It’s an exciting moment for an independent musician to see their music crack the Billboard charts. Unless it was never put on sale in the first place.
That’s what happened to Chicago artist Chance the Rapper last month. The unsigned 20-year-old’s critically acclaimed mixtape, “Acid Rap,” made it to number 63 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop chart the first week of July.
But the album, which had been available for free download on the rapper’s website since the end of April, had never officially been put on sale.
When Chance’s representative noticed what was happening, they got the digital version of the collection of songs pulled from iTunes and Amazon. But physical copies of the tape, which Billboard reports are being sold by a company called Mtc, are still being sold on Amazon.
“I’ve never heard of Mtc, so this has taken us by surprise,” the rappers manager Patrick Corcoran told Billboard.com. “But when I first saw it I showed Chance, and his lawyers are trying to stop it.”
While the rapper is trying to stop someone else from profiting from his work, he can at least take solace in the fact that his music, even though available for free, is finding a paying audience