Kanye West’s ‘Vultures 1’ Already Has a New Distributor
Written by djfrosty on February 15, 2024
Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign‘s collaborative album Vultures 1 moved between distribution companies on Thursday (Feb. 15), starting the day with FUGA and then moving over to Label Engine.
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Label Engine, a distribution company acquired by Create Music Group in 2015, had previously put out the two lead singles from Vultures 1. Confusingly, however, the album then arrived via FUGA.
A FUGA spokesperson told Billboard on Thursday that “a long-standing FUGA client delivered the album Vultures 1 through the platform’s automated processes, violating our service agreement.” As a result, the company said it planned “to remove Vultures 1 from our systems.” This created some turbulence for West’s release, which was briefly pulled off Apple Music and iTunes before it reappeared.
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The album’s new home, Label Engine, was founded by Rich Billis; in 2022, he said that “over 1,500 labels and a total of over 90,000 artists” use his company for distribution.
Billis said the company built its client base in part because “we had a very low [distribution] rate which was 15%, compared to 25% (what a lot of other distributors were charging).”
“We also provided free use of all the accounting and promotion tools I had created,” he continued. “That seemed to do very well. We quickly acquired customers and grew quite quickly in the upcoming years. From there, we got purchased by Create Music Group, which was a client of ours for a year or so. That’s when I took over as CTO of Create Music Group.”
On Wednesday, Spotify also removed the song “Good (Don’t Die)” from Vultures 1 after Donna Summer‘s estate complained it interpolated the singer’s work without permission, as did Amazon Music and Apple Music later, too.
But despite the hiccups around the new album release, listeners continue to seek it out. The song “Carnival” is No. 1 on Spotify’s Daily Top Songs Global chart, picking up nearly 6 million daily streams on the service. “Burn” and “FUK SUMN” are also in the top 20.