After one of the most convoluted and irritating album launches in the history of music, The Life Of Pablo is finally available to the public... sort of.
Performed live last week in Madison Square Garden, some music journalists reviewed the album as it was that day, only for Kanye to take to Twitter and confirm that the track-list would be changed yet again, pushing the release date back from February 12th.
The constant tweaking-and-fro'ing of the album left fans in a lurch when it was no longer clear when it would finally be released, only for it to arrive unceremoniously in the middle of February 14th.
With a salvo of controversial Twitter action distracting from the album itself - Kanye went from defending Bill Cosby, to attack Taylor Swift, to asking Mark Zuckerburg for $1 billion in the space of 48 hours - West then added fuel to the fire of his already confused fans by telling them the album would never be available, in any form, outside of Tidal.
My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale... You can only get it on Tidal.
— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016
Soon afterwards, filesharing reporting website Torrent Freak discovered that the album had been illegally torrented over 500,000 times in it's first 24 hours: "The album is currently leading (file-sharing website) The Pirate Bay’s list of most shared music torrents by a landslide. At the time of writing close to 10,000 people were sharing a copy of the most popular torrent simultaneously, something we haven’t seen with a music release before."
