Lyfe Jennings claims that he is owed millions of dollars from his former record label, Sony Music.
While on the BagFuel podcast, the “Must Be Nice” singer discussed promotional expenses and revealed the label spent money on his music videos and that “they’re allowed to recoup half of it.”
He added, “They also still own the video forever. Like they own one hundred in the video, money’s made all the video.” Jennings explained how Sony Music recouped all of the money from his entire music video and that he was given a “three-year window” to audit the label.
“That’s when they kill you,” he said. “So then when you finally realize, years later, when you might be having a couple of money problems and somebody put in your ear, ‘Yo, they weren’t supposed to do this and they owe you…’ ‘Cause Sony really owe me like about $15 million, bro.”
Lyfe Jennings explained, “Which means that if your third album tanks but your first two albums was low, they can recoup the tanking from your third album from your first two. He continued, “I didn’t have that in my contract but when I looked they had cross-collateralized everything.”
He also revealed that the music label owes him $1 million from his 2004 debut album Lyfe 268-192. “So now they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, we made some calculation errors, but you didn’t catch it in three years, so we don’t owe you nothing.”
Jennings began the auditing process but decided to not go through it due to the expenses getting higher. “The reason why I didn’t do it is because look how these cats play and I respect it,” he said. “When we put in to get all the paperwork, no bulls**t, we got a FedEx truck with probably like 40 boxes in it.”
He continued, “And if they owe me $15 million it makes financial sense that they can spend $5 million just making this s**t go on 80 years. But for me, I only got a certain budget, so I took out what was said in the beginning- I just accepted it, because it is what it is. I don’t got the money to fight them, I’ll be more careful next time.”