Rapper Megan Thee Stallion says her label prevents her from releasing new music.
The star, who released the single Hot Girl Summer, which sold platinum last year, says she has been frozen since she asked to renegotiate her contract.
“I didn’t really know what was in my contract,” she said on Instagram Live. “I was young. I was 20 years old.”
“So now they say [me] this [I] cannot drop any music. It’s really just a gourmet game, “she added.
The musician, whose real name is Megan Pete, signed her contract with 1501 Entertainment in 2018. She only became aware of the problems with the contract last year when she hired a new management team.
“They were like, ‘Do you know it’s in your contract?’ And I thought, “Oh, damn, this is crazy. No I did not know.”
“It’s not that I literally haven’t read [the contract]”, She explained,” is that I did not understand the verbiage at the time.
“Now that I do it, I just wanted it fixed.”
After the rapper released his statement, the hashtags #FreeMeg and #FreeTheStallion began to make their way onto social media, and other artists shared similar experiences.
“I’m not going to put this solely on the situation of my label because I had other things going on,” wrote British rapper Nadia Rose. “But being unable to get my music out was one of the most heartbreaking feelings I have ever had. I had a severe depression, suicidal thoughts … God, my family [and] therapy saved me. “
Separately, American star Juicy J spent the weekend chatting with his label, smoking in a tweet: “I have given Columbia Records more than 20 years of my life and they treat me like a backwash . I’m going to release my entire album, stay tuned. “
A few minutes later, the star released a short poisonous song (the title of which is not printable here) saying that he was treated like a “slave”.
“If I waited for Columbia, I would be broke here,” he said. “I sold albums, sold tours but I never sold my soul.”
The song ended with a sample of Prince’s acceptance speech for Artist Of The Decade at the 2000 Soul Train Awards, where he spoke about his own battle against Warner Bros Records.
“As long as you are under contract, you will take a minority share of the earnings,” warned the star to his fellow musicians.
Juicy J’s song had an almost immediate impact. By the end of the day, the rapper had deleted all of his messages on Columbia, removed his song from streaming services, and delivered a conciliatory message on Twitter: “Talked to @ColumbiaRecords. We’re all good!”
Megan, Nadia and Juicy J are not alone. The record industry has a long and reprehensible history of mistreating artists, skimping on royalty payments and tying them to unfair contracts.
The Union of Musicians offers a standard contract to help groups avoid being exploited. But if it’s too late for that, here are some of the creative ways that artists have gotten out of bad business.
1) Van Morrison’s contractual bond album
One day in 1967, Van Morrison entered a recording studio in New York and recorded 31 songs. All were horrible – but that was precisely the point.
The star had become frustrated with her label, Bang Records, who wanted more pop success in the vein of Brown Eyed Girl; when he was drawn to the more mystical and jazz-inspired sounds that inspired his 1968 album, Astral Weeks.
Morrison’s contract stipulated that he owed Bang Records exactly 36 songs; so the famous earthy star decided to record them all at once. The results are short, improvised and angry, Morrison’s guitar slowly detuning over the sessions.
The lyrics are weird. “I can see by the look on your face / that you have ringworm,” he sings on Ring Worm. “Do you want a Danish?” he inquires about Want A Danish. “No thanks, I’ve just eaten”.
However, the tactic did not really work. Morrison’s songs weren’t released until 2017. He finally terminated the Bang Record contract when the owner, Bert Berns, died of a heart attack.
There is a superbly detailed article on sessions on longreads.com.
2) TLC takes its label boss hostage
Until the arrival of the Spice Girls, TLC was the best-selling group of girls of all time. But despite selling 65 million records, they were only making $ 75,000 each.
This is mainly due to a contract that group members signed with manager Perri “Pebbles” Reid, who gave him ownership of the name, a percentage of their publication and a share of every dollar the group has ever earned.
Frustrated, the group decided to act – storming the offices of their label, Arista, and holding President Clive Davis hostage at gunpoint.
“We were sexy, because we didn’t understand how we were selling all of these records without showing anything. So it was like,” Okay, let’s go to the source, “said singer Rozanda” Chilli “Thomas at the BBC last year.
For backup, they brought a gang of women whom rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes had met in rehab.
“They were big girls, huge and scary,” recalls Thomas. “And unless we nodded, no one could come in or go out, no matter who it was.”
The impasse was finally resolved peacefully and the group renegotiated their contracts.
“We were little gangsters,” laughed Chilli, remembering the incident. “TLC is as close as possible to rock and roll”.
3) Frank Ocean plays a seven-year-old chess game
After Frank Ocean signed with Def Jam Records in 2009, he found himself in limbo. The label didn’t want to release its music because it didn’t have a big enough profile – but it couldn’t create a profile when nobody could hear it.
Finally, he took matters into his own hands, self-financing and automatically releasing the Nostalgia, Ultra mixtape. The buzz surrounding this disc prompted Def Jam to embark on the debut of the star, Channel Orange, who was nominated for the best album at the 2013 Grammys.
Instead of celebrating, Ocean implemented a clever plan – breaking ties with its management, its legal team and its publicist, and using its new wealth to buy all its master recordings and redeem itself from its contract.
As a condition of the arrangement, Def Jam obtained distribution rights for its next album, Endless. But Ocean insisted that it could only be broadcast as streaming video on Apple Music, hampering the label’s ability to profit from the album.
Then, the day after its release, Frank released Blonde – the official follow-up to Channel Orange – a higher record, the existence of which was completely hidden from its former label.
Speaking to the New York Times, Ocean described the release as the final step in a “seven-year chess game.”
4) Joss Stone redeems himself from his contract
“Free me, free me, EMI,” sang Joss Stone on his 2009 single, Free Me, a song released by his then label (yes, you guessed it) EMI.
The star had become disillusioned with her label after being bought by a private equity firm in 2007, saying she had “no working relationship” with the new owners.
When her fourth album collapsed, she decided to sever ties with EMI. The catch? She had to repay the advance granted to her when she signed her contract.
“I realized, ‘You two want completely different things. So give yourself to each other.’ They gave me my musical freedom and I gave them their money, “she later told ABC News.
Although Stone never confirmed the amount she paid, it has been estimated between £ 2 million and £ 7 million. Whatever the amount, the singer felt it was a fair price to pay for her happiness.
“It is expensive to make an album with orchestras and wonderful musicians,” she said. “But it’s not millions and millions of pounds [so] it’s my way of being happy. “
5) Taylor Swift re-records old songs
When Taylor Swift’s old label Big Machine was bought by Ariana Grande manager Scooter Braun last June, she made no bones about her dismay.
One of Braun’s occasional clients is Kanye West, who has been tormenting Swift for more than a decade, interrupting him at awards ceremonies, bashing him in his songs and inserting a wax from his naked body into a clip.
Swift believes Braun encouraged and approved some of these actions, which is why she felt “sad and disgusted” when Braun took control of her first six albums.
She called the deal “my worst case scenario” which “stripped me of the job of my life”. But then she came up with a plan: later this year, Swift will re-record all of her old music, reducing the value of the master tapes owned by Braun and his investment firm Ithaca Holdings.
In the future, if someone wants to license Shake It Off or Love Story for a movie or commercial, they’ll use the new version – owned and controlled by Swift.
She is not the first artist to airbrush their old recordings. In 2005, the Sugababes reissued their album Taller In More Ways, digitally erasing the voice of Mutya Buena and adding her replacement, Amelle Berrabah.
In 2012, Jeff Lynne reconstructed 11 classic ELO songs for a new Best Of album; pretend that the originals did not sound “as I had always heard them in my head”; while U2 never ceased to fiddle with its 1997 album, undercooked, remixing and re-recording songs from the disc that Bono once called “the most expensive demo session in the history of music”.
“Re-recording our back catalog is one way to empower us,” said Nick Feldman of Wang Chung, who made copies of their 80s hits Everybody Have Fun Tonight and Dancehall Days.
“We can be a lot more selective about where these songs go and how much we charge them.”
6) Prince swaps his name for a symbol
When Prince signed a $ 6 million contract with Warner Bros in 1992, it was the largest contract ever signed by a solo artist. But it was expensive – Warner Bros. owned all of Prince’s work.
Why did he allow this to happen? Tour director Alan Leeds thought it was because Prince was impatient to prevail over the multimillion-dollar deals that Janet Jackson and Madonna had recently signed.
“He was so desperate to get this title that he allowed his team to negotiate certain royalties, certain publishing rights and all kinds of things to obtain greater guarantees,” he told the biographer of the star, Matt Thorne.
As the reality of the deal came to mind, Warner Bros. demanded that Prince allow more time between his album releases, fearing that audiences would tire of his prolific production. It was like a red cloth for an already angry bull.
On his 35th birthday, the star announced that he would no longer bear the name of Prince, but rather a “Love Symbol” which was a mixture of gender symbols for men and women.
“Warner Bros has taken [my] name, filed it and used it as primary marketing to promote all the music I wrote, “he said in a press release.” The company has the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I just became a pawn used to make more money for Warner Bros. “
Of course, changing his name didn’t cancel the contract (otherwise we would all do it every time we bought a new car), but Prince’s feud lasted seven years, during which time he began to write the word “slave” on her face in the eyeliner.
In the end, he fulfilled his obligations by delivering a series of disposable albums filled with clippings and unfinished ideas.
Prince being Prince, of course, there are still gems on these discs – Papa, Dinner With Delores, Extraordinary, Gold – but ultimately he agreed with Warner Bros .: Releasing so much material in such a short time, everything removing the quality control filter has damaged its business prospects for years.
But Prince’s fight to protect his creative rights still has repercussions today. Artists are now more likely to demand ownership of their master tapes, or to seek other distribution agreements – such as Prince’s decision to publish music online or bundle CDs with concert tickets.
No wonder Juicy J sampled it by crossing swords with Columbia.
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