Having seen the company’s image plagued by rumors of bad business deals [click to read] and allegations of violence, Death Row Records‘ new owner has a few simple plans for her new investment.
“Our goal is to make sure that fans’ first taste of the new Death Row is stuff that’s fresh,”WIDEawake CEO Lara Lavi tells the Wall Street Journal. “There’s so much video and artwork and music that’s never been seen by fans…We’re going to put a Death Row online destination store site together.”
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Lavi‘s company purchased the remaining Death Row catalogue at an auction on January 15 for $18 million [click to read]. As she goes about the task of remaking the company’s image, her statements about its former owner sound decidedly different from Death Row‘s previous suitors.
“Suge doesn’t own this thing anymore” adds Lavi. “As long as we keep pulling it back to that, it makes it very hard to go forward, and it’s painful for the artists. I really want these artists to feel good. Mr. Knight is a business man. And I think he comes from a community with these artists, and they know each other and they’re going to continue to know each other. It’s not about what he influences but how we go forward as a team to create a new day for Death Row.”
The two-week-old purchase makes Lavi the owner of a cadre of unreleased recordings from the likes of Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Tha Dogg Pound. She likely also inherits material from artists such as Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez, Crooked I [click to read] and Petey Pablo, who were signed when Knight rechristened the label as Tha Row. Lavi asserts that she’s aware of how much of a drastic change her image is from her predecessor’s.
“There is an irony to a singer/songwriter/entertainment lawyer/soccer mom now being the chief of this thing,” says Lavi, who also co-founded Very Juicy Records with her husband, producer Maurice Jones Jr.“I’ve been married for many, many years to an African-American man. I’ve had the blessing of being exposed to music that perhaps my upbringing would not have suggested would be possible.”
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Former Death Row artists Daz, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre have attempted to either sue Death Row, or outright buy back their catalogues in the past [click to read]. Lavi expressed hopes of re-establishing a relationship with them and former artists.
“[We need] to have a healing process with the Death Row artists, and that is probably one of my first priorities…to systematically talk to the artists that have quality catalogs in the Death Row asset purchase and get things on a better level,”Lavi says. “They deserve better than this. Their product has been sitting in a bankruptcy proceeding for the past three years. Much of it hasn’t seen the light of day.”
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