Popular rapper Future released his latest album, Dirty Sprite 2, a few days ago, and the investigative reporters at The Fader noticed something interesting about the album’s artwork: It looks surprisingly similar to a stock photo from image site Shutterstock. We don’t know how the site noticed that—or who tipped them off to it—because recognizing something like this would either require a bizarre amount of luck or an intense familiarity with the library of stock photo sites.
Either way, Fader dug into this mystery and tracked down Sanja Tošić, the Solvenian artist who created the original image. She explained that she did sell the rights to the image to Future’s label, Epic Records, through Shutterstock—so this is all on the up-and-up—and she was paid somewhere between $0.33 and $80 for it. (She wouldn’t give the exact figure, as it’s all based around licenses and percentages.) Fader also spoke with a representative at Shutterstock, who claimed that there has been at least one other case where a record label used one of its stock images as “the cover of a popular single.”
As for Tošić, she hadn’t even heard for Future before this, but now she’s hoping to buy a copy of his album. So, even though he didn’t hire a fancy photographer to make his cover art, it’s still going to result in at least one sale. That’s what’s great about America and/or Slovenia.