JoJo Sues Her Record Label To Get Out Of Contract

Pop and R&B singer JoJo is suing Da Family and Blackground Records in an attempt to get out of her recording contract.

The 22-year-old claimed in a lawsuit that New York State law prohibits minors from signing contracts lasting longer than seven years. When she and her parents signed her seven-album deal in 2004, she was only 12 years old. She argued that her legal responsibility to the label became null and void in March 2011.

The New England native became the youngest solo artist ever to have a number one single in the United States at 13 with Leave (Get Out), the first single from her self-titled debut album. Her second single, Baby It’s You peaked at number 22 in the US and featured Bow Wow.

Too Little Too Late, the first single from her second album The High Road, broke the record for the biggest jump into the top three on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 2006. The single went from 66 to three in a week, breaking the record set by Mariah Carey with her 2001 single “Loverboy,” which jumped from 60 to two. The album went on to sell 2 million copies.

Since then, JoJo — whose real name is Joanna Noelle Blagden Levesque — has been in a fight with her record label. In 2009, she said on her YouTube channel that she was waiting for the label to sign a distribution deal to release her third album. She filed a lawsuit against Da Family Entertainment in August 2009, and was released from her contract in October. She then signed with Blackground, but released a mix tape, Can’t Take That Away From Me, the following year. In 2011, she remixed Drake’s “Marvin’s Room.”

When Blackground lost their distribution deal through Interscope Records in 2012, JoJo’s third studio album was delayed once again, and she released another mixtape, Agáp?.

[Photo credit: s_bukley / Shutterstock.com]