Back in February, N.O.R.E. appeared as a guest on The Joe Budden Podcast to discuss a multitude of topics, including the intricacies of the Drink Champs' and why the structure of their business deal was superior to a similar endeavor once negotiated by the Taxstone and the late hip-hop attorney, Combat Jack, regarding the Loud Speakers Network.

“It’s probably the best audio deal in rap podcast history,” N.O.R.E. said. “I’m keeping it 100. And we still own our IPO. I said, ‘Before me, they gave the YouTubes for free. Them IPOs, they didn’t own, only me and [DJ EFN]...“A’lot of y’all dudes was out here giving y’all YouTubes away for free. Y’all was signed to… what’s that shit, Sound? What was the shit that Tax and all them n-ggas was signed to? What’s that label? A dude named Matt ran it. Combat, Tax, all of them was on this label giving they YouTubes away for free. I’m the first dude that had a three-deal for the same crack.”

When asked about the matter during an interview with Complex, Taxstone, who's currently in prison for the murder of Troy Ave's bodyguard, said the following.

“I didn’t really address it because that shit is not even true," said Taxt Like if you really do your due diligence to look at the Tax Season podcast, I didn’t post videos on YouTube,” he said. “And that was intentional because I wasn’t getting paid from it. So if you really see my podcast, it’s only clips of them. It’s only one full interview of Tax Season ever on video. And that’s the Meek Mill interview I did in Atlanta. So that’s false because I didn’t even post videos on YouTube of my podcast. I actually have all of my videos on my hard drive because I knew that that was a different form of revenue that I could get.

The 37-year-old continued, “But as far as getting paid and stuff, yeah. Combat got us ads. That’s how we got paid in the beginning. That was the very beginning of podcasts. You know how hard it was to even get a company to believe to put an ad [on the podcast]. But they seen these podcasts is doing 300,000 a week. And that’s when we started selling products like Casper mattresses and Bevel blades. And they seen the products really moving, and they was like, ‘Yo, this is another place to promote and advertise. It’s like, wow. Why are you happy that somebody didn’t succeed? Like why would that be a part of your agenda? This is your agenda and happiness?”

Source: Hip Hop DX