Halsey spoke out against their record label on Sunday.
The Without Me singer, who uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, told fans on TikTok that her label, Astralwerks, is allegedly blocking the release of their new song for marketing reasons.
“Basically, I have a song that I love that I want to release ASAP, but my record label won’t let me,” reads the text in the video. “I’ve been in this industry for eight years and I’ve sold over 165 million records and my record company is saying I can’t release (the song) unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok.
“Everything is marketing and they are doing this to basically every artist these days. I just wanna release music, man. and i deserve better tbh. I’m tired.”
The text accompanies a video of Halsey looking at the camera as the unreleased track plays in the background.
One user commented that the singer had given her label their “viral moment” with the new TikTok post, and she replied, “Bruh I wish it was haha. They just said I have to post tiktoks they didn’t specifically say ‘about what’ so here I am (laughing emoji).”
They also told another user that their label allegedly wanted them to post six viral TikToks.
Halsey followed up her video with another TikTok in which a man can be heard off-screen talking about the marketing strategy for her song, which he called So Good. The video shows Halsey telling him, “I just hate this… it sucks.”
The caption of the post reads: “I wish I was kidding lol”.