Alleged phone calls made from jail by Young Thug have been leaked in recent days, as the YSL honcho faces snitching allegations stemming from a 2015 conversation with authorities surrounding a Lil Wayne tour bus shooting.
Thugger continues to distance himself from Gunna, who was released nearly two years before Thug after reaching an Alford plea deal in the YSL RICO case in December 2022, as Thug believes his mentee snitched on him.
One recent alleged jail phone call involving Thug found him claiming that he paid $50,000 for streams to help Gunna’s DS4EVER album debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 over The Weeknd’s Dawn FM in 2022.
“Like, the No. 1 album you just had right now, I paid for you to have the No. 1 album,” he said. ”You didn’t honestly earn a No. 1 album over The Weeknd, my boy. I paid for that sh–. I never said anything to him. I never told him that.”
He continued: “We just got the plug on that. You never earned a No. 1 album. I spent 50 extra grand buying motherf—ing streams for you.”
Gunna earned his second No. 1 album atop the Billboard 200 in January 2022 in a tight race against The Weeknd. DS4EVER launched with 150,300 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Jan. 13, according to Luminate.
The album’s first-week sales figure was nearly entirely comprised of streaming. SEA units comprised 144,600 (equaling 193.5 million on-demand official streams), while album sales held 4,700 and TEA units comprised 1,000.
It was also the most-streamed album that week and Gunna added a Drake collaboration titled “P Power” to the project’s track list on the final tracking day. DS4EVER was on sale for $7.99 on the iTunes store and could be purchased digitally on his website for $4.
As for The Weeknd, Dawn FM bowed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 148,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Jan. 13, according to Luminate.
Of the total, SEA units made up 131,300 (equaling 173.04 million on-demand official streams of the album’s songs), while album sales bested Gunna’s total with 14,800 and TEA units comprised 1,900.
Billboard has reached out to Luminate for comment.
Here’s the text we include in our weekly story announcing the top 10 of the Billboard 200 that explains Luminate’s review process: Luminate, the independent data provider to the Billboard charts, completes a thorough review of all data submissions used in compiling the weekly chart rankings. Luminate reviews and authenticates data. In partnership with Billboard, data deemed suspicious or unverifiable is removed, using established criteria, before final chart calculations are made and published.
