Cash Money Records
American record label founded by brothers Bryan "Birdman" Williams and Ronald "Slim" Williams

Cash Money Records is an American record label founded in 1991 by brothers and record executives Ronald "Slim" Williams and Bryan "Baby" Williams. The label gained prominence in the late 1990s for having signed and released albums for New Orleans–based musical acts including B.G., Lil Wayne, Juvenile, Young Turk and the Hot Boys. It became an imprint of Universal Records, a division of Universal Music Group in March 1998, and remained so during its following iterations as Universal Motown and ultimately Republic Records.
In the late 2000s, Cash Money signed and released projects for a number of prominent hip-hop artists, including Drake and Nicki Minaj. Wayne launched Young Money Entertainment in 2005, which operated as an imprint of the label and Republic Records until 2018—a joint venture colloquially branded as Young Money Cash Money Billionaires (abbreviated as YMCMB). The label has been commonly regarded as among the most successful urban contemporary music labels of the 2000s to 2010s.
The label has released a total of 12 number one albums on the Billboard 200, and seven number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart: Lil Wayne's "Lollipop", Jay Sean's "Down", and Drake's "One Dance", "God's Plan", "Nice for What", and "In My Feelings", and Juvenile's "Slow Motion".
The label's name alludes to the Cash Money Brothers, drug kingpin Nino Brown's gang from the 1991 crime film New Jack City.
History
1991–1997: Beginnings
Bryan Williams, also known as Birdman, told some of his close friends the motivation for starting the label:
I was hoping it would get us out of the projects and into a positive way of life. And we wanted to help other people get out of this poverty...
“Cash Money Records” enters the record as american record label founded by brothers Bryan "Birdman" Williams and Ronald "Slim" Williams. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cash, Money and Records can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1047366. VIAF identifies the subject as 130412240. The Library of Congress control number is no2002001254. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1998, 2005 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cash Money Records” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.