this movie made me look up bad recording contracts...here's some well known ones
This is how a group can sell 10 million records and be broke: They sign a slave contract that not only pays their management too large a cut of their money, but also requires that they foot the bill for every one of their expenses and retain little ownership of what they produce. Pebbles may be alleging that the women of TLC were heavy spenders, but she can’t seem to explain away the fact that each member only took home about $35,000 a year – at the height of their careers.
Soulja Boy’s career has been struggling for a while now, and part of the reason, he claims, is because of his ex-manager, Philip Ransom. According to a lawsuit filed by Soulja Boy in 2011, Ransom pressured him into signing an “oppressive” contract when he was just 16 years old. The contract gave Ransom 5% of Soulja Boy’s income forever and gave 50% of copyright ownership to the record label. But Ransom has denied doing anything wrong and even went so far as to countersue Soulja Boy for money still owed.
After two successful albums, 20 million records sold, and a handful of awards, Toni Braxton filed for bankruptcy and shocked all of her fans. Following the announcement, the media (and especially Oprah) were quick to blame her spending habits, but Toni set everyone straight when she revealed that her financial woes were really the result of a bad contract she signed with LaFace Records that took too much of her money and bankrupted her with overbearing expenses.
R&B Diva Dawn Robinson has taken a lot of heat for the (multiple) breakups of En Vogue. But Dawn says the group’s issues were less about her and more about the slave contracts that robbed them of their money for years. During an interview with Essence Magazine in 2009, she explained that the record deals were written in “Old English” and were very hard to understand. Although the women had legal counsel they didn’t know the “right questions to ask.”
When Salt-N-Pepa signed their first deal with Next Plateau Records in 1985, the women unknowingly agreed to be paid half the going cent-per-album rate with no option to renegotiate their contract no matter how successful they’d become in the future (which of course was very successful). By their third platinum album, the group members were only making about $100,000 a year each, while their management was making millions.
Ma$e has revealed a lot about the shadiness of Bad Boy contracts over the years: one shocker being that he performed for Bad Boy’s ‘No Way Out Tour’ for free 99 – until he came to his senses partway through and stopped performing. His spot on the tour was ultimately re-filled by Junior M.A.F.I.A member Lil’ Cease
Record labels giving black musicians bad record deals back in the day should come as no surprise to anyone – and according to Little Richard this was standard practice in the industry. In his biography, The Life and Times of Little Richard, the rock and roll front runner explained how it didn’t even matter how many records you sold if you were black. The record label owned all publishing rights before the record was even released; meaning successful artists were paid just as little as unsuccessful artists.
Early rap groups like Kid ‘n Play are said to have received lower cent-per-album rates because of the uncertainty of hip-hop’s long term viability in the music industry. Although that sounds like complete BS to me and an extension of the thinking that was popular during Little Richard’s time (the overwhelming majority of hip-hop artists who’ve signed record deals have been black after all), Kid n’ Play reportedly only received one percent of sales on their first album
Lil’ Kim sued her lawyers for tricking her into signing a series of branding and licensing agreements that apportioned them nearly 50% of her profits. Kim claims she had no idea what the fine print within the contracts read, but her lawyers say she’s just looking for a way out of the deals.
Too many great performances to list them all, but Bobby Brown's character was pissing me the fukk off lol. Dude must have been a real pain in the ass and that's an understatement. He had me 
all throughout.
the record industry is shady as hell. The entertainment industry in general should be lucky there's no government regulation on them like most other industries. All that dirt they do would be deaded instantly 
