Timbaland says that he and Swizz Beatz are focused on making Verzuz a “serious business model” amid its ongoing break. The legendary producer discussed the upcoming third season of the show during a recent interview with AllHipHop. Speaking with the outlet, he also detailed what fans can expect from the series going forward.
“Verzuz is still a baby,” he explained, “It was something that was built in the pandemic that’s now a household name. Look how you saying it. Now we back open. To make it have the longevity that we need it to have, we have to reorganize the ship. We have to know how are we scaling up. We have to do things not how people used to us doing things.”
Timbaland & Swizz Beatz In Miami Beach
Timbaland also explained that they’re working on transitioning Verzuz out of the pandemic model in which it began. “With everything going on in the world, we have to convert back and really make this a real serious business model and a real serious thing, because I feel like Verzuz changes people’s lives,” he said. “What me and Swizz have created, we have changed the lives of a lot of things and built up catalogs, so we have to really structure who we are and when we come back, what we stand for.”
Despite this, Timbaland knows they can’t switch up the model so much it becomes unrecognizable. “Once you reintroduce a business that you built in front of people, it has to be somewhat nostalgic of what it was, but as it builds into what the future is going to be, you have to organize—and that’s what we’ve been doing,” he added. “I believe that we’re gonna drop some good ones before the end of the year. We’re trying to get at least one good one before the end of the year to recalibrate what Verzuz is going to be in the future.” He also says the battles need to be authentic and compared the brand-building to WWE. “It’s almost how we look at the WWE and wrestling. It’s like, ‘OK, now I gotta do WrestleMania, I gotta do this, I gotta do that.’ I gotta build this stuff to captivate the people,” he said.
[Via]