After a turbulent time with the label that began shortly after he moved to L.A., Frank Ocean left Def Jam in August of 2016 after the release of his visual album Endless. In the years since it happened, the move and the details surrounding it have been discussed at length, with Frank being praised for his independence.
Some news has surfaced today which might surprise people. A source close to the situation has confirmed with Variety that Frank Ocean has signed a deal with Warner Chappell Music. The deal was kept quiet intentionally and was done sometime in the fall. It’s worth noting that Warner Chappell is a division of Warner Music Group and is a publishing company, not a standard major label, so Frank is still an indepednent artist in that sense.
It’ll be interesting to see how this impacts things the next time Frank decides to put out an album, which hopefully is still soon, despite the artist going quiet after an album campaign seemingly started with ‘DHL‘ and ‘In My Room‘.
