Jay-Z is staking legal claim to the master recordings of his iconic debut album.
The rapper will officially regain the rights to his 1996 album Reasonable Doubt in 2031. The legal move comes after Dame Dash’s attempted sell of his stake in Jay’s debut studio album received the greenlight to proceed.
Dash, who has been trying to sell his Roc-A-Fella shares, will see his 33.3% stake in the record company auctioned off later this month. The minimum bid for Dash’s stake is $1.2 million. The winning bidder of the auction will receive one-third of the revenue from Reasonable Doubt for approximately six years before Jay-Z owns it in perpetuity.
In a filing, Jay-Z’s attorneys reportedly submitted a notice to make parties aware of copyright ownership. The alleged document states that, although his famed record label, Roc-A-Fella, is the current copyright holder, that will change in 2031.
At that time, “those rights will revert to one Shawn Carter/’Jay-Z,’” according to the document. The highly revered album first kicked off a legal spat between the duo in 2021, when Dame Dash tried to offer up the body of work as an NFT for hip-hop head to collect. But, that was supposedly shut down with the court’s intervention by 2022.
The bidder must be able to deposit $240,000
As TMZ suggests, the legal move isn’t personal, just business. Legally, the copyrights would have gone back to Jay-Z 35 years after the album was released. The Roc Nation founder’s attorneys simply initiated the necessary paperwork to make it official.
In 2023, Dash admitted his struggles to make timely child support payments, which he attributes to financial woes related to his entrepreneur pursuits.
“While I’m investing in something else, I might not be making the money and the profit, so I can’t afford to pay out what I was when I was having EBITA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Amortization) of eight million dollars a year,” the 52-year-old told Moreno. “So you can’t judge how much I’m gonna pay out by how much I made 20 years ago.”
On August 29, Dash’s stake will reportedly be sold off at a public auction in New York City. The bidder must be able to deposit $240,000 at the time of sale.