How Quality Control Made Lil Baby the Latest Star of a Rap Dynasty

Baby has to be one of the fastest progressing and maturing artists of the last five years. From doing those small shows to being a top three artist in a handful of years. And I don’t think there are many points of comparison for that in rap.

P: Yeah, but that comes with dedication, and that comes with him surrounding himself with a great team. And also, I pride myself in what we do over here in Quality Control with artist development. I feel like a lot of record companies, nobody’s creating superstars. Everybody just catching these one hit wonders or TikTok moments or whatever. Nobody’s creating real superstars because everybody got away from artist development. Nobody wants to take the time and put the time into artists to really deliver something special. Everything is just about data analytics.

My Turn is the first album that I can remember not just getting a deluxe release, but the deluxe amplifying and even changing some of the critical consensus. Is that something you guys came up with specifically for that album?

P: I’m going to be honest, I can’t take credit for that. That was Ethiopia over at Motown.Covid shut everything down. So Baby wasn’t able to promote that project.. And so one day I Ethiopia called me on the phone and We were just trying to figure out ways to keep momentum going on the album. She’s like, we should just give the fans some more music.. And I pitched the idea to Baby, and me and Coach all put our heads together, and he came with the record with 42 Dugg.

They went to the hood against our advice because I was scared to come out the house. But they went to the hood and shot a video and delivered the records. And we added five more records and it just amplified it even more. So it was like just trying to keep momentum going while we were shut down in a pandemic.

How did the Gunna collaboration come about?

P: Gunna and Thug and Baby, they got a real relationship. And I think it just came down to chemistry. I don’t even think that tape was planned. Baby and Gunna was just working together. They were doing a lot of music together. I don’t remember who came up with the idea of doing it, but whoever came up with the idea, they knocked the records out really fast.

Is there something that you guys can attribute to your success beyond just talent scouting and promotion? Is there something in the way that you guys promote and build up artists that can explain why you have such an incredible track record?

P: So we sort of got, like a secret sauce over here, but it’s not a secret sauce.

Coach: It’s just artist development.

P: Yeah, we put the work in. We take the time out to develop the artist. We’re not sitting around waiting for no computer to tell us that this artist got a record. It had 50,000 views this week, and next week, the week after that, it had 100,000. So we’re not out just chasing the record while not really building the artist. If you notice the history of us, we never had an already established artist. Every artist that we ever had, we built from the ground up. We find diamonds in the rough. We can sort of see it in the beginning, so we take the time. That’s just what we’ve been doing from day one, and it’s really been working for us for ten years now. It’s been working for Coach for over twenty years.