As much as I wish I could actually do a review of Kanye West’s newest album “The Life of Pablo,” I can’t really achieve that. Why not? Because Kanye decided that the only way to listen to it legally is to sign up for the new music streaming service Tidal. What are you doing, Yeezus? Why are you willing to keep your latest work tucked away behind pay walls that only people who look like this are willing to pay for?

Well, there are some reasonable answers to that question.

First of all, Tidal is owned by a company called Project Panther Ltd. who is owned by a man named Shawn Carter. That name doesn’t really mean anything to anyone I’m sure, but that man is more commonly known as Jay-Z. Now, Kanye and Jay-Z teaming up in any way is not a shock to anyone; they’ve made plenty of great music together and have publicly let the world know that they’re good friends. Alright, so maybe he’s just helping a friend out and being a nice guy. Jay-Z bought Tidal and thought having Kanye’s album exclusively on the service would help kickstart it as an institution of music gathering. How adorable.

While that may have some truth to it, it can’t be the only reason for the odd situation. More than likely, the real reason is that Tidal claims to pay the most royalties to artists and songwriters who are involved with the music streaming industry. Knowing that, this move Kanye has made makes a lot more sense. With artists like Taylor Swift removing their music from other streaming sources (specifically Spotify in Swift’s case) due to the low percentage of royalties being earned, is Kanye making a statement that music streaming services aren’t paying artists enough? Oh yeah, of course he is. Is he trying to get everyone to leave behind Spotify and other music streaming entities so that Tidal will be the main source of music listening? Perhaps he is, but I highly doubt this little plan will actually work.

If this was the plan, Kanye and Jay-Z should not have relied solely on people needing to hear Kanye’s new album. They should have gotten a few other well-known artists to join their cause and also exclusively release music on Tidal. I’m positive that if say 10 or more popular artist agreed to jump on board, there would be a lot more people listening to music on Tidal because it’s the only place to hear it. I know I couldn’t live if I wasn’t able to easily access the newest Adele or Drake.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a firm follower of the church of Yeezus, but do I need to hear the album that badly? Not at all, especially when you consider the fact that if I did change my loyalty from Spotify to Tidal I would have to re-save all of the music I had on my Spotify app to my new Tidal app. Do you know how long that would take? Probably like a solid 10 minutes. There’s no way I’m doing that.

But since I am a huge Kanye fan, I do low key need to be able to listen to this album. How am I going to do that? The same way millions of people are most likely doing it too: illegally downloading it off of the Internet. I don’t want to do that, but in this unique situation, it feels like the most logical way to go about hearing it.

Please know that I’m not trying to encourage people to start illegally downloading albums, because that is just flat out not cool. I’m just trying to say that Kanye has put me in a position where that seems like a pretty good option, effectively ruining the plan of trying to get more royalties to artists.

Am I trying to attack Kanye or Jay-Z? No, absolutely not. I’m just a disgruntled fan who is trying to rationalize these unusual circumstances.