TOO $HORT’S 10 REASONS TO SAY “FUCK A MAJOR LABEL” 10 09
money against your little 15% or 20%. Everybody has a fucked up contract. If you ever get to the point where you can get rid of all those clauses, you’ll be good, but it’s a lot of bullshit in the entertainment industry. That goes for all aspects, not just being a rapper.
Be Your Own Boss You can be your own boss. You run your own situation – nobody can tell you what to do.
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Complete Creative Control A major label will tell you what order to put your songs in, which one is the next single, what’s the next video, how much the video budget is going to be, what you’re supposed to wear in the video, and who’s supposed to shoot your video.
Sign All The Tight Rappers In Your Neighborhood Everybody who’s a rapper who’s experienced any kind of success knows where they come from, and throughout the history of their own career and their own struggle, they’ve come across a guy who’s really close to you – your cousin, your homie, your best friend’s little brother – that deserves that shot. When you’re in an independent situation, you pretty much have the resources and the know-how and the ability to give it to them. You can do what you do for yourself, for the next homie. It doesn’t cost a lot to put out an indie album. You can put out $25,000-$50,000 to invest in your homeboy and you could make a lot more back.
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Make More Money You can make more money indie. A major label will make you a star, but independent labels will make you rich. You make real money, and they’ll actually pay you.
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Less Pressure It’s not as much pressure being indie. Being on a major label, you’re always gonna have certain expectations. These days, major labels are looking to ship at least 500,000 copies of your album and build on that. They aren’t really interested in trying to make an album go gold. They want platinum or better. They want instant success. There’s a lot of pressure to be instantly successful. Sometimes you have to work a record. It’s so much pressure because if your first single isn’t blowing up the charts, the label is gonna back away from your project.
You’ll Stay Hungry Independents can’t always ball like the majors, so it causes you to sit at home and watch BET and MTV and know in your heart that you’re just as good, if not better, than a lot of people that you see enjoying success. It just makes you have that hunger and work harder and hustle harder and not give up, so you can get on that level. Some artists start their career off trying to be on BET on a major label, and all they do is try to figure out how to take pictures and package themselves so major labels will buy into their image. When you’re indie, you gotta be hungry.
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Longevity Independents have a better chance of having a longer career. It might not be BET, MTV, superstar status, but you can find your niche and sell a certain amount of units every time you drop a project, and that’ll be enough money for you to feed your family. You have a better chance of putting out 12, 15 albums indie than you do on a major label. There’s not a lot of rappers on a major label that can say they’ve got 10 or 15 albums. If you check out the indies across the country and see how many mixtapes or underground albums they’ve put out, the indies probably have a better track record than the majors as far as recording and releasing songs.
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Your Homeboys You have a better chance of helping out your really close friends if you’re in control of your own indie situation. If you’re with a major, it might not be as easy to employ some of your homeboys and teach them the game. The majors don’t have the time or patience to bring in inexperienced people and let them learn the business. If you’re indie, you and your crew can learn through trial and error; on-the-job training. When you have on-the-job training, you might end up like Baby and Slim: executives. You learn hands-on in the streets running your indie label, and ten years label, you’re dealing with all the majors, building Lil Wayne’s career and shit.
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Bad Contracts If you go with a major, you have to sign that shit. It’s really hard to earn your way to dealing with a major and getting a super, super excellent contract. That’s a hard thing to do. A major will never say, “We’ll give you the greatest contract ever.” The majority of the people in the industry have fucked up contracts. They may think they have a good contract, but if you were to tell the average person in average words – just plain English, not contract terms – what the contract says, they’d be shocked. In most cases, the label gets like 80% and the artist gets like 20%. The artist gets charged half of everything and the label gets charged half of everything to market and promote the project. So the label gets 80% but they’re splitting the costs, and they’ll hold high percentages in reserve. They’ll just hold their
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short dog’s on your mind, bitch
96
RAY TAMARRA
You’ll Get A Better Deal Being on a major label is not a bad thing. If you really wanna end up on a major label eventually, being independent and saying “fuck a major” will probably get you a better deal than if you just concentrated on packaging yourself to get a deal. If you say fuck all that and just put it down indie and say “fuck a major” and hustle really good, the majors are gonna call you and you’ll get a better deal.