Migos’ Solo Release Strategy Was Inspired by Rae Sremmurd’s Triple Album

Quality Control Music has had a momentous year. With the upcoming release of the Offset’s solo, the dominant label will end the year with 14 projects released this year alone, including the Migos’ Culture II.

In an interview with Complex, QC executives Kevin “Coach K” Lee and Pierre “Pee” Thomas discussed their 2018 fourth quarter strategy, stating that they had no plans of slowing up. When speaking about how the idea of solo releases came into fruition, Coach K revealed that the members were working on individual records during the course of recording the Control the Streets, Vol. 1 compilation last year. Rather than forcing collaborations, the QC boss thought it would be better to allow each member to present their respective cuts as solo acts.

However, the plan wasn’t always this way. In an interview with XXL, Quavo further details how exactly they wanted to release the individual efforts. He stated that Migos had originally wanted to package the solo projects as one album, citing Rae Sremmurd‘s SR3MM as the source of inspiration. “We originally wanted to do it as one whole album [and] each have our own section… an A- B- [and] C-side,” he said. If you remember, SR3MM was composed of three separate projects; a traditional Rae Sremmurd album, a solo Swae Lee album (titled Swaecation), and a Slim Jxmmi project (titled Jxmtro).

However, Quavo felt the size of a three-album Migos project would potentially leave a member at a disadvantage, similar to what he believed Jxmmi faced (the sequencing of the SR3MM resulted in Jxmtro sitting at the tail end of the 30-track behemoth). “Everybody just listen to the first couple of songs.”

Ultimately, the group abandoned the idea altogether and chose to go with a model that called for solo releases. This tactic seems to be working, as Quavo‘s Quavo Huncho and Takeoff‘s The Last Rocket both managed to have landed in the top five of the Billboard 200 list upon their respective releases.