Azealia Banks has asked her fans not to stream her debut album Broke With Expensive Taste, alleging that the only person who profits from it is her former record label Prospect Park’s chief executive, Jeff Kwatinetz.
On Instagram yesterday (July 12), Banks said that the album’s producers haven’t been receiving royalties from the record since its release, NME reports.
“Jeff Kwatinetz stole all the money and sent a $15k check for album that has been streamed over 200m times,” Banks wrote. “The pain I feel right now is so deep. I lost ‘212’. I worked so hard on that record. But every stream goes into his pocket.”
Prospect Park released Broke With Expensive Taste in November 2014. It was Banks’s only release with the label. The album arrived after a long delay after she was dropped from her earlier deal with Universal.
A year later, Banks and Prospect Park’s management services ended their working relationship, and Banks alleged that she was unable to release music until 2016 because of a contract dispute with them.
The rapper also wrote in an Instagram post that she still has she the master recordings for Broke With Expensive Taste, and is looking at ways she can reissue the record herself so that the producers can receive the pay she claims they’ve been waiting six years for.
Last month, Banks contacted Ice Cube, Kwatinetz’s business partner in the basketball league Big3, over Twitter with similar claims. “Your white manager Jeff Kwatinetz has stolen all of the royalties from my debut album and I was wondering if you could use your influence to get them for me?” she said at the time.
She added: “I worked very hard on that album and Jeff wasn’t the person who paid for its production. Universal did. Jeff purposely released an uncleared record acting as Manager & Label and has screwed me out of millions of dollars.”
Check out Banks’s series of Instagram posts below.
