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Dr. Dre gave up his 50% of Death Row Records just to get away from Suge Knight. Suge kept 100% and called it “the greatest thing in the world for me.” Dre later said in court that he didn’t get a single royalty payment from Death Row for 13 years. In the video below, it’s September 1996, months after Dre left. Suge says the company might be worth a billion dollars, and now he owns 100% of it. “You didn’t have to give him nothing but his walking papers. That’s great.” Then he says Dre didn’t even make “California Love.” Dre and Suge started Death Row in 1991. Dre made the music. “The Chronic” turned the label into a giant, and then came Snoop Dogg’s debut. By 1996, Dre wanted out. He left his half of the label and the rights to his records behind. In return, he was supposed to get royalties on the music he made there. He started a new label, Aftermath. “I’ll be able to sell just as many records, if not more,” he said. “And you’ll see that.” He signed Eminem. Then 50 Cent. Then Kendrick Lamar. In 2014, Apple paid $3 billion for his headphone company, Beats. The case for Suge: Dre signed that deal himself. Death Row kept selling without him. Tupac’s “All Eyez on Me” came out there that same year. Death Row went bankrupt in 2006. Suge Knight is now serving 28 years in prison. One man kept 100% of what he called a billion-dollar label. The other walked away with nothing and built something bigger. So was walking away Dre’s smartest move, or did Suge rob him?

THE AI PROBLEM IN AFROBEATS 🙃 Here are some of the songs of your faves whose lyrics were written with AI: 1. Mr. P (Peter P-Square) - ‘I Love You Because’ 2. Rudeboy (Paul P-Square) - ‘Blessed & Alive’ ft. Sarkodie (minus Sarkodie’s verse) 3. Ayra Starr - ‘Midnight in New York’ I have made music projects with AI for two years now that have generated over a hundred thousand streams on platforms and I can tell you what AI is good for and what it is not. AI is bang average in lyrics, passable in production and melodies and great for demoing works in progress. If you are a big artiste with an established sound, I will advise you not to use AI for your lyrics. You can use other human songwriters instead. Music lyrics are sacred and borne mostly from human experiences, which AI does not possess. And that is why, even when the superstar artiste is performing those songs, something feels off. I understand that these artistes may have been experimenting with Suno and generated a melody that was too good to let go, tweaked some of the lyrics or chorus and ran with the song. The problem with using AI as a big artiste is that it cheapens your offering. You are already regarded as a Premium product. The magic of your work is in your words and melodies. Keep it that way. Upcoming artistes can use AI to experiment, create and iterate. They are playing for survival and do not have the kind of resources established artistes have at their disposal. The best use case of AI in music is for songwriting but not how you think. Let me explain. In the past, songwriters used to write song and go to studios to record a demo version. With AI, a songwriter can feed in these same HUMAN lyrics and melody to AI and it generates the production and singing to create the demo of the song. They can then shop this demo to an artiste that can pay for them. Note that the lyrics and melodies are still HUMAN. AI was just used to create the minimum viable product (MVP). I stumbled upon this earlier this year when I started using AI to recreate songs I’ve released in the past. I retained the human lyrics and melodies but used AI for production and vocals. The result was fantastic. This piece is not to knock on anyone’s hustle. It is just to shine a light on how to best to use AI and how not to use AI in Afrobeats. Udo. 🙏🏽❤️ ©️Uzoma Alaneme, 2026. #BestOfAfrobeats #MusicBusiness #AlaAfrica

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