Nirvana, The Beatles & Tupac: A Look At Music’s Biggest Contracts Posted by Lucas Garrison on 08/22/13 | Filed under Opinion, Tupac, Sales

For as much as we talk about artists being signed, and the focus on who is on what label, the average hip-hop music fan really has no fucking clue what exactly that means or what a contract looks like; that includes myself. I am always interested in the behind the scenes stuff that goes on with an artists or a label so anytime the veil is lifted, I eat that shit up. Thanks to the legendary label Sub Pop we got an inside look at Nirvana’s first contract, signed just before the 90’s when the grunge scene took off and effectively ended hair-metal.



Before I was a hip-hop fan, grunge music was one of my favorites and of course, considering, Nirvana was the most popular (although not the first) of the era, I was a huge fan so this takes me back. Now Nirvana did change labels before releasing “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, and the classic album Nevermind, so Sub Pop didn’t exactly strike gold, but since they received a buyout and future royalties they did OK. Still, singing a band for a mere $600 dollars was some savvy investing. Its crazy to think that one of the biggest bands of the 90’s were only set to make $36,600 for three years and three albums (with an option for a more). I guess it makes sense considering they were nobodies then, but considering how big they got, this is nuts:



Well, that got the historian in me going, so I set out to see if there were any more contracts I could find. Sadly, they are few and far between. I checked all the big names and there doesn’t seem to be much. I guess, for legal reasons they keep them locked up tight. I did find a few that might be interesting to you though. Any interest in a guy named Tupac?











Now I am not exactly sure if this is 10% real, as it was written by hand, but that might make sense considering that, at the time it was written, Pac was in jail. This is pretty incredible, for a “contract” detailing how million of dollars will get paid, its nuts to see stuff crossed out and numbers changed. I also love its included in the contract that Death Row is responsible for “securing” David Kenner to handle Tupac’s court cases. The handwritten thing really does make me wonder, but if this is real, it’s fascinating. That isn’t the end of the legend of the handwritten contract either. This article, from 1997, highlights some of the issues around the contract after Pac’s death and is a great read.

On Sept. 14, 1996, seven days after gangsta rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur was cut down in a drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip, his mother, Afeni Shakur, 50, went back to the family home in Stone Mountain, Ga., to sort through her son's belongings, including the now-infamous three-page handwritten contract he'd signed from prison with Death Row Records' CEO, Marion ''Suge'' Knight, almost 12 months earlier. Even in her grief, Afeni, a former Black Panther activist, was angry as hell. The contract locked Tupac into a Faustian deal with Knight, who agreed to put up Tupac's bail money in exchange for his signature on the three-album, $3.5 million-plus contract. Where were all the advances and royalties the contract promised? Moreover, how could her son produce three CDs in the last year of his life, sell reportedly more than $60 million worth of records — enough to make him one of the top-selling domestic artists — yet still wind up an alleged several million dollars in debt to Death Row?

If you thought signing Nirvana was goldmine, jut imagine how you would feel knowing you successfully inked the most popular band ever, The Beatles. The contract doesn’t have the logistics like royalties and albums but it does have the signatures of “a group of musicians to be known as “THE BEATLES’”. I just can’t get over thinking about how at the time, nobody involved had any idea what would come. In case you were curious this contract, a piece of music history, was valued at 50,000 pounds which is equivalent to 77,925 dollars.





You might think, for any artists of an era, getting a record deal means you are now on easy street; not for black, blind artists in the 1950’s. Of course I am talking about Ray Charles. This contract is almost criminal. For royalties, Charles only got 3% of all record sales and was locked in to making 8 record “sides”. Oh and Atlantic also said that more records could be made at their “election”. So basically Ray was 100% at the mercy of a record label, who, in the 1950’s probably didn’t care to give a blind black man what he deserved.



Looking at these historical contracts is great, but I would love to see some new ones. Imagine what Drake’s contract looks like or how many clauses there are in Kanye’s. I wonder how contracts today compare with some of these classics. Someone really needs to make contracts available for public consumption; I could spend all day looking at them.

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