Latto Takes Heat From Ice Spice Fans Amid Disappointing Sales Projections

Latto’s new album Sugar Honey Iced Tea got a lot of love from her fanbase and from the wider hip-hop sphere… But comparison is the thief of joy. Moreover, some of her rival fanbases online, including that of Nicki Minaj and her big beef opponent Ice Spice, clowned the project’s first week sales projections, which point to a number 17 debut on the Billboard 200 chart with around 27,000 in album-equivalent units sold. Of course, this isn’t the worst chart debut of all time for an artist of the Atlanta femcee’s visibility, but it certainly isn’t making the big commercial splash that she and many others likely hoped for.

Numbers aren’t everything, but the fact that Latto has these feuds with other female rappers makes her (and them) an easy target for ridicule and clowning when things don’t go perfectly. But everyone would benefit from remembering that, beyond the very tip-top of the game which is still seeing diminishing returns compared to years past, pretty much every artist in the mainstream is finding it more and more difficult to get their sales numbers up without a massive and calculated backing campaign from the industry. For example, Ice Spice’s Y2K! debuted with 28,000 in first-week sales at number 18 on the Billboard chart, and despite it being about half the runtime of Sugar Honey Iced Tea, it still puts both LPs at pretty much the same level of commercial success for now.

Instead, what will really differentiate a lot of these albums and narratives is longevity and how these femcees and other artists across the industry will maintain their momentum or squander it. In Latto’s case, she’s got a tour coming up very soon that could help in this regard. Find more reactions to Sugar Honey Iced Tea‘s sales projections down below.

Meanwhile, this is what Ice Spice had to say about her and Latto’s beef. “I feel like if we ever spoke and I asked her ‘What’s the issue?’ it’d be like a blank stare,” she expressed during a recent interview. “It’d really be no issue whatsoever. Especially from me. I can understand a friendly competition, but I just feel like at this point it’s a joke that she’s just dragged out, and it’s just not even funny. Like, bro, ‘Think U The S**t’ is from January. You’re going to post a piece of s**t cake to announce something that’s good news for you? But it is kind of a compliment because you’re talking about something that’s supposed to be a fun moment for you and you’re making it about me… again.”