Cassper Nyovest Rejected A Sony Music Deal To Keep His Masters

SA Hip Hop star Cassper Nyovest reportedly rejected a R300k advance from Sony Music to keep his name and masters.

Every musician aspires to have creative control over the kind of music they put out and also own their music. Cassper Nyovest recently opened up on how much he fought to own his masters and keep using his name. Speaking at the Secure The Bag panel, Cass said,

“If I give you a little bit of a summary of what happened with me, we came from Maftown wanting to own our music. We learnt from Oskido, and Jay-Z, it’s the same thing, Ro-ca Fella and Kalawa is the same thing,”

“So it got so hard I also wanted to give up, I wanted to sign with Sony at that point and they wanted to give me R300 000 as an advance. I was so broke that I almost took the deal but they were two things that we couldn’t agree to.”

“One of them being that they wanted to own my masters, secondly, they wanted to change my name. So they wanted me to drop Nyovest because they said it sounded like a swear word. So they just wanted to call me Cassper. I was like no that’s not gonna work.”

Cass later established Family Tree with the help of TLee of Bridge Entertainment. He used money earned from show bookings and song plays to fund the company. It also financed the release of his first studio album.