S. Samuel
[With the NFL season quickly coming to an end, Atlanta Falcons' superstar Asante Samuel speaks to SOHH readers about investing off-season time into his Deepside Ent. record label.]
Deepside Entertainment really came about because of a situation that a friend of mine brought to my attention some years back and I’ve always been a fan of music. I’m a businessman too, so, I started the company to help employ some of my friends from the neighborhood to give them jobs. Then I started working with some very talked artists like Young A.C.. It turned out to be a very good thing with very creative artists.
It was really something I started to employee people I know and to help keep friends out of trouble.
I didn’t really have any doubts or fears about trying something different than football. When you’re going through anything new, you’re going to learn about it and so having no idea about the music game and doing it all on my end, I was really reaching out to people I know and getting their advice. That’s how I kind of attacked this. We’re going about six years strong now and I’ve learned a lot.
I had a lot of trial and error but I can’t name one particular person who gave me the advice or guidance. I mess with a lot of people over at Cash Money, Slip-N-Slide and different labels. I’ve been around and reached out to people to get advice to learn more. That’s really how I was able to get my reputation and the label up.
My brother is the general manager. I run everything through him so people can’t just see my name and a bunch of money. Everything I learned, I passed it on to him and he’s out there to make the plays. That’s why I let him execute.
We all come from the same neighborhood. We’re all from what you would call “the hood” and so it’s a street label. We have hip-hop, gangsta rap. We go around to all of the clubs and the streets and thug it and try to make our presence felt.
We go out and see the deejays, trying to get them to spin the records. I would say Deepside Entertainment is a street entertainment company.
People have learned over the years that I own the record label and so they’ll try to get at me. They will see me in the streets and hand me their mixtapes. People try to e-mail me, Twitter and Instagram me their stuff, so I definitely get a lot of attention from [social media outlets].
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