ThatвЂ™s it.вЂќ I finally found someone who would give it to me, which was Priority. I just kept screaming вЂњI need a distribution deal. I didnвЂ™t really know what it was at the time. But you gonna need $200,000 for marketing and promotion.' IвЂ™m a hood dude that went to college so that stuck in my mind. Michael JacksonвЂ™s attorney told me, 'You know, you need a distribution deal. I think people didnвЂ™t think it was gonna happen. I ended up getting a deal with Priority which was a distribution deal. 'That was going to be my big project to enter the music game. I was selling independently already,' P would explain to HipHopDX in 2015. By 1995, the group was making serious noise with their third album True and the single 'I'm Bout it, Bout It.' And P's new distribution deal was set to kick things into high gear. By the mid-1990s, the moniker had come to be applied to a trio P had formed with his younger brothers Corey 'C-Murder' Miller and Vyshonne 'Silkk the Shocker' Miller. He'd formed the rap group even before he launched No Limit officially, with Grandmaster Scratch, King George, Big O, Chilly D, King George, Chill, Magic Mark all listed on Mind of a Psychopath in 1990 as members initially.

His fifth album Ice Cream Man would become his first platinum-seller in 1996. Once Priority saw the kind of leverage P had generated on his own, he landed a major distribution deal. He'd relocated No Limit back to his native New Orleans and set to work on his fourth album, 99 Ways To Die. See, this way I could sell only 100,000 records and make more money per album than some famous who doesnвЂ™t own and sold 2 million albums.вЂќД«y 1995, Priority Records was paying attention to what Master P was doing. 'Because instead of being signed to a label and maybe at best making 15% of the money, now I make 100%-giving away 15% for distribution if I choose to. вЂњOwning my own company was important,' P explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. All the while, as he grew his brand and built his name, he was focused on ownership.

1994's The Ghetto's Trying To Kill Me saw P take No Limit to SOLAR Records for wider distribution. He'd spend those early years building his name opening for Bay Area acts like E-40 and 2Pac. He'd founded No Limit after opening his record store, launching his career in the early 1990s and seeing regional successes with Richmond-based In A Minute Records releases like Get Away Clean and Mama's Bad Boy.

And with his No Limit Records, Master P came to be the embodiment of that mindset and hustler's spirit. With no homegrown major labels and only middling interests from the powers-that-be, locals like Memphis, Houston, Miami and New Orleans got their rap bonafides straight out the mud. Southern rap's independent spirit is well-documented: it's built into the very DNA of the music and the industry that sprang up around it. 'I used to dream about this type of stuff-making movies, getting a number one record-but I ain't never thought it could really come true, even though I always knew I could do it.' 'When you want something out of life, you always have big dreams about doing all kinds of stuff that the average person probably wouldn't think about doing,' P would tell The Washington Post in 1997. The store soon became homebase for his own record label: No Limit Records. It was while there that Percy's uncle would pass away, leaving the young man an inheritance that P would turn into his own record store.

He would only stay there one year, however, before transferring to Merritt College in Oakland to study business. The eldest of five, young Percy thought his way out of poverty was to be basketball as he attended the University of Houston in 1990 on an athletic scholarship. Miller had come from the hardscrabble Calliope Projects in New Orlean's notorious Third Ward. Actually, to say it was 'beginning' to yield results is misleading: the rapper known as Master P had been making major strides for the better part of three years. The burgeoning rapper/mogul was watching as, after years of labor and hustle, his vision was beginning to bear some serious fruit.

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