In summer 2021, Kanye West was the artist chosen to launch a whole new physical “format”, the Stem Player. It looked a bit like a mashup of a hockey puck and the Simon game from the 1970s and 1980s where players had to remember and repeat a sequence of moves on the discus-shaped device.
West launched his Donda album on the Stem Player, allowing users to remix track stems from it on the fly. The following April, he released his Donda 2 album the same way. His social media outbursts soon after pretty much curdled that association. Kano, the company behind the players, was keen to find less inflammatory associations and signed up Ghostface Killah to release Stem Player-centric music in February this year.
That repositioning of the brand continues through a deal with the estate of J Dilla, the rapper and producer who died in 2006. As part of a subscription, fans can pay $1.94 a month to get access to unreleased J Dilla tracks and beats. Some of them had featured on his Vol. 1: Unreleased EP in 2002 and Vol. 2: Vintage EP in 2003, but others have never been released before.
There is also an upsell option where, for $30, you can buy a “cosmic spectrum green” skin for the device to pimp it up. That also comes with a one-year subscription to all current and upcoming tracks from J Dilla, suggesting this will be a rolling project.
You will, of course, also have to buy the Stem Player itself, which will set you back around $200.
“Stem is about new forms and formats,” said Alex Klein, co-founder of Kano. “J Dilla invented how we produce music today. To distribute these never-before-heard songs from the Jay Dee era is an honour. To do so in clean vocals, drums, bass, and instrumental is something even more special.”
It is an interesting way for an estate to think about putting out unheard music. Traditionally the approach has been to gather together whatever studio outtakes and fragments are available and ration them out as “unheard” albums or treat them as ways to pad out anniversary reissues.
Rather than repeat this marketing failsafe, J Dilla’s estate is at least trying something new. The overall cost may be prohibitive to many fans, but the fact he was such an innovative producer sits well with what the Stem Player is all about.
