Shyne got out of prison just last year and walked straight into a deal with Def Jam. But now a little over a year later, he has gripes over their “lack of interest and promoting” and is looking elsewhere…specifically the home of Baby and Weezy.
Shyne hit up SOHH today and tells them, “I’m definitely trying to get with Cash Money but the Def Jam thing is a question mark right now. I’ve been fixing to get up out of there for a while now because [Island Def Jam CEO] L.A. Reid don’t care about hip-hop. The people up there, they don’t know what they’re doing. When you don’t have a strong leader, where you gonna go? … They don’t care about hip-hop music. You give them a hip-hop record with an R&B singer, you “might” have a chance. They don’t care. You got The Roots, Ghostface, Nas, probably the best hip-hop roster you could imagine and they do nothing. L.A. Reid doesn’t want nothing to do with rappers — it’s nothing personal, I don’t have nothing personal with dude but he makes it known he doesn’t care about hip-hop. So I’m really interested in seeing who’s gonna replace him. Because I know he’s been replaced — so I wanna find out who’s gonna take his spot before I decide what I’m gonna do with Def Jam…The music that we make is responsible for pop, R&B, everything that’s jumping right now…”

“They gotta care about [what we’ve done] the way Jimmy Iovine cares about that, the way Lyor Cohen cares about that,” he continued. “I’m definitely not gonna scrap everything I recorded. I put in so much, I’ve come so far. From the first record I did when I got out to the new records I’ve done while going to all these different countries, I ain’t scrapping nothing. I paid for that. I’m not signed to Def Jam anyway, I just need to find another distributor. I might just have Cash Money do everything. Who knows? That’s the beauty about being in the business for yourself. You can decide where you want to go and what you want to do.”
Last February, LA Reid traveled to Belize to announce acquiring Shyne to Def Jam.