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New R Kelly album briefly appears on streaming services
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 12 December 2022
A new R Kelly album briefly appeared on the streaming services last week with the provocative title of ‘I Admit It’. However, legal reps for the jailed musician have denied that he had any involvement in the release, which was basically a compilation of tracks from Kelly’s archives, a number of which had been officially posted online in the past.
When ‘I Admit It’ arrived on the digital platforms it was listed as being released by Legacy Recordings, which is a label owned by Kelly’s former record company Sony Music. However, both Sony and Legacy also denied any involvement in the release, and it later transpired that the record had been delivered to the streaming services via Universal Music owned distributor Ingrooves.
As soon as execs at the distributor became aware that the new Kelly album had been delivered via their platform they requested that the record be removed by the streaming services. Sources have told Billboard that the company is now investigating how the Kelly record got through, and has also ended its deal with the client that actually uploaded the album, which is reportedly LA-based Real Talk Entertainment.
Kelly, of course, is in prison having been found guilty in the New York courts of running a criminal enterprise to access and abuse women and teenagers. He was also subsequently convicted of enticing minors to engage in criminal sexual activity and of filming that abuse in his home city of Chicago.
It’s not clear how or why Real Talk Entertainment came to be uploading a new Kelly album. It was recently claimed that the musician had sold a stack of music rights to a childhood friend last year, allegedly in a bid to stop those rights from being seized by a court in order to pay damages to Heather Williams, who accused Kelly of sexual abuse and won a lawsuit by default in 2020. However, those were meant to be interests in Kelly’s songs rather than his recordings.
The title of the short lived new Kelly album comes from a previously released 2018 track in which the musician responded to the various allegations that had been made against him over the years. Despite the title, in it he denies all the claims of abuse and criminal conduct.
