Ya'll think Wide Awake made any money?

[TraceOneInfinite]

CD sales are hard to come by these days, and they put out albums of songs that were recorded nearly 20 years ago.   Being a die-hard fan I bought a couple of them LBC Crew and Snoop's Lost Sessions..... but you can't make much money off a few die-hard Death Row fans posting on the dubcc...

...I give them props for putting this stuff out, but I don't think they turned any profit

[Hack Wilson - real]

sure because they never paid the artists any royalties

[aerroc]

selling albums of has been never been artist i think not
i dont think even Europe could have saved wide asleep 

[doggfather]

don't think so.

[Kashif mirza]

Wideawake made there 18 million back from the deathrow catalogue i got the info from chad kiser the guy who worked for wideawake. But they never paid the artists either.

[Jimmy H.]

Their whole set-up was poor.  I don't think it was putting out old music that was the problem, though it is a "niche" market but I think when they tried to downplay the quality control issues with the Snoop project, they started to lose. 

The thing with me is you've purchased the entire catalog for Death Row that includes established catalog, all the photographs and art work, imagery, likeness, and publishing rights and all your energy is in pushing out old songs on CD that you are too cheap to polish so they sound good? I think if they were smart, they would have concentrated on licensing rights because that music still has huge commercial value.  They would have put out updated "collector's editions" of all the best-selling albums like the original Row did when they moved their distribution over to D3/Koch and maybe worked in a few of those rare and unreleased collections but the way they dropped a lot of that music was so exploitive and cheap.  It's not hard to see why they went from getting end-cap promotion at Best Buy chains with exclusive tie-in versions to not even being carried in their stores. 

They put out three releases and then they more or less became albums you could only get in online stores.  Trying to build a profitable business venture off vault material was never a smart move.

[WestSideDon]

Who owns death row right now ?
And any Chance the New Owners put something out ?

[Kashif mirza]

E 1 owns the deathrow catalogue  i dont think there will be any releases this year .

[WestSideDon]

So are they just gonna let the tons of material rot in the vault ? 

[Will_B]

E 1 owns the deathrow catalogue  i dont think there will be any releases this year .

E1 know how to turn a profit tho. Hope to see something next year at least (even tho I suspect its gonna be more geared at T-shirt sales etc)

[WestSideDon]

I hope they start releasing and emptying the vaults soon. There must by tons of unreleased dope songs by snoop, pac, dre, daz, kurupt and all the others...

[Jimmy H.]

There's not that much left in the vaults according to many sources who worked over there.  They can't release any Pac without Amaru signing off on it.  They can't release any Dre without his permission.  If previous releases are any indication, there does not appear to be much quality Snoop and DPG music floating around.  I doubt E1 is going to invest in putting out a whole lot of "vault" material.

[djbeto]

made there money bac lol. why are they trying the dump the company then? E1 only has the rights for the previous releases only, no unreleased.

[DeeezNuuuts83]

The purchase was a huge loss for them, and everything was mismanaged.

The quality of the finished product wasn't nearly as professional as it should've been.
The physical products (meaning actual CDs and not just the digital downloads) grew more and more limited, eventually just disappearing.
Half of the surviving artists didn't endorse their own WideAwake DR material.
The most valuable material (meaning the sought after stuff from people like Pac and Dre) required clearance from outside of their company.
John Hyland supposedly blew a ton of their money on bullshit.

I don't see how they turned a profit, especially when the ownership got put back on the market for even less money. Plus the stuff they did release didn't really cause a blip on the Billboard radar. I would be surprised if all of WideAwakes releases collectively sold 100k units.

[Hack Wilson - real]

i kept my copy of Doggy Bag sealed.  wish i had done the same with the others.