Before he was a world-renowned hip-hop impresario and multi-hyphenate businessman with designs on starting a political movement, Sean “Puff Daddy/Diddy/Love” Combs got his start A&Ring R&B acts like Jodeci and Mary J. Blige at Uptown Records. For his next endeavor, he’s getting back to those roots, as he told Vanity Fair in the magazine’s upcoming September issue. Although he did previously announce he was putting out an R&B album, here he goes a step further, announcing that he’ll be starting a new, R&B-centric record label as well.
And before any of his many critics could point out that his previous label, Bad Boy, has a less-than-stellar record in how it treated its artists, Combs explained that he’s doing things differently this time, explaining that he wants to get back to R&B because “I feel like R&B was abandoned and it’s a part of our African American culture,” he says. “And I’m not signing any artists. Because if you know better, you do better. I’m doing 50–50 partnerships with pure transparency.”
He also elaborates that his purpose in launching such a label is so “we can own the genre; we don’t own hip-hop right now. We have a chance to — and I’m going to make sure that — we own R&B.” Although he hasn’t announced any projects or even a name just yet, it may be interesting to find out whether or not he can be the person to drive innovation in the music business.
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