By Chuck "Jigsaw" Creekmur
Play-N-Skillz don't want to sue the biggest rapper on Earth, but they have yet to receive any monies for their work on Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III.
Play-N-Skillz produced "Got Money," which was the third official single from Lil Wayne's acclaimed sixth studio album.
The song featured T-Pain and peaked at No. 4 on the iTunes Top 100 and No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.
"We haven't gotten any compensation. We really didn't want to speak on anything like that, just because of our relationship with Pain and Wayne. We're more thankful for the opportunity to be on Tha Carter III, but business is business at the end of the day," Skillz told AllHipHop.com at Sha Money XL's One Stop Shop producers conference over this past weekend.
Skillz, one half of the production hit squad, continued, "now it is coming to where we have to put our business hat on. We had the producer and the creative hat on, but now we wanna know what's going on."
"Got Money" was originally for Pitbull's album, Play said, but it was submitted a mere two days too late for inclusion on the Miami artist's album.
"So, by the time he sent it back, T-Pain was on the hook. T-Pain had made it happen," Play continued. "This just goes to show, where technology is going,” Skillz explained. “We had never even met Wayne. He's in there and with us being from the South, we had seen him here and there, but that was the first time we had actually worked with him. But we didn't actually go into the studio and work with him. Everything was third person."
The song made the rounds and soon there was talk that the song could be going to the next level.
"Pain's people reached out to us and they said there was a big rapper that wanted to rap on it. We wanted to know who the hell it was,” Play continued. “They said it was Wayne, they sent the files back, we changed the music on it, rearranged it and the rest is history."
How the future plays out is unclear, but both Play and Skillz want to resolve things amicably so that all parties can continue to make music.
"We think the legal issues will be taken care of. It might not even be on his radar. A lot of people fail to realize, the artist might not even know. I'm sure that Wayne doesn't even know or Pain doesn't even know," Skillz said. "It could be Universal Records, but somebody has to come with it. Give us our change, man...we need that. We got expensive tastes, baby. We're going to continue to work and hopefully it doesn't tarnish the relationship,” Play said. “But, if you don't handle your business, nothing you do makes sense anyway."
In related news, Play-N-Skillz are going to continue to work on music, but will also return to their rap craft as well.