Tory Lanez seems to have reached a breaking point with Interscope Records. He threatened to expose his label in an Instagram post on Sunday (Dec. 15).
“Interscope Records… If yall ni**as dont stop playing w/ me… Ima expose whats really going on in that f**king building!!!!!” he wrote. “Y’all play w me if u want to… Let’s play… y’all got the right f**king one.”
“This is going to be fun tho… I promise,” Lanez commented later on.
One fan commented on the post, writing, “Chill bro I ain’t tryna see you killed.”
“That’s the difference… I don’t care,” Lanez responded. “My integrity respect and the path of light that i can show the generation after me is more important than this life that ni**as is so scared to lose.”
It’s unclear what prompted Lanez’ post, but the crooner has been unhappy with his label following the release of his Chixtape 5 album. Despite the high-charting project’s apparent success, Lanez has claimed that the album lost him money.
“We actually didn’t do this from a monetary standpoint, we did this from a standpoint of like, I’m losing money doing the album but what is gonna come out of it? Of course it’s gonna be incredible,” he told Hot 97 of the project, which was anchored by 17 expensive samples and credited 97 writers. “I feel like it’s damn near at a place where it’s gonna be critically acclaimed because no one ever did it before.”
One of Lanez’ managers, Sascha Stone Guttfreund, told DJBooth how Lanez was able to clear all of the sample for his 2000’s-flipping record.
“We cleared 17 samples, there was a total of 19 different lawyers we had to clear things through,” he said. “Obviously, there were some expenses associated with clearances, but the artists did not charge a fee.”
Despite disagreeing with Lanez about the album’s profitability, Guttfreund revealed that Interscope did not cover all of the project’s clearance costs.
“… I can tell you this is not a loss leader, and this will be a profitable album,” he told the outlet. “Interscope contributed, but they didn’t cover all our costs. Tory is not afraid to invest in himself.”