Blog: product innovation

Kanye West has released the Donda Stem Player, a handheld remixing speaker that can interact with music, as a way to create a personalised experience with his new album. However, this is not just an interactive speaker for consuming Kanye’s new musical project - it is a creator tool to remix any recording, as shown by a video of the device splitting Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On into distinct parts.

In this era of access to all music and everything about it, I do enjoy reading artist interviews, and pay attention to artists’ views on the modern music industry. What caught me recently were Mark Ronson’s remarks on songwriting in the age of the playlist in The Guardian: “Everything has to be produced so it sounds competitively as loud as possible coming out of an iPhone or as loud as possible when it comes out of a Spotify hits playlist; you have to make sure the kick drum and the guitar have the same loudness and presence all the way through the whole fucking song or you don’t stand a chance.