An up-and-coming artiste with the moniker Wise Kid has come under scrutiny after it has been revealed that he illicitly profited by uploading songs of Afrobeats star, Wizkid, on multiple streaming platforms.
It has been alleged that the singer has raked the sum of $73,170 monthly since October 2020 by uploading Wizkid’s recent album, Made In Lagos on Apple Music, Amazon, Shazam, and Tidal.
An album uploaded by Wise Kid on the streaming platforms is titled “Lasgidi Made,” an alteration of the original “Made In Lagos” by Wizkid. But despite the change in title, all the songs contained in the album are songs by Wizkid, including Essence, Ginger, Grace, No Stress.
Wise Kid also uses similar social media handles to Wizkid. On Twitter, he is @wisekidaya, whereas Wizkid goes by @wizkidayo.
Wise Kid drew attention to himself after he tweeted a now-deleted screenshot of an Apple Music analytics which he captioned “On God.” The screenshot showed that in the past 4 weeks he’s enjoyed 9.3 million views, 133.6k average daily listeners, and 1.2k song purchases.
Wise Kid has denied the accusation of copyright infringement. He tweeted, “I’m just an upcoming artist I know nothing about this and please am not the one distributing Wizkid album on Apple music.”
He also claimed that Freeme Digital, a music distribution digital company, handles the distribution of his songs.
However, Freeme Digital has countered Wise Kid’s tweet by saying: “We did NOT distribute his ‘Lasgidi Made’ album and have only distributed his old content. We will see him and everyone else involved in this lie and defamation in court.”
Freeme Digital also said that it will be deleting the rest of Wisekid’s content on its platform.
