Megan Thee Stallion. Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Is Megan Thee Stallion a free woman? That’s what the “Bongos” rapper declared after years of battling her former label, 1501 Certified Entertainment.
“This part of my album is very much so funded by Megan because we’re trying to get off… Y’all know what’s the tea. But I have no label right now,” said Megan, 28, during an Instagram Live session on October 12. Megan said that her upcoming music is being funded out of her own pocket and would be under the “Hot Girl Productions” banner. “The next sh-t y’all about to see about to be all straight from Megan Thee Stallion, Megan Thee Stallion’s brain, Megan Thee Stallion wallet.”
“We’re in my pockets, hotties!” she told her fans, stressing that she’ll need their support now that she’s taking care of everything. “I’m so excited to be doing something for the first time independent[ly] since it was just me and my mama.”
“It’s really just me, this go around until we sign to a new label. But, I don’t wanna sign to a new label right now because I just wanna do it myself,” Meg added.
Megan The Stallion first clashed with 1501 Certified Entertainment, the label founded in 2016 by ex-MLB player Carl Crawford, in 2020. She sued the label, claiming they were blocking her from releasing music while refusing to negotiate or terminate a contract she called “entirely conscionable,” per The Fader.
When Megan signed a management deal with Roc Nation in 2019, the lawyers for Roc Nation found that her deal split the recording profits 60-40 in favor of 1501 and that they got a cut of income streams outside of recorded music, which includes live shows and commercial deals.
The judge later ruled in favor of Megan in 2020, resulting in the release of her Suga EP. The clashes continued again, with Megan suing over the label blocking a remix of BTS’s “Butter.”
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She also sued the label in 2022 over whether or not her 2021 compilation album, Something for Thee Hotties, counted as an “album.” Megan argued that it did, and along with 2022’s Traumazine and 2020’s Good News, she believed she fulfilled the number of albums she was to record under her deal with 1501.
The label countersued, saying that Something for Thee Hotties – being a collection of previously released freestyles and unreleased archive tracks – only had 29 minutes of new material and wasn’t pre-approved by the label.
Megan later amended the initial complaint, demanding $1 million in damages. In December 2022, a Texas judge rejected 1501 Certified Entertainment’s request that Something for Thee Hotties be declared less than an album under her contract. This ruling would pave the way for a trial to commence. However, The Fader noted that less than 1 percent of these artist-label disputes ever reach court, with one or both parties opting to settle instead.
