There wasn’t a more appropriate title for a tour than “Back Outside” for Lil Baby and Lil Durk’s joint venture. Fresh off of the release of their joint project The Voice Of The Heroes, which debuted atop the Billboard 200, they revealed that they will be hitting the road this fall in their first touring efforts since the pandemic began. Surely, it’ll be one of the biggest hip-hop tours featuring two of the hottest rappers right now.
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If there’s one person who doubts the success of Baby and Durk’s venture, it’s DJ Akademiks. The media personality recently sat down for a lengthy conversation with Flagrant 2 podcast where he explained why he doesn’t think the “Back Outside” tour will be a success. In his opinion, the possibilities of Lil Baby and Lil Durk being able to sell out 10,000+ capacity arenas are slim, even with their commercial success.
“Lil Baby’s trying to do arenas about 10,000 to 15,000,” Ak said. “Could you imagine? It’s Baby. They said his tour’s doing bad. You’ll never see him post that his tour is sold out. It’s not selling that much.”
Akademiks then began comparing the potential success of the “Back Outside” tour to Jack Harlow’s venture. He admitted that there’s a chance the pandemic played a role in the ticket sales for Lil Baby and Lil Durk’s tour but he believes they could’ve been able to sell out every arena if they booked smaller venues.
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“Jack Harlow’s doing smaller venues. 2,000 [people capacity] venues. Sold out. All them shits sold out,” he continued. “With Baby — as much as you would think if I told you to name five current artists that you think are the biggest, he would be on that list.”
Andrew Schulz disagreed that Baby is among the biggest artists in the world. Schulz said that there’s possibly a disconnect between Baby’s appeal between Black communities and white communities in America which could be a factor in the ticket sales projection.
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“I hear certain people within hip-hop say like, ‘Lil Baby is the biggest thing in the world,'” Schulz said. “I can’t speak on behalf of all whites but I have a feeling that Lil Baby is massive among Black people and there’s a huge chasm between white and black people getting on board and that’s your ticket sales slump.”
Check out the full episode below with the bit about Lil Baby starting at the 2:22:30 mark.