Joe Budden On Kanye West’s Stem Player & “Donda 2”: “We’re Stealing This Music”

Joe Budden and his podcast’s co-hosts don’t intend on paying $200 to buy the Stem Player to hear “Donda 2.”
Joe Budden thinks Kanye West’s current album rollout for Donda 2 is “genius” but he and his podcast’s co-hosts aren’t interested in partaking in the album’s release on Stem Player, with Budden saying, “We’re stealing this music.”

Discussing the album’s rollout on a recent episode of his podcast, Joe Budden explained why the Stem Player is a great idea and will be a successful venture for Ye, but he and his friends will not be spending $200 to procure one.

“Kanye, we stealing that from right out of there,” said Budden about the Stem Player, on which four new Donda 2 songs released exclusively on Wednesday. “Kanye, Justin LaBoy, Antonio Brown, all of y’all… we’re stealing this music. I wanna just call a spade a spade. It’s a great idea and it is exactly what should be done but your business people have to account for me, the n***a that’s gone steal it.”

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Ice went on to argue that Yeezy’s team likely didn’t consider the people who planned on bootlegging the album because this venture will make Ye more money than he would have made on streaming when it’s all said and done. They went on to compare this situation to when Nipsey Hussle was selling his mixtape for $100 before Budden suggested that we will be seeing a lot more of this in the coming years.

“This is the future of music,” he said. “I’m talking about the future of music doing this– the big artists doing this. In the future, not now, but somewhere down the line, more big artists like this will do this. We’re not gonna keep having the ‘Hey, the streaming sites don’t pay me’ conversation. At some point, the n***as with some money is gonna get up and do something. More people will think to do this and then the music industry maybe has a problem on their hands.”

What do you think about Joe Budden’s assessment of Ye’s new Stem Player? Do you plan on buying one to listen to Donda 2? Watch the beginning of the episode below.