JAY-Z Says Getting Rights to His Masters Was “The Fight of My Life”

The post JAY-Z Says Getting Rights to His Masters Was “The Fight of My Life” appeared first on Consequence.

Don’t expect JAY-Z to follow the trend of veteran artists selling their masters. In a two-part interview with CBS News’ Gayle King, the rapper recalled how reacquiring his master recordings was “the fight of my life” and said he would leave the decision of selling his catalog to his children.

“I get why people do it, I’ve been fortunate enough to make money in this place, but for me, it was the fight of my life,” Jay told King about getting his masters back from Def Jam. “You know from being an independent company from the beginning and then going through the Def Jam system not really understanding how that works and then having my masters, then going back to Def Jam as the president and then saying, ‘Okay, I’ll do this job and part of this job is my masters has to be reverted back to me.'”

He added, “I want my kids to see my work and if they decide to sell it, then it’s up to them.”

Jay served as the president and CEO of Def Jam from 2004 to 2007. His masters would later revert back to him in 2014, with his publishing rights returned to him around the same time in a separate deal with EMI.

In 2019, Forbes estimated that Jay’s music catalog was worth $75 million while crowning him the first hip-hop billionaire. Since then, however, the catalogs of Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and Bob Dylan have all sold in the hundreds of millions. With two decades’ worth of No. 1 albums and singles, the valuation of Hov’s catalog has undoubtedly gone much higher.

Elsewhere in the wide-ranging interview, which was done in promotion of his The Book of HOV exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library, Jay was characteristically vague about what it would take to get him back in the studio, saying that it would have to be something meaningful.

“I’ll say I wanna make music, but it has to be something important,” Jay explained, after saying he couldn’t use the word “retirement” again. “I don’t wanna just make a bunch of tunes. That’s not gonna serve me. It won’t feed me, first of all. I have to be saying something important. It has to mean something to a larger society.”

Jay continued by alluding to his last album, 2017’s 4:44, which he said was “a personal story, but the amount of vulnerability in there allowed for a lot of people to explore the space.” One year after the release of 4:44, Jay teamed up with his wife Beyoncé on their joint album, Everything Is Love, but he’s only occasionally popped up on features like DJ Khaled’s “GOD DID” and Pusha T’s “Neck & Wrist” in recent years.

To that point, Jay told King that he currently pulls “the most satisfaction” from “being a beacon and helping out my culture, people of color,” adding, “I think now the idea of taking that platform and reproducing it for others or doing something like reform, etc. I think I derive the most joy from that.”

He also touched on his family life, revealing that his eldest daughter’s name, Blue Ivy, has nothing to do with blue being his favorite color. “It was supposed to be Brooklyn. That was the name we had in theory,” Jay remembered. “But when we got the sonograms, you know, it’s super small and we was calling her blueberry. It was like a nickname, and for nine months we [were] like, ‘Look at the little blueberry.’ So it was natural. We just took the berry off and called her Blue.”

In a clip from the interview released earlier this week, Jay put an end to the “$500,000 cash or lunch with JAY-Z” debate. Earlier this year, he made an appearance at the Grammys to perform his verse from “GOD DID.” He later played his first show in four years at an Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat art exhibit and dropped a remix of “Empire State of Mind” featuring Gil Scott-Heron.

JAY-Z Says Getting Rights to His Masters Was “The Fight of My Life”
Eddie Fu

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