Bad Boy Records
American hip hop record label
Bad Boy Entertainment, doing business as Bad Boy Records, is an American record label founded by Sean "Puffy" Combs. The first signee, Craig Mack, gained significant commercial success after the release of his 1994 single "Flava In Ya Ear". The label then signed other hip-hop and R&B acts, including The Notorious B.I.G., Faith Evans, Mase, 112, Total, the Lox, Shyne, and Carl Thomas. At its peak in 1997, Bad Boy was worth an estimated $100 million. During the 2000s, Bad Boy Records signed several notable artists, including French Montana, Machine Gun Kelly, Janelle Monáe, and Cassie Ventura.
In 2023, Combs founded a successor label, Love Records, to self-release his fifth studio album, The Love Album: Off the Grid, in September of that year.
History
Beginnings
Sean Combs founded Bad Boy Records in 1993 after rising from an unpaid internship to an artists and repertoire executive at Uptown Records, where he was fired in 1993 by Andre Harrell. Combs took the role of chief executive officer, while former Orion Pictures marketing manager Kirk Burrowes was named general manager and given a 25 percent stake in the label. During this period, Burrowes managed the company’s internal business affairs and operational structure.
Combs brought the Notorious B.I.G., who became the label's flagship artist, to the company.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q798658. VIAF identifies the subject as 141064664. The Library of Congress control number is no2003082059. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1997, 2023 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bad Boy 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.