegotiated contracts
She is not, she wants to make money like everyone else.
Kanye recognises his privilege too? Kanye grew up in Southside Chicago, not Beverly Hills.
200 bucks for a glorified sound mixer.
Not really worth it.
Mic, this was some very (de)constructive criticism. I wouldn't want a Swiftie to be banned somehow by the blockchain from making a Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version) mix on the stem player. I enjoy much of Kanye's music, but your analysis really underlies a big problem with both these major platforms, labels & artists, basically going "rights for me, but not for thee". Additionally, this video made me realize that the decentralization of currency, on a monolithic & supposedly permanent blockchain, seems paradoxical/centralized.
There's theoretical/minor crypto that's properly decentralised, but ultimately, it's just capitalism and/or cloud storage with extra steps. And more malware.
I think it's a big jump to conclude that people with a stem players could replace mixing and mastering engineers. Donda would have been mixed and mastered to already sound good split in the 4 tracks. There's much more production than moving 4 faders.
I think people underestimate the power of polarizing artists. Kanye, T swift, drake, etc. Can definitely sell their music directly, regardless if people use apple music or spotify.
So if you played a song through Skype, and then play the result through Skype again, and then that one more time, you get the sound quality of this thing.
The bad splits of vocals and instrumentals sounds like when you listen to a song on headphones and pull the jack out from input just a bit.
From what you're describing, it sounds to me like Kayne's attempt to give the ownership of music back to the people who create it is really just heavily monitoring things that already exist in ammeter form; in other words, his attempts to save one market is really just tapping another, untapped one. Further proof that capitalism, even when it's not flat-out evil, is a complete hinderance.
Kanye is just another creative person with so much money that he never need to work on his ideas before investing in them.
What's the betting the egg makers themselves are paid less than minimum wage?
@@theMoporter I don't doubt it.
okay now I need a physical copy of the Sonic Heroes soundtrack.
The stem player is to music, like what 60fps upscales are to animation
Unbelievably accurate
@@theMoporter how so. Upscaling is adding detail that wasn’t there in a sloppy way while this allows you to see existing detail in a more granular way. Isn’t this kinda the opposite
@@Vageta1999 the AI's meat is suffocating from how hard you're riding it
Just saved me 200$ wanted to buy this to enjoy certain songs vocals only or instrumental only but sounds just like when you delete wave vocals for beats you can still kind of hear them in the background
I always assumed stem player would be loaded with official Donda stems, not Spleeter technology that’s free to use.
It is loaded with official, studio-quality stems for Donda, Donda 2, and Jesus Is King. As a bonus, you can upload any other song to the stem player, and the platform splits the stems using AI, which can be hit-or-miss.
This thing kind of reminds me when I was a kid and I would pull out the headphone jack halfway and it would sort of isolate certain instruments in the mix like guitars
I got shivers when you chose plimsoll punks, what a great song hahahaha
I think the middle ground is called CDs and then just remixing it yourself if you want to.
you are an upset guy. and frankly, i appreciate you being on my feed. everyone else grits their teeth and says hopeful positive stuff, which is great. but i feel upset a lot of the time too, and it's nice to hear someone else vent with the same passion XD cheers
I don't like the idea of music being either a free download off the pirate bay or a luxury symbol! THIS.
I don't know if I agree without that getting potentially unlimited music for £10/mnth is am "Insane" idea, I've had Spotify Premium since It launched in the UK in 2009, and for the last 4 years I have upgraded to the family plan (£14.99/mnth), so In total from 2009 till the 3rd of this month, I have spent nearly £3000 on streaming music , That's not nothing. - I do agree that the cut the artist gets from streaming is insane, Ideally I would still get to pay my £15/mnth for access to the music I want to listen too. What's going to happen is were going to need to have ALL of the streaming services to get access to our favourite artists since they can choose which platforms get their music via their record label/management etc.
All of that is before I have bought physical goods as well like vinyls/tour tickets etc. £10/mnth for the option to choose only the songs/artists I want to hear, potentially for the rest of my life isn't bad, Those artist not getting a fair cut of it is bad.
There's no way anyone could have ever convinced me that Kanye West, the man with the biggest ego known to man and who married Kim kardashian, a lady who is Rich and famous for no reason in particular, could ever truly care about the liberation of smaller artists. Everything he does is to inflate his own image.
The fact that I get to listen to majority artists for £9.99 a month is crazy…but I’m not willing to pay anymore than that.
The genie's out of the bottle and any solution to it that's slightly worse isn't going to catch on.
I mean, im buying and collecting CDs and im okay with it. Its only like 10-15 bucks. But im absolutely not willing to pay $200 for an album with a portable music player.
It definitely doesn't seem to understand music mixing, and seems to try to overcompensate for the music section trying to be removed You can hear it in the compression of the reverb. Shame though I'm like hyperfocused auditorily and if this worked perfect I'd never but it down
I remember back in the day (like 10 yrs ago) there was an app that let you isolate every track on space oddity by David Bowie and remix it. It was fun to play with.
Dang man you really outdid yourself with this video! Great job!
Spot on.
Kanye doesn’t really have any practical solutions to this current streaming climate.
I wish he’d come up with his version of Bandcamp!
Anyone else desperately wanna hear the Fuser mix shown, which was an incredible mashup of All Star, Old Town Road and Hot Stuff?? Plz Mic the Snare, the streets need it!!
The splitting of the audio seems to just be done by reducing parts of the EQ.
Music fans have been doing this for years to make instrumentals and acapellas of songs.
11:13 This is peak first world. I dont have TIME to have my whole life being creative, I just want to listen to some songs on my commute
i've tried splitting audio tracks before for a quick mashup using an ai too (lailai if im not mistaken). granted that was a bit more simple in terms of the mix, i feel like ive gotten better results from those websites lol
The Blockchain stem player mobile app in the video isn't being made by or with the Kano or ye teams,
BUT! Alex Klein has shown off actual official plans for some kind of blockchain-based music subscription integration with the platform; so all the stuff in that section of the video is still super relevant.
Just wanted to note this before someone else does
Got one when it first came out with Donda 1 - I love it and use it a lot but it's definitely not the "future" like Ye and Kano are claiming. It's a unique piece of merch from one of my favourite artists that will last longer than his other similarly priced products (yeezys, hoodies etc - have never bought into those)
My least favorite thing about modern music is that it’s all digital and you can’t hold it in your hand.
I think the stem player take a step in the right direction. It turns digital music into a physical product again and it is interactive.
You still can buy CDs or vinyls that are cheaper than this Stem player.
Thanks for breaking this down so well man, shit was cracking me up too 🔥
What's with the fire emoji, WEIRDO?
You think this guy is funny? Zooming in on your face isn't funny. If you find that funny, I've got some real good knock knock jokes for you. (GEEZUS)
@@nirv I'll listen to your jokes if you like my new music video
@@jayverse222 Dude Hanson from the 90s is better than anything you've ever done in your life. Music isn't for you. It's time for you to take up BASKET WEAVING.
There's something infuriating about a billionaire like Kanye West waxing idiotically about Spotify's horrible system and treatment of artists, and selling a $200 piece of plastic with derivative software, while artists with nowhere even close to his level of clout, connections and resources have to grind and toil for crumbs on Spotify and even Bandcamp and pray to at least get slots in festivals.
9:29 Where is crazy frog?
Look a bit closer....
@@MicTheSnare 💀💀💀
And how is this device supposed to separate drums, bass and instruments from each other with something like experimental electronic music. As a producer and a musician, this makes me kinda angry, I don’t want people to listen to some kind of ai filtered and unbalanced version of my music.
Tbh, as soon as music becomes less convenient (i.e. Spotify loses artists), I'll just pirate whatever isn't on there. I'm never buying specific albums or tracks ever again.
Anyone unfamiliar with Dan Olson's work, the guy Mic links the nft video from, should absolutely go watch it. His whole chanel is amazing, but the nft video in particular is a masterclass. Its also over two hours and can be a pretty hard watch, so keep that in mind
Please go through the playlist you made for the hyperpop video and play with the stem player
i’m loving the stem personally. some songs it struggles to split cleanly. but i have about 60 songs downloaded (max storage) which sound pretty crisp and clear. i can play around on it for hours.
Mic The Snare Video checklist:
Crazy Frog: Check ✅
Run Away With Me: Check ✅
80% of the people buying the stem player would mess around with for an hour or two then forgot about it.
If that stem player app and things like it are the future of music the tech industry wants, it needs to be fought against as much as humanly possible.
As a musician, all of this feels so bleak.
An alternative to mp3 where stems are somehow able to be separated for streaming would be awesome. Sequencing yourself will always lead to mediocre results
Have you seen an egg my guy? This things more like a baby bell cheese circle.
I was excited to hear about this because of how it could make chopping samples and mixing more accessible to people who either cant afford or cant use a daw. Then i learned it was more expensive than a daw. And had no UI and was harder to use than one and even if you did learn how to use it it doesnt transfer into daw knowledge because you dont know how to mix and produce you know how to rub an egg.
What artists are on the screen at 9:30 ?
this video is so good every few weeks you drop a 9/10 video. never change ;)
I do wish there was a feasible way to obtain the actual stems from the master recording of songs. The most frequently close we can come to that is the Rockband games, which is far from the stems all separated as it's about 5 different tracks (as a minimum depending on the track). And then the actual closest (which is rare and probably not legally sound) is when the stems get leaked, like with Linkin Park's In The End, Black Eyed Peas I Gotta Feeling etc.
if this didn't have kanyes name attached to it more people would think it's cool, but the snobbery in the production community means anything with hype behind it that gives everybody the ability to play around with music and change it into something different is bad because it makes their hobby feel less cool.. fucking pathetic
I can do everything the Stem Player can on my computer with a base program and a couple plug-ins that aren't all that difficult to learn how to use at a base level. The plus to this method is that a person also learns an actual skill, how to work an audio program, how to extract the various components of a song, how to sample and mix etc. The final result if I like it can be loaded to any device I choose and I am not locked into a nutsack device that is overpriced and dependent on a single website to work...a website prone to Kanyes whims and fancys which to be honest I don't trust to be stable.
the more people try to "solve" problems the more old solutions just seem like the best solutions, instead of doing this bullshit just go back to itunes and pay for an album you want and download it, or potentially even better, just buy it on CD or Vinyl, buy some merch, go to a live show.
The problems with digital music were solved back in 2009 when iTunes became DRM-free. All of the problems with streaming (artists not being paid enough) is from people (including me, I use Apple Music) not willing to pay full price for the music
As a musician, even I don't want to go back to the times I have to buy every single album. I think the core idea of streaming services is great - pay per play, and more money going to an artists if their stuff is listened ot more. Its just that 10 bucks a month plus millions of free users ain't cutting it.
the mario sunshine death noise is the perfect representation of how i feel every time i have to hear about NFTs, thank you for that gift
alt title: the problems with "vocal removers"
I'm a huge Kanye fan and defender but everything you said in this video is correct. Nice work! Crypto sucks.
From my experience the stem player actually does isolate stems really well. It’s also funny how most critiques always fail to mention all of the looping effects and fx options you can use to experience songs in a completely different way. I believe interactive music will be the future of music consumption. The stem player is a one time purchase of $200 where you can download and remix any song ever made yet we all pay $130 every year on streaming services.
Why wouldn’t I just pirate a software that can do the same thing and doesn’t look like a vibe.
@@mimipeahes5848 Because you can't have that in your pocket and can't get official updates and support for free for that long after you buy it.
@@shape8198 200 dollars is not worth having a software with a extremely niche uses in my pocket. Just practically that is never going to come up. I appreciate that you thought about it though.
@@mimipeahes5848 Lol your taking it to personal. Don’t even have to purchase it. Not everyone in the world has everything
Why the hell would I trust a Stem Player to give me an even slightly unbiased opinion about the Stem Player.
it’s because music shouldn’t be isolated when it’s all together, the reason the donda album works so well is because it’s loaded with the studio stems. it’s kinda hard to do that with other artists. they would have to publish their own studio stems
new mic video let's fucking goooo
I may be incorrect, but in most cases vocals are centered in a mix, making them easier to isolate using phase cancellation than various other components in a mix. This is not proprietary technology here.
Aaaaand the bubble popped
I don't own one, but it sounds nice for instrument practicing if you want the artist's singing, and you play the instrumentals yourself.