Kanye West’s ‘The Life of Pablo’ gets wide release

Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo” is an album unbound by conventions regarding stable tracklists, mixes or even when it’s truly finished. Now it’s been freed from its Tidal-only release.

The album -- again updated, remixed and remastered, naturally -- is available for streaming at all major services. Also, in a first, it’s available for download at West’s own website.

The download is a move that may, for fans, finally put some brakes on his ever-evolving LP, which has been undergoing constant tweaks and revisions since its Feb. 13 release. Most have been minor changes in the mixing, guest appearances and alternative lyrics, but collectively they have broken ground in looking at an LP as an evolving process that more resembles software with patch updates.

Until Friday, the album was exclusively available via streaming at Tidal (save for a few patrons who pre-paid for a Tidal download that took a while to finally arrive). That kept it out of contention for most metrics of sales success (streaming numbers weren’t reported to Nielsen, which counts streaming toward its charts), but it still managed to dominate the pop-music conversation for much of the early year.

The wide release also reverses an earlier pledge from West that it would never be available on Apple Music, and would remain a Tidal exclusive in perpetuity.

The album’s success along with exclusive releases from Beyonce, Rihanna and other acts have almost singlehandedly kept the service afloat, with “Pablo” garnering 250 million streams in its first 10 days of release (“This is not regular!” West added, on Twitter). Tidal now has 3 million paid subscribers.

The album is still unavailable for purchase anywhere outside of West’s website -- its not turning up in the iTunes store, and there’s been no physical release yet.

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