It’s rare for a record company to shake off an artist’s hands because of their behavior. However, increasing social pressure to tackle transgressive behavior makes it increasingly difficult to keep pop stars under control. Lil ‘Kleine was arrested last week on suspicion of assaulting his girlfriend. Since then, a response has been expected from Sony, which eventually came on Sunday evening.
“Sony Music in no way tolerates the behavior that can be seen in the images that are circulating on social media,” said a statement from Sony director Alex De Maegd. The company says it takes the allegations against the rapper seriously and has therefore terminated ‘the working relationship’. It is unclear what financial consequences the cancellation will have for the rapper and the record company: no amounts were disclosed when the collaboration was entered into, although the rapper himself said that he had received “an advance” of 3 million euros.
Sony had just signed a contract with Lil ‘Kleine. The record company’s role was limited to distributing the rapper’s songs to wholesalers, retail stores and digital platforms. Lil ‘Kleine broke with the label Top Notch last year, where he broke through with the hit Drink & drugs† The rapper wanted to have full control over his music, he said at the time. From now on, as an independent artist, he wanted to determine his own creative course and no longer have certain collaborations or release strategies forced on him.
Social media
Now he will also have to take care of the dissemination and promotion of his work himself, or will have to look for a new partner. What can help Lil ‘Kleine is his great popularity on social media: the rapper can bring his music to the attention of 1.6 million followers on Instagram alone. The rapper is also unabatedly a listening figure on Spotify: his songs are streamed more than 2.7 million times a month.
Sony isn’t the only business partner to break up with Lil’ Kleine. When violent images surfaced last week in which it appears that Jorik Scholten, the real name of Lil ‘Kleine, is abusing his girlfriend Jaimie Vaes, record company Top Notch, who had released his album in January. Ibiza Stories released, are no longer able to promote the rapper’s work on their own channels, and therefore also on social media. That was a remarkable step because Top Notch had announced the album, which is about a previous alleged violent incident between Lil ‘Kleine and Jaimie Vaes on the party island of Ibiza, on social media with provocative selfies of the rapper and the label bosses.
When the images of the violent incident in Amsterdam were distributed last week, two days after Lil ‘Kleine was sentenced to 120 hours of community service for kicking a man, the radio station FunX quickly announced that it would no longer play the rapper’s music. Streaming platform Spotify announced that it would no longer include Lil ‘Kleine in its editorial playlists.
Rare
Internationally, the number of examples of record labels breaking with artists is rare. Last year, for example, the record company Loma Vista decided to terminate the contract with American rocker Marilyn Manson, because he allegedly mistreated actress Evan Rachel Wood. The label decided not to wait for a lawsuit and to cut ties with the singer because of the allegations alone, and the subsequent uproar in the media.
Record company RCA, part of Sony Music, broke with the singer R. Kelly in 2019, but that parting was very difficult. Kelly had been associated with serious abuse of young women and minors for many years, but the singer remained attached to the label. Only after the release of the revealing documentary series Surviving R. Kelly in 2019 parent company Sony decided to distance themselves from the artist, without further explanation. R. Kelly’s music is still widely available on the streaming platforms, just like Marilyn Manson’s.