Lawsuit Says Cinq Refusing To Sell Albums

A decade after Cinq Music bought much of T.I.’s recorded music catalog, the rapper is suing the label over accusations that it has refused to honor a contract promising to let him to buy back those same masters at a cheap price.

Cinq bought T.I.’s Atlantic Records-era catalog in a splashy 2017 deal, including chart-topping albums King, T.I. vs. TIP and Paper Trail. But he says he only greenlit that deal because Cinq gave him an option to buy back the records later on “very favorable” terms.

Now, in a new lawsuit obtained and first reported by Billboard, the “Bring Em Out” star (Clifford Joseph Harris) says Cinq is violating that part of the agreement after he invoked it — demanding a price nearly $50 million higher than what he actually owes.

“Cinq regretted that it had agreed to the [option terms], and, therefore … did everything it could to frustrate plaintiffs’ efforts to complete the purchase,” writes T.I.’s lawyer Robert Jacobs of the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips.

After T.I. exercised his option in 2024, he claims Cinq tried to “artificially inflate” the price by warping the formula that the company itself wrote back in 2017: “Using these tactics Cinq sought to extract a purchase price from plaintiffs that was nearly 20 times higher than the price mandated by the parties’ agreed-upon formula.”

Rather than the maximum of $3 million that T.I. says he should pay for his albums under the original deal, he claims Cinq “manipulated” the numbers and came back with the “significantly overstated purchase price” of $52 million.

A spokesperson for Cinq did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday. An attorney for T.I. also did not return a request for comment. Atlantic is not named in the lawsuit nor accused of any wrongdoing.

After releasing his 2001 debut on Arista, T.I. spent the prime of his career at Atlantic, releasing seven studio albums that included a slew of Hot 100 top 10 songs. His 2008 Paper Trail included two No. 1s (“Whatever You Like” and “Live Your Life” feat. Rihanna) as well a third track (“Dead and Gone”) that reached No. 2.

In 2017, Cinq made a splash by buying the recorded music rights to all those albums from Atlantic. “Through artists like T.I, we’re showing Cinq is a company that artists of all sizes can rely on to maximize the value of their intellectual property,” Cinq president Barry Daffurn said at the time.

Though not always strictly required, such catalog deals work better with cooperation and consent from the artist — and T.I. says in his new lawsuit that Cinq sought such approval by offering him the buy-back provision. He claims it was “one of the principal reasons” that he agreed to consent to the sale.

The option allegedly required the label to sell him the masters at a price determined by a set formula: Cinq’s gross receipts from May 2023 to April 2024, minus any royalty compensation owed to T.I. and his company, multiplied by 12. But crucially, T.I. says it explicitly excluded Cinq’s revenue from digital streaming providers like Spotify.

That’s a surprising carve-out in the modern music business, and one that would obviously drive down the sale price. But T.I.’s lawsuit says that Cinq itself wrote the agreement to include that provision, and cannot back out now simply because it regrets the terms.

“Because it was common knowledge when the parties entered into the Cinq agreement in 2017 that audio streaming and video streaming via the DSPs had become the main driver of music industry growth and revenues, Cinq had ample reason to know then that the [streaming] exclusion would have a significant impact on the [price].”

When T.I. exercised the buy-back option, he says Cinq quickly realized that the formula would “yield a low purchase price because of the limited revenue streams it included.” So, he says, the label simply included that streaming revenue anyway, as well as other excluded sources of income like foreign revenue. “Cinq’s departure from the contractual definition of Gross Receipts resulted in an exaggerated and inaccurate revenue-side starting point.”

He claims Cinq also fudged the numbers when it came to deducting his royalties, doing so as part of an overall effort to “artificially maximize” the price he’d have to pay. His lawyers say the label clearly knew the terms of the deal, but chose to violate them because it was hoping to “trigger a negotiation” that would net a better price.