JAY-Z's '4:44' Is Now on iTunes and Apple Music for You Non-Tidal Types

Not sure what you were up to in about 2001, but if you're of a certain age you might remember an email service running on a domain called another dot com. Like MySpace at the time, it let you customise your own page to hell and back – though in this case, you were fiddling with the aesthetics of an inbox rather than the precise amount of sparkle on social network page white text sat on a black background. With a seemingly endless assortment of colour combinations, another.com also made it stupidly easy to set up a cluster of accounts all linked together under one log-in. In those heady days, I remember having one address named after each of my three favourite ice cream flavours (please do not even bother to ask) and checking them all incessantly for messages from the friends I'd just spent seven hours with in school. I lasted a couple of weeks on the site.

But in these difficult times, when signing up for just about everything online now requires a confirmation email address, I long for the days of another.com. It would be the perfect service with which to use as a sort of waste collection dump for all the unnecessary accounts you now have to set up to book a table at a restaurant with an app service, watch terrestrial TV on demand or be able to listen to Tidal exclusives during your one-month free trial because you're already paying for two other music streaming services and are quite frankly fed up.

Anyway, you can set aside that Tidal-specific email account you may have set up just for JAY-Z's 4:44, because Hov's latest studio album is now up on Apple Music and iTunes. In other JAY-Z news, label Universal also shared news that three bonus tracks will appear on the physical version of 4:44: "Adnis", "Blue's Freestyle/We Family" and "ManyFacedGod", the latter of which is rumoured to involve James Blake and is thus already confirmed to bang even though I haven't heard it yet.

So far, there's no sign of the album on Spotify – though that makes sense, given JAY-Z's recent move to pull a fair amount of his back catalogue of that service. And yes, the streaming wars do tend to lead to an inordinate amount of articles that basically read like advertising for tech companies – sorry – but the places where tech and music intersect are becoming more prominent as the music industry more broadly grapples with Life in the Internet Age. If you're an Apple Music type, you can stream 4:44 below. If not, hold tight for that physical album as the album's drip-feed release continues.

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(Photo by Michael Whitney via Flickr)