Drake’s label situation has never been short of complicated. This is just to give a little background on how his label situation shaped up early in his career.
Drake started his career with Room for Improvement and Comeback Season. Both sold well and during this period he was unsigned. In 2009, while still unsigned he released So Far Gone. This tape was massively successful gaining thousands of downloads within hours of release. A major label bidding war started around Drake but rumors circulated that Drake had signed with Young Money.
The deal looked like this:
TLDR: Drake got f***ed over by his management early in his career and his label deals were a mess and led to him getting paid almost nothing in terms of recording profits during the first 5 years of his career.
At the same time Aspire were f***ing over Jas Prince (son of J Prince) in terms of recording profits. He was the one who discovered Drake and under the initial contract Aspire had to pay him 22% of their share of recording profits.
Once Drake’s management deal with Aspire was up, he dropped them and hired Future the Prince and Oliver as his managers. He remains close to J and Jas Prince.
Again, this is a pain in the ass to try and properly verify because the documents detailing Drake’s initial deal have been removed. Regardless, label deals, especially major label deals and initial deals tend to come attached to a certain number of albums. You’re signed on to that label for the first x albums of your career. There’re obviously stipulations about what constitutes an album, but this is generally how it works.
Drake started to advertise his next project, Views from the 6 in June 2014. This is his last album for his initial deal. However on February 13th 2015, he dropped If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late out of the blue.
So what’s the conspiracy?
The conspiracy suggests, that Drake dropped If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late without label knowledge, releasing it in order to fulfill contractual obligations so that he could renegotiate or change labels prior to releasing his next studio album. Think what Frank Ocean did with Endless but a year and a half earlier.
There are hints and pieces of evidence purported to verify this throughout.
The album title is supposedly directed at Birdman – by the time he’s seeing that album cover and reading it, it’s too late and Drake has fulfilled his contract obligations with the release.
The album cover features a scrawl that many likened to a hostage note
The album included shots at his label on ‘Star67’ - "Walk up in my label like, ‘Where the check, though?’/ Yeah I said it, wouldn't dap you with the left, ho."
The project included a long list of thank you’s of which none mentioned Birdman or YMCMB.
In a May 2015 freestyle Drake said “Had n****s tell me to my face how we were family and how they love me/While they were skimming off the budget.”
The album was initially made available for free on soundcloud and later removed – however the links remained on the OVO Blog.
The album featured Wayne who at the time was in the middle of a $51m lawsuit to get contractual freedom and ownership back from YMCMB. Wayne also had discussed wanting to take Drake and Nicki with him when he left.
The list of Thank Yous attached to the album
The truth is its basically impossible to know. What is clear is that there were tensions between Drake and YMCMB in 2014-15. It is clear that Drake intended the project to be at least available for free in addition to for sale but YMCMB blocked that and said it would count for contractual obligations. Did Drake want it to be free and paid so it would count contractually while also reaping minimal profits for the label? Who knows? What is also true is that Drake renegotiated his contract with YMCMB prior to the release of Views which indicates that regardless of intention, Drake likely ended up better off for that release. Drake later sued YMCMB, as did Aspire, in order to gain back recording profits.
The other thing is that Drake is now label free. As mentioned on Scorpion, with the release of that album he finished contractual obligations and chose to create a new label called OVO. This is a different label to OVO Sound which is a subsidiary of Warner. So an artist like dvsn is on OVO Sound and under a major label while Drake is under his self-owned independent label OVO. You may notice that many of Drake’s releases now say ‘Republic Records’ or ‘Under Exclusive License to xyz’. This is because Drake now uses labels exclusively for distribution. He owns his masters, he has full creative freedom to create music and then he licenses that music to labels on a case by case basis. He likely gets funding to create the project and the distributor label funds the marketing and rollout. He keeps a large cut of recording profits and gives the label a smaller cut for distributing the album for him. Please be aware that this is about as independent as a major artist will ever choose to be. It allows him to reap the benefits of the label resources while having all the power and control that label signees lack. Frank Ocean for example uses Warner for publishing and XL Recordings for physical distribution. Drake could at any time opt to go completely label free but realistically his current situation likely gives him an incredibly favorable deal.
this is a shorter one so im not gonna @ people for it or put the |safe bit in the title ✌️
next proper one gonna be a data one on playlist payola by labels and artists that are particularly guilty of it so look out for that one sometime next week
not reading all that
Damn this is a very long post
its a lot shorter than my other ones
not reading all that
fair enough
in short its a breakdown of the idea that IYRTITL was an album specifically made to get out of Drakes YMCMB contract
the conspiracy says he released it without label knowledge and the title is a jab at that
basically meant he could renegotiate his contract prior to Views which was always gonna be a big seller
what you think about that idea?
tldr plz
in short its a breakdown of the idea that IYRTITL was an album specifically made to get out of Drakes YMCMB contract
the conspiracy says he released it without label knowledge and the title is a jab at that
basically meant he could renegotiate his contract prior to Views which was always gonna be a big seller
what you think about that idea?
this is a shorter one so im not gonna @ people for it or put the |safe bit in the title ✌️
next proper one gonna be a data one on playlist payola by labels and artists that are particularly guilty of it so look out for that one sometime next week
So another thread on drake
So another thread on drake
drake definitely a culprit but I suspect that hes not gonna rank too high given his popularity
depends how I do the methodology
I think the biggest ones are gonna be washed pop artists like Katy Perry
Too long tbh
read the TLDR in the other post