T.I. is taking Cinq Music to court over the rights to some of the biggest albums of his career.
The Atlanta rapper, born Clifford Joseph Harris, has filed a lawsuit against Cinq Music, accusing the label of refusing to honor a 2017 agreement that allegedly gave him the option to buy back his master recordings on “very favorable” terms.
The catalog at the center of the dispute includes T.I.’s Atlantic Records-era albums, including King, T.I. vs. T.I.P. and Paper Trail. Cinq purchased the rights to those recordings from Atlantic in 2017, but T.I. says he only agreed to support the sale because the company included a clause allowing him to buy the masters back later.
According to the lawsuit, T.I. exercised that option in 2024. That is when, his legal team claims, Cinq tried to push the price far beyond what the contract allowed.
“Cinq regretted that it had agreed to the [option terms], and, therefore … did everything it could to frustrate plaintiffs’ efforts to complete the purchase,” T.I.’s lawyer Robert Jacobs wrote in the filing.
T.I. claims the original formula should have capped the price at around $3 million. Instead, he says Cinq came back with a figure of $52 million — nearly 20 times higher than what he believes the agreement requires.
The lawsuit argues that Cinq “artificially inflate[d]” the buyback price by including revenue streams that were allegedly excluded from the 2017 formula, including digital streaming revenue from platforms like Spotify and other DSPs.
That detail is central to the case. In today’s music industry, streaming is one of the biggest drivers of catalog value, but T.I.’s legal team says the agreement specifically left that revenue out of the calculation. His lawyers argue that Cinq wrote those terms itself and cannot now ignore them because the formula produces a lower price.
“Cinq had ample reason to know then that the [streaming] exclusion would have a significant impact on the [price],” the filing states.
T.I. also alleges that the label included other excluded sources of income, such as foreign revenue, and mishandled royalty deductions in a broader attempt to “artificially maximize” what he would have to pay.
Cinq has not publicly responded to the lawsuit. Atlantic Records is not named in the complaint and is not accused of wrongdoing.
The case now puts one of T.I.’s most commercially important catalog runs back under the spotlight. During his Atlantic years, the rapper released several of his biggest hits, including “Whatever You Like,” “Live Your Life” with Rihanna and “Dead and Gone,” helping cement his place as one of the defining Southern rap stars of the 2000s.