In a casual tweet last week, Kanye scratched SWISH as a title and renamed his forthcoming album, Waves, which seems like a little bit of a sloppy move less than a month out from the stated Feb 11 release date, and raises questions about how finished the rest of the record is. The day after—the same day Tidal briefly leaked ANTI—Kanye further muddied the water by embroiling himself in a controversy involving Wiz Khalifa and Amber Rose. The former, miffed at Kanye’s use of incarcerated rapper Max B’s signature word “waves” for his album title, had a few words for Yeezy on Twitter, to which Kanye responded with a brutal 20-tweet shellacking of Khalifa, during which he made the ill-advised choice of involving former partner Amber Rose. Still, one of Ye’s now-deleted tweets effectively sums up the scuffle: “Thank you for the extra promotion #WAVES available February 11th.”

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According to data from Twitter, Kanye's tweets were seen over 400 million times during his confrontation with Wiz. Twitter even packaged the spat in one of its newly released Moments features, in which a collection of tweets about Yeezy were presented in an easily comprehended slideshow.

There’s no question that all of this chatter—very little of which is actually about music—will only increase the amount of people talking about Kanye’s album. Just as Rihanna fans’ frustration with the strangeness of ANTI’s rollout ultimately made for premium meme fodder, Kanye’s Twitter Moment points to a shifting paradigm in how fans interact with musicians.

This week, the Recording Industry Associate Of America, or the RIAA, officially began counting streams in its measurement of platinum records. The distinction was a long time coming, as the way we consume music—and almost everything for that matter—has fundamentally changed with the internet. The conversation surrounding musicians and music is today as valuable as the music itself. It’s why artists are using emojis to communicate more authentically to their fans, and becoming miniature media enterprises in the process. In 2016, the chatter and speculation around a release hasn’t changed, it’s just been incorporated into the process.