Last year, MetroBoomin unleashed a tweetstorm calling out Atlantic for formulaic “hit-making” practices just last year. Now more producers have gripes with the label. Producer E.Dan of ID Labs recently revealed that Atlantic Records shortchanged them on payments by arbitrarily categorizing albums as mixtapes and “street albums.” Producer Marvel Alexander confirmed the practice isn’t Atlantic-exclusive by revealing that RCA Records paid him and his partner only $1,000 for ASAP Ferg’s “Hood Pope” because they categorized Ferg’s Trap Lord album a mixtape — purportedly to get out of sample costs. Alexander said the late ASAP Yams told him the circumstance was simply “paying dues.”
awful. i’m taking irv gotti’s advice from now on – charge your advance fee plus 50k on the back end that comes out of the artist’s show money. they tell you sales are low so they can lowball you but they got a 360 and are eating off the shows as well. https://t.co/nz3jDOZ2zB
— DJ Burn One (@djburnone) January 3, 2018
Rising producer TM88 must have some more imaginary “dues” to pay of his own, because he says he still hasn’t been compensated for “XO Tour Life,” Lil Uzi Vert’s ubiquitous banger. TM88 announced today on Twitter that he hasn’t seen a dime of proceeds from the triple platinum song, and called Atlantic Records “the worst label in the history of f*ck sh*t.”
https://twitter.com/TM88/status/949354256250867713
https://twitter.com/TM88/status/949363540279906304
https://twitter.com/TM88/status/949353136971501568
https://twitter.com/TM88/status/949352138089443328
It looks like Atlantic Records have a lot of angry producers on their hands, hopefully they can rectify the situation with these artists and continue their streak of successful acts such as Uzi, Kodak Black, and Cardi B. And on the flipside, producers should definitely consider unionizing like Sonny Digital suggested last year.
