Dre’s cash remains Stranded On Death Row.
Dr Dre‘s 1992 G-Funk touchstone The Chronic continues to cast a long shadow (just ask 100s), but it seems the record has been causing the rapper/producer/bigwig a spot of financial bother. After some tortuous legal proceedings, Dre has been denied access to royalties for the album dating back as far as 2006, apparently leaving him $3m out of pocket.
The mildly convoluted story goes as follows. Under the initial oral agreement behind the album, The Chronic – issued on Death Row Records, the label Dre co-founded with Suge Knight – entitled the rapper to an 18% royalty rate, which crept up to 20% for sales above the million mark. Dre also received a 4% producer royalty. When Dre bought his way out of Death Row in 1996, his royalties arrangement supposedly remained intact, and he was also given the power to limit any further distribution of the record beyond “the manner heretofore distributed.”
In the intervening years, Death Row has hardly been the steadiest of ships: it filed for bankruptcy in 2006, and was subsequently bought by WIDEawake Entertainment Group Inc for $18m. The label’s back catalogue was then ostensibly acquired by a wing of Koch Entertainment for $280m in 2012.
During the shuffling, the label put out a new digital release of The Chronic without Dre’s permission. The rapper sued, with a judge finding in his favour in 2011. Since then, Dre has been pursuing unpaid royalties and a percentage of sales owed from 2006-2009: as Dre’s suits have put it in court, “the Trustee sold [his] records for three years and never paid [him] a single dime.”
As Billboard report, a bankruptcy judge ruled on Friday that Dre will not be able to recoup the missing royalties after all. The decision pivots on two factors: Dre’s failure to flag up Death Row’s benefit from sales of The Chronic at the time; and the tentative nature of the original oral contract with Death Row.
We can’t imagine Dre’s excessively miffed: he’s apparently about to sell his Beats megabrand to Apple, making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Dre, naturally, features in our recent rundown of 10 ghostwritten hip-hop tracks and the unlikely ghostwriters behind them.
