Nearly a year ago, Kanye West announced he was working on production for a new album titled So Help Me God. With no release date stated, excitement began to stir with many Kanye fans and music lovers anticipating the release of his newest work. Most of this excitement was justified, too. With six prior albums and 21 Grammy’s, it seems at times that Mr. West can’t miss.

After about a year of build up, single’s being released, and more teasing being done by Kanye, his 7th album, The Life of Pablo, (formerly So Help Me God, then Swish, then Waves,) was set to be released on February 11. Many fans didn’t like this new title, but in the end a majority of his audience only cared about the music. Kanye sold tickets to Madison Square Garden in New York City for people to see and hear the debut of his new material and also catch a glimpse of the third season of his fashion line Yeezy.

To those who couldn’t afford to go to this event, Kanye also had a live stream brought to you by Tidal, a music streaming company in which he has a large share in. As the stream began, Kanye walked out with a laptop and proceeded to play his album on the aux cord of Madison Square Garden. I tuned in for the entire stream and loved what I heard.

Following the stream, I expected the album to immediately drop on all music streaming platforms since after all, it was February 11, the day he said his album would be released. However, no album was available for purchase. Kanye tweeted the next day posting a picture of an updated track list stating “The album is being mastered and will be out today… added a couple of tracks…”

Finally, on February 12, the album was available to listen to. But that’s just it, you could only listen to it. You couldn’t actually buy it, you could only listen to it on Tidal, the music streaming app that I mentioned earlier. At first, this seemed to be not that big of an issue, if you wanted to listen to the album someone could start their 30 day free trial of Tidal (or pay $10 for one month of service if you already used your trial), or just wait a week or so for the album to come out on every platform.

This is what I thought was going to happen. However, Kanye later tweeted that the album would only be available on Tidal. It wasn’t going to be on Apple Music or Spotify or even open for purchase through other means. This is where I see a major problem with how Kanye is presenting his album. When one makes music or any form of art, it should be easy to listen to or see it. The point of making art is to spread it to as many people as possible that can relate to your art and appreciate it.

By making it an exclusive to a streaming app, it limits the amount of people that will actually listen to it because they are already subscribed to another streaming service or would just rather buy a physical copy of it. If you’re selling a product, don’t you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible? Instead of promoting his streaming service, Kanye is just begging his fans to get the album some other way rather than give him money for his hard work.

Combined with his Twitter rants about various different unrelated subjects, Kanye has effectively ruined the debut of an album that deserves to be listened to by all. From a fans view, I have lost a lot of respect for one of my favorite artists after all of this needless drama. I truly do hope in the coming weeks he wises up and makes The Life of Pablo obtainable on all streaming services and for separate purchase as well. As a Kanye fan and a fan of rap music alike, I can pray he doesn’t continue to make these types of unwise decisions.