Meek Mill Thinks That Labels Fake First-Week Album Sales Numbers

Meek Mill has been on a bit of a rebellious streak lately, speaking out against music industry practices he sees as outdated or unfair. After Kanye West posted several pages of record deal revisions to Twitter in 2020, Meek claimed he wanted to do the same in 2021, writing, “I’m about to make my record deal public… just to let the world see what these people on!”

While he never quite followed through on that particular threat, he has continued to air out his issues with the recording industry. Most recently, he denounced the industry’s modern emphasis on publicizing first-week album sales numbers. In Meek’s opinion, this is an unhealthy way to do business; it unfairly hurts the public perception of artists and how their labels deal with them. He also believes that labels have more control over those statistics than they let on.

“We don’t go off first week numbers,” he wrote. “Labels run that shit … and most of the numbers be fake … you can clearly see all the artist that’s killing shit! Focus on your brand and impact!!” In a follow-up tweet, he described what he believes is the detrimental effect this is having on the music business. “They crashing the rap game out,” he predicted. “That everybody drop on Friday bs …. Wtf is that … why would you want to sell your product on the same day as the competition… for a billboard look? lol what does that do for the artist?”

While Meek’s issues appear to be with the recording industry in general, his MMG boss Rick Ross doesn’t believe Meek has issues with MMG. Rather, Ross recently said he thinks Meek’s label complaints are focused on Atlantic Records, which currently distributes his music.

Meek Mill is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.