Kanye West shocked the world yet again when he dropped DONDA 2 on streaming services, albeit under unorthodox circumstances. While reacting to the launch on his livestream, DJ Akademiks broke down how he thinks Ye's first week sales numbers for the rereleased project will go and addressed the debacle with Kanye's producers and collaborators on the record.
First off, Ak looked at the Spotify streaming numbers for the rereleased 2022 album, such as some tracks from it which racked up over a million streams each at press time. All of them have at least over 400,000 streams as of writing this article.
Akademiks believes Kanye West's controversies and a new Spotify account wouldn't have denied him about 20K in first week sales... If he had dropped it on a Friday. Instead, since Ye dropped DONDA 2 on a Tuesday, the media personality thinks he will sell about 10K in its first week. He still called this impressive due to all the context around the release, and doubts it will chart on Billboard since they have strict rules for eligibility.
Kanye West DONDA 2 Producers
From there, DJ Akademiks discussed Kanye West's DONDA 2 clearance controversy, as caught by joebuddenclips/fanpage on Twitter. For those unaware, Ye's former manager Free Maiden accused him of stealing from producers Brian Allday and Boogz. Basically, the allegation is that Kanye never paid them for their work and released these tracks on streaming without their permission.
Of course, this is far from the only time the Chicago artist has faced these types of accusations. In fact, some of the current debacle concerns various productions for his VULTURES series with Ty Dolla $ign as well.
Speaking of which, Kanye West claimed VULTURES isn't coming back due to Ty's distance from Ye. We will see if this actually pans out, but either way, the former G.O.O.D. Music boss has more projects to drop.
With that in mind, we will see how the sales numbers for DONDA 2 continue to evolve, especially as other projects like Bully and Cuck are allegedly still on the way. In any case, DJ Akademiks will break it all down and continue to support his big 2025 media ally.
