50 Cent's departure from Interscope was a long time coming, as the rapper reveals in a new interview with Business News Network, it took four years to negotiate. 50 says he received a payout of $23 million upon leaving Interscope.
Fif spoke on his excitement for his upcoming album Animal Ambition with BNN, and how he's considering it his reintroduction to the rap game.
50 said, "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."
Fif explains how the importance of Beats Audio for Interscope served as somewhat of a conflict with his own headphones line, SMS Audio. This factor also led to his departure from the major label.
"I was paid," 50 said of the $23 million Interscope owed him. "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."
Watch the full interview below.