Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) has enjoyed platinum success with Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city.Given that the label is based in Southern California and that Kendrick Lamar is from Compton, California, some have drawn comparisons between TDE and Death Row Records, the imprint run by Comptonite Marion “Suge” Knight that released albums from Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg,Tupac Shakur and others during the 1990s.
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“I respect Suge for what he’s done in music,” Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment, says during an interview with VIBE as part of its “New Juice: 8 Influential People To Watch” feature. “He had the coast booming. They had a star roster; I think I have a star roster. Shit was a lot wilder back then and I think shit got a little out of control in certain situations. I try to stay calm. I try not to have the big entourage because sometimes when people see so many dudes moving they want to challenge you. We got a lot of similarities, but we don’t club like they clubbed ‘cause you always got someone that want to come and try some shit. Then you have to put a demo down on somebody and then the following week you gotta put a demo down on his brother, then his cousin. It keeps going and brings negative attention. We had that attention early in the game with Jay Rock—everybody thought [we was] gangbanging. We couldn’t get no shows; everybody was scared for us to show up at events. We learned from that too.”
Tiffith also says that he learned several lessons from his first major label contract. TDE had a deal with Warner Bros. Records for Jay Rock that lasted from 2006 until 2010, according to the VIBE article.
“One thing I learned is don’t chase radio or follow the artists that the label follows,” Tiffith says. “If it’s hot, that’s what they’re on. They make me fuck up my acts ’cause I’m telling them to follow that when they should be doing their own thing. Two, don’t depend on nobody else to do things for you. The label is there, but they don’t know shit ‘cause they not in the streets. Spinning out of the WB situation, we realized that the Internet was really becoming big and that became our focus.”