Carl Crawford has thrown in the towel on his beef with his former 1501 Certified Entertainment artist Megan Thee Stallion, and he hopes to repair the damage following the rebrand of his record label.
The “Hot Girl Summer” rapper signed with Crawford’s Houston label in 2018. In May 2019, she released her mixtape Fever with the hit singles “Big Ol Freak” and “Cash S**t,” which landed Megan on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Later that year, she became one of the newest artists to join Roc Nation for management. This partnership fueled the social media war between her and the CEO, leading the 28-year-old to file a lawsuit against 1501 in 2020 to release new music.
In a recent interview with TMZ, the former MLB player shared that he decided to change how he was marketing his label months ago. Crawford brought on the company’s new president, Kai “Verse” Tyler. He admitted he realized his faults regarding handling issues with the Houston hottie and dislikes that he hasn’t had a personal conversation with her in years.
“Unfortunately, me and Megan haven’t talked since 2019. We’ve been going through I guess what you guys see online. That’s unfortunate too ’cause I never wanted to have a situation where I was going back and forth with her on the internet,” he told TMZ. “Kind of like a couple of months ago, I wanted to revamp the company and bring in whole new fresh faces to try to rebrand the company and give us a new look. Our reputation was real, real bad out there, and I wanted to go directly at that situation and start fresh. I have to take responsibility for anything that happens over here at 1501.”
He admitted that things moved fast for him in his previous career. However, since the music industry was a new lane for him, he made some mistakes along the way, which he has no problem owning up to after reflecting on the downward spiral of his and Megan’s relationship.
“A lot of things came at me real, real fast that I had to learn real, real quick. And in the process of that, you don’t always make the right decisions or might make a few mistakes here and there and you have to take ownership of that. That might be the case for me at this point,” the 41-year-old said.
Things hit the boiling point when Crawford posted a picture with Canadian artist Tory Lanez, who is facing prison time for shooting Megan, to troll her. He wanted people to know that outside of the social media posts and exchanges, he didn’t have real issues with the “WAP” artist and regrets falling victim to social media.
“I never had any problems with Megan Thee Stallion. It’s just this social media stuff turned really, really sour. You take the social media stuff out of it we don’t have a problem,” he shared. “I’m done with that. You won’t hear me mention Megan Thee Stallion’s name in the media unless I’m doing something like this or it’s a big-time interview where I got to say it.”
Tyler joined Crawford’s interview to share the same sentiments and clear up any alleged tension 1501 may have had with Roc Nation.
“We don’t have any disdain for anybody, Meg … Roc Nation. I mean at the end of the day they are a business conglomerate, they are business people. We don’t have any discrepancies towards any of them. I think it became more of an emotional thing from the beginning not realizing that I haven’t spoken to my artist whom I found since she went into the meeting and it’s like I’m going to be in my feelings at first,” the new 1501 president said in the interview.
Operations and contracts are to be restructured during the rebranding process within the business to ensure a similar situation won’t happen again because the paperwork will speak for itself.
“The music business is a contact sport, but the business of music is a contract sport. Learning the business of music will allow us to operate in such transparency where it’s wide open and there won’t even be a reason for white noise or convolution as the time goes on, and I think that’s what was needed, above anything else at 1501, is one word, transparency, and that comes from the CEO to the artist.”
The label is working on developing its current roster of artists, which includes Dallas rapper Erica Banks, whose song went viral on TikTok in 2021.