Megan Thee Stallion may be in the middle of a complicated situation regarding her contract with her label and the release of her new album, but it all boils down to a simple hashtag: #FREEMEG.
The rapper shared on Sunday (March 1) that she’s running into an issue with 1501 Entertainment as she attempts to release new music off her forthcoming album, Suga. In a live Instagram video, Megan explained her side of the story: when she signed a management deal with Roc Nation, they brought certain details to her attention about the initial deal she signed with 1501 when she first started out.
“I was like 20, and I didn’t know everything that was in that contract,” she said. “So when I got with Roc Nation, I got management — real management — and real lawyers. They were like, ‘Do you know that this is in your contract?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, damn, that’s crazy — no, I didn’t know.'”
She goes on to clarify that she wasn’t mad at 1501 (and didn’t disclose which aspects of the contract were problematic), and wasn’t looking to leave the label — at first. “I wasn’t upset,” she said. “I’m thinking in my head, ‘everybody cool, we all cool, we family, it’s cool, it’s nice.'” That apparently changed when she asked to renegotiate her contract. “Soon as I said, ‘I want to renegotiate my contract,’ everything went left. It all went bad. It all went left. So now they tellin’ a b—h she can’t drop no music. It’s really just, like, a greedy game.” (Billboard has reached out to representatives for both Megan Thee Stallion and 1501 Entertainment.)
“I’m not a greedy person,” she continued. “I’m not a person that likes confrontation. I’m not a person that’s a b—h. I work with everybody, and I’m nice, and I’m real family-oriented… I see the s–t that camp be saying about me, and I be like, ‘Damn — since you got so much to say, why you just won’t tell ’em why you mad? You mad because I don’t want to roll over and bow down like a little b–tch and you don’t want to renegotiate my contract.”
Following her explanation of the situation on Instagram (and the drop of the #FREEMEG and #FREETHESTALLION hashtags on Twitter), she further elaborated why she wanted to revisit her initial contract: “I didn’t understand some of the the verbiage at the time and now that I do I just wanted it corrected.”
As for 1501 Entertainment, CEO and founder Carl Crawford didn’t address the conflict directly on Instagram — but he did have some choice words about “loyalty” to share.
“At a time when loyalty is at an all time low it’s nice to be link with @jprincerespect who is steady teaching me how to move in this cutthroat industry,” he wrote. “And I know that terrifies some especially the ones who double cross me.”
