display during the 'ShowStoppers' event at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 06 January 2015. Now, however, multiple services are offering high-resolution streaming as standard.Ī music player 'Pono player 2' by manufacturer Pono Music, founded by musician Neil Young, is on. At the time, this audiophile strategy was swimming against the general tide of streaming which was more about convenience than sound. Artist empowerment was a happy byproduct of Pono’s central idea, but Young was really selling it as being about enhanced sonics for the listener. What was a phenomenal success initially as a Kickstarter project back in 2014, raising over $6 million in pledges to get it off the ground, seemed to steadily run out of steam thereafter. In that sense, the ghost of Neil Young’s Pono player raises its head.

He is positioning Stem Player as being about artist empowerment over and above fan interactivity. This makes the moves here by West all the more intriguing. It was fine for a competition or a piece of interactive fan marketing, but it was never going to travel far outside of that. That said, this was, by definition, an incredibly niche activity and was never going to be a dominant way of consuming music. There was also a brief flurry of activity around browser-based interactive remixing, presenting it as a new type of musical format, with MXP4 being one of the better known examples.

This all has echoes of trends from the early 2000s when acts would release stems of tracks and offer them out to fans usually as part of a remix competition, with Radiohead being one of the biggest acts to experiment here several times. The twist with the player is that it lets users interact with the tracks as they play them, with four channels that can turn up or down different parts of the track (using the stems) to get the particular sound they want.

Stem player