Nicki Minaj is venturing into the entrepreneurial side of the music industry. On March 9, the rapper shared in a sit-down interview with Joe Budden that she is starting her own management company and record label. “I am creating my own management company,” she said. Minaj also shared that she first decided to create her own management company for herself but that she ultimately wants to bring others along for the ride.
The announcement comes only months after sources confirmed to Variety that Minaj was no longer a client of Full Stop Management, which represents artists such as Lizzo, Roddy Ricch, and Harry Styles. Last September, Variety also reported that Minaj was in preliminary talks with SALXCO, the management company to The Weeknd, Doja Cat, French Montana and Ty Dolla $ign.
The rapper appears to have taken matters into her own hands and – in turn – has kept building her legacy as an entertainer and mogul. “I’m also doing my record company,” she shared with Budden, disclosing that she has already signed artists. “I have a couple of artists that I will start the record company with,” she said.
After signing with Young Money Entertainment in 2009, Nicki Minaj was quickly propelled to international fame. Today, she wants to lead by example and show others that female rappers can become moguls in their own right. “The female rappers before me, I would always say they should have retired as moguls. And I would say, ‘Why isn’t there a female version of Jay-Z, who at that time, even when I was coming in, we could see that he was on mogul status,” she told Budden. “So I was like, ‘I’m gonna be that person, I’m gonna do that.’ Even what I’ve done, I haven’t done what I want to do, what I need to do, what I will do yet.”
Minaj will be sharing more detail about her record label “closer to album time.” In fact, the rapper is reportedly also working on her fifth studio album. Although no release date has been announced, Minaj shared that she will be going back to her roots on her new project. “There’s a little bit of full-circledness happening, because I’m creating music kinda like how I used to create music when I first started rapping on mixtapes,” she said in a February interview on The Dana Cortez Show. “Which is just having a great experience, enjoying it, being in the moment, staying present in the moment and seeing what happens.”
Photo Credit: Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images for Billboard