The Agile Album of Kanye West
Kanye develops his album just like a piece of software.
The year’s 2016, Mr. West was about to release another album, previously named ‘So Help Me God’ then settled on ‘The Life of Pablo’, notorious for his unpredictable behavior, he decided to release the album fully digital and exclusive to Tidal (Jay-Z's Music Streaming Service) with no physical releases, a really bold moves on Ye’s part since in the year 2016 even Spotify isn’t as popular as of today where at the end of the year people all over social media posting their Spotify Wrapped, billions of listens on popular songs.
Before we dive into the release here’s a summary of what Agile is in the Software Development world, Agile makes software and the team behind it able to adapt to changes faster. adding bug fixes, various features enhancement even after the software is released to the public, all those changes are possible due to the internet, with the internet people can just download the patches and update their software. Software used to be released in physical form in CD that is why back then agile is not even possible, back then its called Waterfall and the development ends when the CD was about to be released to the public, updates take time because it needs to be saved to a CD then shipped to the consumer, not with a few commands and then the updates got published on the internet and the consumer can update their software immediately after it got published. that’s the case with software development.
How about from a Music perspective, if the critics or the listener doesn’t like how the album is produced, mixed badly, etc. The album never got updated people won’t buy the same album with slight changes, even if they did the effort and the payoff is not worth it, might as well release another album.
Now back to Ye’s album, The Life of Pablo got released, there were great songs like Famous for example, but tracks like Wolves — well not that great even Ye’s himself admitted it, then comes what might be during the initial release is a bad idea which is releasing the album only on streaming platforms and no physical releases became the decision that might change how music is distributed, on February he tweet this.
He decides to ‘bug fix’ Wolves and not just Wolves, its actually almost every track on the album pretty much got an alteration, but how ? the music was already released. Due to his decision to only release the music online well, he just needs to upload his new mix and that’s it, he keeps doing it with what seems to be the never-ending cycle of updates, a music experience that the mainstream had never seen before, the ‘living breathing changing creative expression’ as he declared. It's as if the album got a day 1 patch just like video games when it got released nowadays. After the release of the album, many follow his path, altering the songs, adding features, such as Young Thug with ‘So Much Fun’. Even Anthony Fantano gave it a higher score, not because the music grew on him but rather the new experience he gets when listening to the album again after the updates.
Ye might be not the first to do it, but he is the first to do it in the mainstream and succeeded in doing so, he develops his album just like a piece of software.
