2024 has been consumed with Hip-Hop beef. Vince Staples points the finger at Spotify, one of the biggest music streaming companies in the world, as an instigator of the toxicity in the culture.
“We have every songwriter that we’ve ever had in Hip-Hop music complaining about their publishing splits, but we kinda don’t pay attention to that,” Vince Staples stated during a phone call on The Joe Budden Podcast.
The California native also said, “But once n##### get mad, the whole internet is activated and we got billboards from streamers talking about, ‘Hip-Hop is a sport.’ But we ain’t never seen a billboard from a streamer that said, ‘Give that n#### his publishing back.'”
Spotify began putting up “Hip-Hop is a competitive sport” billboards across the country in March. Those large advertisements coincided with the release of Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You collaborative album.
We Don’t Trust You hosts the “Like That” single featuring Kendrick Lamar. That song included Lamar throwing blatant shots at fellow chart-topping Hip-Hop acts Drake and J. Cole.
Vince Staples also called out The Joe Budden Podcast hosts. He accused them of getting excited over rap beef but not expressing anger over artists losing their publishing, going to jail or dying. The 30-year-old MC then shared his thoughts on rappers battling each other.
“Why are we at war with the n#### that’s making a song and not the m########### who owns the whole thing? We don’t say their name at all. We quiet when they do some f### s###,” The Vince Staples Show creator stated.
Staples added, “We don’t have rap labels no more. But nobody says nothing about that. Nobody wanna talk about these labels folding in the other and then fire 50% of the people. Firing Hip-Hop radio people at these labels that’s been working there for 20, 30 years. That’s not war though, right?