Meg Thee Stallion has been one rap’s favourite rising stars. From her taking photo booth pictures with Beyonce and Blue Ivy or twerking in celebration as she submits her college assignments on Turntin, she’s just able to do it all Her infectious, playful lyrics and mantras make her a favourite amongst her fans who she warmly refers to as ‘hotties’. 

Though her career has been on an unstoppable ascension, it has still been met with some hiccups which seemed minuscule in the grand scheme of things. Thee Stallion heavily promoted The Fever Movie, directed by Hype Williams, which never came out and there was never a Cash Shit video.  Fans wondered what was holding up on a seemingly 

This week, the Houston rapper revealed on an Instagram live that she is unable to release new music due to a contractual agreement with her former label, 1501 Certified Entertainment. Towards the end of last year, she signed a momentous management deal with Roc Nation. Megan claims she didn’t know what was in her contract when she signed it at 20 years old. She’s asked for terms within her contracts to be renogitated and her request was denied by 1501.

“Soon as I said, ‘I want to renegotiate my contract,’ everything went left,. “It just all went bad. It all went left. So now they’re tellin’ a b*tch that she can’t drop no music.”

“When I signed, I didn’t really know what was in my contract,” “I was young, I think I was 20. And I didn’t know everything that was in that contract. So when I got with Roc Nation, I got management—real management. I got real lawyers, and they were like, ‘Do you know that this is in your contract?’.

Megan ended the Instagram live with #FreeTheeStallion, a hashtag which has been met with pity and anger towards the singer but an equal amount of criticism regarding her naivety and lack of scrutiny of the contract . 

This week the specifics of Meg’s contract revealed the extent of how bad her contract is, resembling the slave contracts of the early 90s. It’s a criminal 60/40 split. 1501 gets 60% of her recording income and that payment to third parties such as producers, mixers, remixers and featured artists is paid out of her 40% interest — a split she noted is well below industry standards. She also said the contract allows 1501 exclusive rights to control her live performances and touring, obtaining 30% of all her touring money, even as the label has no infrastructure to administer her copyrights or handle her touring. And she said the contract gives 1501 30% of all her merchandising. Meg has over  1 billion streams and sold more than 300,000 individual track downloads – earning an estimated $7 million in revenue – but she has only been paid $15,000 by the label. Meg has an atrocious deal, almost appearing worse than a 360 deal (a deal in which the label takes a percentage of all an artist’s earnings) which is considered bottom of the barrel in the music industry.

But Meg’s contract is apart of a long history of exploitative contracts by record labels whichs transcend time, race and sex. After winning two awards at the Grammys in 1996, TLC revealed that they were broke, despite selling 10 million records. At the height of their career, their take home was only about $35,000 a year.

P Diddy’s contractual hold on the Lox was so strong, that a ‘Free The Lox’ campaign was held just to get them out of their oppressive contract in which P Diddy owned 50 percent of their publishing. During a heated argument on Hot 97 with Angie Martinez, Jadakiss threatened to throw a refrigerator at P Diddy.

Even the largest music stars have been subjected to exploitative, slave contracts. Within weeks of eachother Kelis and Mase revealed how little money they had been paid from contracts they signed in their youth. Kelis spoke about her fallout with Pharrel and co-collaborator Chad Hugo which was due to her bad contract. “I was told we were going to split the whole thing 33/33/33, which we didn’t do,” the singer says. In the end, she made nothing from sales of her first two albums but was making so much money from touring, she didn’t notice. She confronters her partners are simply retort, well you signed it.

Following P Diddy’s Grammys speech about artists taking back control, Mase took to Instagram to publicly shame P Diddy for denying him his masters.

And despite Taylor Swift having good lawyers at the time she signed her original contract with Big Machine Records, there were still clauses and terms which are affecting her in present day. This came after Scooter Braun bought Big Machine records last June and thus gained ownership of Swift’s master recordings. She is being prevented from playing any of her old music. Swift also said that her old music was being barred from being used in her upcoming Netflix documentary. 

Signing a bad deshe ial with your label and later being embroiled in legal contract battles has been dubbed a rite of passage in the music industry. You go through it at a young age, recoup the losses and then make millions later in your career.

Meg’s revelation came as even more of a shock as these slave contracts had been dubbed a thing of the of 90s and early 2000s. It appeared the music industry was in the age of artist indeppendance, with the streaming era breaking the shackles of label reliance. However,  that’s not the case. Meg is just another casualty of the music industry. There were many before her, and there’ll be many after her. Meg’s fate is not the exception, it’s the rule.