About two weeks ago, Ifani was still on the road to achieving his goal of going gold on the first day of his I Believes In Me:2nd Quadrant album and did just that.
Now, Ifani has been trending all over social media after AKA made a Tweet stating that Redd’s played a major role in Ifani selling 20 000 copies on the first day of its release. Both Ifani and Redd’s deny this accusation, and needless to say Ifani was less than impressed with Kiernan’s Tweets.
AKA claims that his I initial intention was not to throw shade on iFani but instead congratulate him on seeing a business opportunity at time where CD sales are rife. He also drew a comparison to Jay Z’s controversial Samsung deal, in which units of Magna Carta Holy Grail were sold to the company and distributed to all folks who owned their cellphone device for “free”, technically catapulting Hov’s sales to a million (platinum) before the album even dropped.
For some reason, which we hope to find out soon, AKA is adamant that the events he described are facts. And of course his army of Twitter fanatics have backed him up, expressing the concern that there is no transparency in the business of selling music and certifying its performance. This is not the first time AKA challenges the legitimacy of an artist’s apparent CD sales; Cassper also caught the heat after AKA challenged him to provide proof in the form of a SAMRO plaque when Cassper claimed to have gone gold with Tsholofelo last year. Tumi, also made a brief statement out of the blue during all the commotion tweeting: “So gold Huh? How you do numbers when we don’t know the number/song?”
Whether there is truth to anything being thrown around in this mess, what is evident is that there is a clear need for a more systemized way to monitor album sales in our industry. And this leads us to two very important questions: (1) If iFani did in fact make the deal (which would be completely legit) with Redd’s, is he a genius for finding a loop in the system or a fraud for misleading the industry? And (2) is AKA hating or does he bring up a good point the general tracking of CD sales in South Africa?
