T.I. Sues Cinq Music, Claims Company Finessed Price to Buy Back His Catalog

He said the company requested that he pay nearly 20 times what he actually owes.

Atlanta rapper T.I. has filed a lawsuit against Cinq Music, accusing the company of backing out of a deal that allowed him to repurchase his catalog at a reduced price.

According to Billboard, in a 2017 deal to purchase the rapper’s music catalog, T.I. said he agreed because Cinq would give him the option to buy it back later on “very favorable” terms.

But he now says the company requested that he pay nearly 20 times what he actually owes.

“Cinq regretted that it had agreed to the [option terms], and, therefore … did everything it could to frustrate plaintiffs’ efforts to complete the purchase,” wrote T.I.’s attorney, Robert Jacobs, in the lawsuit.

T.I. exercised his option to purchase it in 2024. He claims Cinq tried to “artificially inflate” the asking price. The company altered the formula that it wrote back in 2017 and by “using these tactics, Cinq sought to extract a purchase price from plaintiffs that was nearly 20 times higher than the price mandated by the parties’ agreed-upon formula.”

T.I. said the price is capped at $3 million; Cinq has countered with a $52 million valuation. The agreement set the buyback price as Cinq’s gross receipts for a 12-month period, minus royalties owed to T.I., then multiplied by 12. The rapper argued the formula explicitly excluded streaming and certain other revenue sources.

According to T.I., the deal specifically excluded revenue from digital streaming providers like Spotify. Cinq wrote the terms of the agreement, and the rapper said Cinq cannot back out of the deal now because the original terms aren’t favorable.

“Because it was common knowledge when the parties entered into the Cinq agreement in 2017 that audio streaming and video streaming via the DSPs had become the main driver of music industry growth and revenues, Cinq had ample reason to know then that the [streaming] exclusion would have a significant impact on the [price].”

When determining the purchase-back price, Cinq included streaming revenue anyway, as well as other excluded sources of income, such as foreign revenue. T.I.’s lawyers say Cinq knew the terms of the original deal, but chose to violate them, hoping to “trigger a negotiation” that would net a better price for the company.