Mac Miller. Juice WRLD. XXXTentacion. Pop Smoke.
When an artist dies in the middle of their career, devastated fans can be left wanting more. And while the artists deserved to be remembered and celebrated, record companies have used their deceased signee’s names to pump out release after release. The motivation behind this is no secret: money.
A record company’s entire model for profit is built around the artists they sign releasing music. This is why most contracts signed by musicians obligate them to release records on a schedule decided by the label and its investors. This has led to plenty of recording companies taking advantage of a loss of life within the label, leading to disappointing, disrespectful and unfinished projects being pushed on fans.
RnB artist Mac Miller is one of the most recent artists to have his name used as a cash cow. “Balloonerism,” a 14 track album, was released Jan. 17, nearly 11 years after it was created. The album doesn’t match up to his previous acclaimed works–it seems like a watered-down version of the music that he chose to release from this time period. What was previously a private step in creating highly praised works like “Faces” or “The Divine Feminine” is now a public stain on his discography.
This is far from the first time his label rereleased old works—in fact, since his death, five projects have been released under his name, as well as an anniversary edition of his 2013 album “Watching Movies with the Sound Off,” which came with three new songs. All of these “songs” had a feature—likely to cover up that the original song with only Mac was unfinished. There has been no structure or cohesion to how these years-old unfinished projects are released, which gives most the impression that his label only releases them when an easy payday is needed.
The ethicality of these drops is questionable at best, given that the creator has no say in how, when, where or why it is presented. However, Miller’s situation is far from the most ridiculous.
After a home invasion took New York rapper’s life Pop Smoke in 2020, four LPs would follow over the next two years, with a noticeable dip in quality as the label scrambled to pull a project together. Republic Records used a similar technique to Mac Miller’s album, using features to mask the fact that few of the songs were finished. However, it was used considerably more—of the 65 tracks that make up the albums, 47 had features. Of the remaining 18 solo tracks, only two are longer than two minutes.
It’s undeniable that these albums were made entirely with money in mind. Artists make a lot of music, and not all of it gets released. Projects might never get finished, or might simply not be high enough quality. When a label acts for them this creative control is lost, and tracks that were never meant to see the light of day become widely available. It becomes even more insulting to Pop Smoke’s legacy when you realize that all four albums have his smash hit “Dior” tacked on at the end. Since streaming services’ algorithms push more recent music, this was done purely to boost album streams and in turn boost sales. For a final bit of cash, his label released merchandise such as clothing and physical copies like CDs and vinyls, for each of these releases—and more recently a collection of items centered around “Meet The Woo,” the New Yorkers’ first mixtape, to celebrate its fifth anniversary. What is most baffling is that these items were released in January of 2025 when the anniversary in question was in July. The company pumped out so much over time that longtime collaborator of Pop Smoke Rico Beatz said in a 2024 social media post that there was simply nothing left to release.
But neither label can match the greed of Grade A Records, who represents the artist Juice WRLD. The Chicago rapper, born Jared Higgins, died just months after two smash-hit albums that both hit the Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 200, in December of 2019. A short five months later, Higgins’ family and label Grade A Productions announced “Legends Never Die,” a 15 track LP meant to “represent the music Juice was in the process of creating” and was marketed as his final release. In reality, five more albums would drop after this.
Higgins’ debut album “Goodbye and Good Riddance” was re-released twice— first in 2021 with a single remix track added and again in 2023 with the only change being a recolored cover. In 2021, an entirely new project called “Fighting Demons” was released. This project confused fans— hooks were looped, a lot of lyrics were reused, and two tracks were just him talking while studio mics happened to be recording.
It only took two days before “The Party Never Ends,” Juice’s second supposed final album would be announced. A slew of delays and excuses from his team pushed it back to a release in November of 2024. The literal quality of the music is low– the instrumentals are quiet, the vocals are off-beat and no tracksounds like a completely mixed song. The features are overwhelming– in fact, none of the songs with a feature have a stand-alone verse from Juice, either opting to layer it with another artist or just have a hook by the song’s apparent creator and let the guest artist do the rest.
An important note in this is that his family has never spoken about a release following “Legends Never Die”- seemingly due to a lack of control over what happens with their loved one’s’ name. Since then, a “2.0” version was released a week later, and a deluxe version of the 2.0 version was supposed to release Jan. 24 but was yet again pushed back, leaving even more music to be dangled over fans’ heads. Whether this was caused by a genuine hiccup in the release process or his team needed to find more demos to release is unclear.
Money-hungry labels will continue to milk all the dollars they can from heartbreaking deaths. More often than not these releases feel soulless, knowing this wasn’t released by an artist wanting to convey emotion or send a message through music but rather a group of executives trying to get more money out of someone no longer with us. It becomes even more saddening to consider that almost all of these releases, no matter the artist, have had massive merch pushes, and that families of the artists have little to no say in what releases and when. The epidemic of record companies monopolizing the death of a beloved artist has spiraled out of control, putting the artists’ visions in the backseat for the sake of more money.
