Ryan Leslie

Casablanca Records was an American record label started by Neil Bogart, who partnered with Cecil Holmes, Larry Harris, and Buck Reingold in 1973, and based in Los Angeles. The label was formed after all of them had left Buddah Records and secured financing by Warner Bros. Records to start the... venture. Casablanca had become one of the most successful labels of the 1970s, signing and releasing albums by such acts as Kiss, Donna Summer, Village People, Cher, and Parliament featuring George Clinton. The label's film division, Casablanca Filmworks, had hits with the movies The Deep and Midnight Express. In 1977, PolyGram Records acquired a 50 percent stake of Casablanca for $15 million, and then in 1980 it purchased the other 50 percent. Also in 1980, one of the label's biggest acts, Donna Summer, left for another record company as she and Casablanca could not come to terms on her musical direction in the new decade. That same year, PolyGram pushed Bogart out of Casablanca due to what it viewed as the label's overspending and accounting irregularities.
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Bad Boy Records is a record label founded in 1993 by producer/rapper/entrepreneur Sean "Diddy" Combs. Today it operates as a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, and is distributed by Interscope Records. After his climb from a non-paying internship to becoming an A&R executive at Uptown... Records, Sean Combs was abruptly terminated in 1993 by Andre Harrell. Combs soon founded Bad Boy Records in 1993. The label’s first release was "Flava In Ya Ear" by Craig Mack, followed quickly by Mack's debut album, Project: Funk Da World in 1994. On the heels of these releases came "Juicy" and Ready To Die, the lead single and debut album from The Notorious B.I.G. , released the same year. While Mack's album went gold, Ready to Die achieved multi-platinum success. Dominating the charts into 1995, B.I.G. became one of the genre’s biggest names of the day and Bad Boy’s premier star. Also in 1995, the label continued its success with platinum releases by Total and Faith Evans.
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Universal Motown Republic Group, also abbreviated as UMRG, was an umbrella label founded in 1999 by Universal Music Group to oversee the labels assigned to it's unit. UMRG was formed in 1999 by pooling together Universal Records, Motown Records, and Republic Records, all of which are now defunct,... but which gave way to the current incarnations of those labels at the time, Universal Motown Records and Universal Republic Records. Universal Motown Republic Group was one of the three Universal Music Group umbrella units in North America to deal primarily with mainstream pop, rock, and urban performers; the others being: The Island Def Jam Music Group and Interscope-Geffen-A&M. Barry Weiss served as Chairman & CEO of the Company.
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