Saweetie criticizes label for "prematurely" releasing her Doja Cat collab "Best Friend"

Any collaboration featuring “Tap In” artist Saweetie and Grammy-nominated rap-pop force Doja Cat is bound to garner some attention. Originally, their upcoming single “Best Friend” was scheduled to debut Thursday night (or early Friday morning, if you’re on the east coast) per Saweetie’s label, Warner Records. So when the track hit Apple Music at the previously announced time, nobody thought anything was out of the ordinary. Apparently, something was definitely amiss according to Saweetie herself, who took to Twitter to call out her label for allegedly releasing the track early. “I am extremely disappointed in my label WBR for prematurely releasing a single I was so excited about,” the rapper tweeted. “I feel disrespected.” She went on to share that she had a larger rollout planned for the track, which was obviously circumvented by the songs release, and asserting that possibility of gaining clout and money tend to “[override] the artists’ art.” She also noted in a follow-up tweet that the version that was released was the incorrect one.

But the situation gets a little more confusing. According to Uproxx, the single was later pushed to January of next year—a change that Apple may not have recognized in time, since the company briefly released the song on its streaming platform. “Best Friend” has since been pulled offline (though you can still listen to the Essentials playlist that was clearly inspired by the song and still uses the key art from the release). Brian “Z” Zisook, vice president of content operations at Audiomack, shared on Twitter that the label was not responsible for its release, as he received correspondence from Warner Records about the delay eight hours before the song was scheduled to go live. Further down the thread, he hypothesized that the upload was liked the result of a missed update to the original feed. If true, that would account for why Apple was ostensibly the only platform to air it.

Since the debacle, Warner Records has not released a response to Saweetie, nor has the artist retracted her previous statements. If anything, this all draws a lot of curiosity about the forthcoming video, so that’s a small victory, perhaps.