“CraZee and ConfuZed” Stacks
We start the list off with THE most expensive rap album ever produced, with a rumored budget of 10 million dollars! Thats right 10 million dollars. Stacks had guest features by pretty much every big name in rap from 2006: Swizz Beats, Fat Joe, Trina, Lil Wayne, Diddy, Twista, Jah Cure, with Scott Storch producing four records on the album! This was when Scott Storch was charging a quarter million dollars for a track. So, multiply that by four (assuming Storch did not give him a bulk discount) and just the cost of the Scott Storch tracks alone was a million dollars. Did this album really cost 10 million as was being reported in 2006 and 2007? Maybe not quite 10 million, but realistically it definitely cost upwards of $5 million to produce. For comparison, 10 million dollars in 2006 equals about 15 million today.
“Ready To Die” Notorious BIG
Now this one might surprise you to be on the list. Well, here are a few things that you don’t know. Puffy had to pay west coast white rapper Biggy Smallz in a lawsuit since he sued Bad Boy Records for the use of the name Biggie Smalls. Rumors are that the lawsuit costed Puffy a million dollars. Biggie had recorded half of this album with Uptown Records before Puffy was fired. Once Puffy secured the investments to start Bad Boy Records, he had to pay Uptown Records half a million dollars to buy back those original Biggie Smalls records. Ready To Die’s original budget was around half a million dollars, so add to that the lawsuit and the cost to buy back the original records, and Ready to Die cost around $2 million in 1994 dollars to create.
“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” Kanye West
You obviously knew Kanye was going to be on this list somewhere. Well, he appears multiple times, with My Dark Twisted Fantasy appearing first. Def Jam Records coughed up three million dollars in order to produce this album. Kanye was booking 24-hour sessions for three different studios during the creation of the album. Was it worth it in the end? Definitely so, as many fans consider this album one of the greatest hip hop albums ever created.
“Late Registration” Kanye West
It has been reported (with reports from Kanye himself) that the cost to create Late Registration was around 2 million dollars. Interestingly enough, when you take the budget of two million dollars and compare it to other albums that Kanye produced like Yeezus or The Life Of Pablo, Late Registration is one of the cheapest albums that Kanye West ever made!
“Watch The Throne” Kanye West and Jay-Z
Kanye West was given an advance of 1 million dollars and a 1.5-million-dollar budget to create Watch The Throne. Jay-Z’s advance or budget has not been disclosed anywhere, but it can be safe to assume that his advance and budget was either the same or slightly more than Kanye’s back in 2011. The total album budget that has been publicly released is 1.5 million dollars. However, that 1.5 million dollars does not account for any budget allotted to Jay-Z. So, it’s more likely that the album budget for Watch The Throne was actually around 3 million dollars, which is double of Kanye’s budget. Something to interesting to note, of all the ten albums listed, Jay-Z is only listed here and not for any solo album. Jay-Z has been known to not use big budgets for his albums and always is looking at the bottom when producing an album.
“He Got Game Soundtrack” Public Enemy
So here is one that you probably didn’t expect to be on the list. But here it is, and it cost over a million bucks (1998 dollars) to create. Some of you that were not old enough to be around when this was released probably had no idea that a major label soundtrack was released in conjunction with the film. Even today the movie is still very famous, but the soundtrack is definitely not. It was Public Enemy’s first time recording in four years, and Def Jam Records went all in for the album. Although the album received mostly solid reviews, the album bombed in stores selling less than 50,000 copies in its first week at a time when rap records were doing big numbers. The album nor its single charted high in any category, making this album a big loss for the record label.
“No Way Out” Puff Daddy
Another one on the list that you may not have thought would be on it. For this album, Puffy released five separate singles with five big budget videos produced by either Hype Williams or Paul Hunters. All of those video budgets were in the high six figures to seven figures. The most expensive of those five videos was Victory, which is considered one of the most expensive rap videos ever produced. The budget for the Victory video was 1.4 million dollars in 1997. Puffy had flown all of his producers to the Caribbean to produce the album in Trinidad, none of which was cheap. Puffy wanted to show the world that he was the biggest artist in rap in 1997 and spared no expense in creating his debut album.
“All Eyez On Me” 2Pac
This album cost 1.4 million dollars just to get the artist to the recording studio! In addition to the album, four major singles/videos were released, all costing six figures to produce. The album contained twenty-seven tracks and another twenty-five to thirty were recorded and not used for the album. When you add up the twenty-five different artists featured, the twenty-four different writers and ten different producers along with one of the most rap marketed albums of 1996, the total that it cost Suge Knight and Death Row Records was between two and three million dollars.
“Yeezus” Kanye West
When we went digging on information for albums for this list, we knew that almost all of Kanye’s albums would be there. Every single Kanye West album had budgets in the millions. As shown above, My Twisted Dark Fantasy cost three million dollars, Watch The Throne was around three million dollars and Late Registration was two million dollars. Those budgets we had expected for all Kanye’s albums. What we did not foresee however, was the total budget for Yeezus, which was 12 million dollars! It has been rumored that Kanye actually only spent eight million of the total twelve million budget, which would make it the second most expensive rap album ever created. If those rumors are wrong, and Kanye really did spend the total budget of twelve million, then it would be the most expensive rap album ever.