Making an appearance on Canada’s Business News Network to speak about his Animal Ambition rollout and departure from Interscope, 50 Cent explained negotiating a $23 million payout for the sales of his singles while at the label.
Initially asked about his own personal expectations for his Animal Ambition release, 50 Cent said the album will serve as his reintroduction.
“I’m excited about it,” he said. “You can expect it to be exciting. For me it’s my reintroduction. ‘Cause I’ve spent a long time period on hiatus. I was in the back portion in the music business. I was in the business portion of music for four years. Because it was my fifth and final album requirement for Interscope we was in a position where we would have to do audits and go through the books and everything. It was conflicts in different areas. My album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin is the largest debuting Hip Hop album and the way we sold ringtones at that point is exactly how we sell the single. So, the language in the contracts spoke to the same light and the way I would be paid off a ringtone…if that’s the way I was to be paid off the singles would mean that they owed me like another $23 million maybe. So we went through that process and it took—for four years actually. It took a while for us to get through it.
“I was paid,” he added with a smile. “And then everything was comfortably—we resumed back to making music. Then, what I was getting out of the response to the actual music made me feel like I lost that camaraderie we had at one point. Not in touch with the audience but within the actual system itself because Interscope’s priorities shifted. They created Beats Audio. And Beats was the priority of things over there and I had already committed to my own audio company, SMS Audio. It was like I’m the competing company while actually being signed to the company as an artist. I couldn’t get the leverage I needed to properly launch the project. I went another route. I went the Eminem route.”
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50 Cent Speaks On Animal Ambition Release Campaign
On the subject of the recent influx of alternative release campaigns from major artists like Beyonce and Radiohead, 50 Cent explained wanting to preview the quality of his material in full as an incentive for his fans.
“Look,” he said. “They can tease to it and get people excited so they can buy it or you can actually give it to them and it ensures them that they’re buying something that’s worth buying because they’ve heard several projects. I have music that I bought months after the actual album was released because I knew it was something that I actually wanted to hear. If you view it and you say, ‘Well, you put everything out, why am I supposed to be excited to buy it?’ Did you hear it when it came out? When they heard it when it actually came out, if it was good to you then why is it not good now? When it came out over a period that they would say is only sufficient for them to launch one song. We previously would launch records and it would take six to eight weeks for it to reach a position that we would know whether it would make it into the Top 10 records.”
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“I actually decided to create a campaign for the actual record that can sustain the audience,” he later said. “Because it has to sustain your interest for one week until the next song comes, until the next song comes, until the next song comes. And the actual visuals match the song so if you weren’t impressed by the music you’ll understand creatively why it’s the way it is when you see the images. It’s obviously a more complex presentation because you have to be really premeditated. You have to know what each one of your songs are gonna feel like. We only needed to know what three looked like. With three records because we’re only shooting three music videos before you sold millions of records. The adjustments are technology.”
50 Cent’s Animal Ambition is planned for a June 3 release and features appearances from Jadakiss, Kidd Kidd, Prodigy, Styles P, and more.
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