Joe Budden isn’t totally convinced that the City Girls‘ new album has been the victim of low sales — he wants proof before he starts believing the reports doing the rounds.
In a video clip released on Tuesday (October 31), Budden and his cohorts on The Joe Budden Podcast discussed the Miami rap duo — specifically reports saying that anticipated first-week sales for the group’s new album RAW were in the range of 6,000-8,000, a number that many people thought was extremely low given the group’s prominence.
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In the video, Budden’s podcast co-host Ice expressed skepticism about the number. He theorized that it was actually a measure of the group’s so-called “pure” sales, rather than the final number, which would include streaming stats as well as outright sales. The low number may have been leaked, Ice theorized, in order to embarrass the group.
“I don’t know of an artist that’s signed to a major that’s doing 6,000,” Ice said. You can see the whole exchange below.
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Budden agreed with his co-host that the 6,000-8,000 figure sounded suspicious.
“I need to have that number confirmed,” he said. “It still sounds unbelievable to me. I’m with you [Ice] as far as how they counted that — maybe it’s the pure album sales. Somebody was trying to hurt them during their release.”
The podcast crew then went on to discuss rumors about tension between group members JT and Yung Miami. Ice and another co-host, Parks, speculated that those rumors may have actually been conjured up by people close to the group in order to draw attention to the new project.
“I just look at the timing,” Ice said. “We ain’t heard nothing about them breaking up like this — we haven’t seen text messages and all this stuff — until after the album dropped. Why?”
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The group members actually responded to the reports of low first week sales in a recent interview.
JT and Yung Miami stopped by The Breakfast Club late last month to discuss an array of topics, including RAW‘s reportedly lackluster performance.
“It’s tough times. You get what you put in, in this shit. And I feel like, collectively, we didn’t do what we had to do to promote the album,” JT admitted. “But if you don’t go hard with promoting your shit, and putting it in people’s face, it’s like, of course it’s going to miss people.”
Later in the interview, JT suggested that bad timing was also to blame for the album’s failure.
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“Right now, stunting ain’t cool, because people broke,” she said. “I feel like we have a bad timing thing. I feel like our timing, and our management, is poor. We’ve got poor management, poor timing — like, it’s really never no strategy. We just out here, like, why the fuck are we at The Breakfast Club a week after our thing dropped?”
