Photo by Elena Ganz / Design by Tyler Farmer
Angelo Mota signed a major label deal on his 25th birthday, after years of fighting to make music his full-time job. We hear these kinds of success stories often, but what happens when it doesn’t work out?
June 22, 2026
BY Jacob Moore
For as long as he had been pursuing a career in music, Angelo Mota imagined what it would be like to get signed to a major label. He pictured walking into a gleaming Manhattan skyscraper, his music playing and his face up on the lobby screens as he exited the elevator. He envisioned popping a bottle of champagne to celebrate after he inked the deal with a fancy pen, seated in a room full of people clapping and congratulating him.
The reality was a little different. In 2022, he found himself inside of a Staples in Jersey City on his 25th birthday, printing out a 60-page contract from Def Jam. He quietly posted up at the printer next to an employee, waiting for dozens of pieces of paper to spit out of the machine.
“I remember standing there with a guy who worked at Staples and thinking that I could have been in his position just a few months ago,” Mota says. “And for all I know, he might have been an aspiring rapper himself. So I’m printing out this contract that is going to change my life, but we’re both just standing by this machine with soft retail pop music playing in the background, all while this mystery illness is spreading around the world. It was a weird feeling.”
Because of the pandemic, there was no grand entrance at the label headquarters—before printing out the contract, he had actually already signed the deal. A couple days earlier, a digital copy came through in an email, and Mota signed it on his phone while he was lying in bed playing Rocket League.
On the afternoon of his birthday, Mota went home with his stack of papers and joined a Zoom meeting with a few label reps to formally seal the deal. He did, at least, get a cheap bottle of champagne (kind of; it was actually a $15 bottle of La Marca Prosecco) to mark the occasion, but he nervously pulled the cork before he signed the final document, leading to an awkward moment where his A&R joked that it was bad luck to pop the bottle before the deal’s done.
“I was counting my chickens before they hatch,” Mota explains with a smile, “and it’s funny because I don’t even drink. I hate drinking. But this whole thing was purely symbolic. I worked so fucking hard, and I wanted to give myself that experience.”
Growing up in West Orange, New Jersey, about 20 miles outside of New York City, Angelo Mota was one step removed from the entertainment industry success stories you see firsthand in big cities. His dad was a manager at a call center, and his mom was the only person he knew with a job in a creative field, holding a role that focused on sustainability in the apparel industry. Mota started playing drums in school at 7 or 8 and was making songs by 12, but for much of his adolescence, he wanted to be a professional skateboarder.
After breaking his foot and giving up on skateboarding dreams, Mota started rapping in 2010 as he was entering his teenage years. At that point, he wasn’t paying attention to labels or the music industry, but he was familiar with the classics: 2Pac, Biggie, A Tribe Called Quest, E-40, Method Man, 50 Cent, De La Soul, Eminem, Ludacris—the list goes on.
And then, of course, there was Kanye West. “Kanye was the North Star for a lot of people back then, and he was on Def Jam, doing all this cool shit.” The same year that Mota started rapping, Kanye released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy after months of the iconic GOOD Fridays campaign featuring songs with artists like JAY-Z, Pusha T, RZA, and Kid Cudi.
While he was in college, Mota had friends who made music for fun, but he started taking it more seriously around 2012 when he got close with fellow New Jersey rapper Topaz Jones, who lived in the neighboring town of Montclair. Mota sent Jones a Facebook message and asked if he could sit in on a studio session, just to watch, and Jones agreed. “He was putting me onto game, talking about working with Theophilus London around the time that Travis Scott was making Owl Pharaoh. He was encouraging me, telling me to do things beyond SoundCloud. I credit him in a huge way. I’m the only one in my family to pursue music, and [Jones] was the first person I met who showed me it was possible.”
In 2014, at 19 years old, Mota dropped out of college. “I couldn’t do that anymore. I had to do music, and I couldn’t stand doing anything else. Nothing could keep my attention or stop me from feeling the effects on all the mental health shit I had going on. Music was the only thing that made me feel like there was something more I was living for.”
Once he dropped out, he started taking steps to make music his focus, but he was also taking whatever side jobs he could get to make ends meet—he worked at Urban Outfitters, in the produce section at Whole Foods, at a Guitar Center, and as a salesman at a restoration company.
All the while, he was releasing music independently with distribution partners like DistroKid, TuneCore, and Empire. He began working with a manager named Tim Gunter, and he was running around with friends who were also chasing rap careers, so he started getting more exposure to the music industry. His manager taught him about labels and PR companies, and he started recognizing the influence of music blogs like 2DopeBoyz, DJ Booth, and Pigeons & Planes (we covered him several times in the mid-2010s). Mota even ended up in a room with Ca$ey Veggies and slid him a USB with music on it. “He just looked disappointed in me,” he laughs, “and my friends were telling me that probably wasn’t the right time to do that. Looking back, that was pretty corny, but I didn’t know any better.”
Mota had heard stories of artists getting put on like that, crashing parties and hand-delivering music to A-listers or freestyling for rappers and getting signed on the spot. What he didn’t realize is that the industry was changing. Lil Yachty and XXXTENTACION were blowing up online, the way people discovered music was shifting, and label signings were all about data and internet buzz, not chance encounters and USBs full of demos.
His biggest opportunity yet came in 2015 through a partnership with independent label Immaculate Taste, who had a distribution deal with InGrooves. “I dropped out of school, so I had to make this work. I was doing music, but I had to get money on the side. I wasn't spending anything on ads or marketing. It was really just day-to-day survival: getting food, making sure gas was filled up.”
Photo by Elena Ganz
By 2019, the Immaculate Taste deal stalled out and all parties agreed to split ways on good terms. “I was just like, ‘Am I just dumb? Do I need to get real?’” Mota had hit a wall.
“The last job I worked [before I got signed to Def Jam] was as a waiter. When I was a waiter, I remember having this conversation with my mom where I was basically telling her I feel like I'm a loser. I haven't done anything yet, and I couldn’t live off of music. I was applying to A&R jobs, trying to get closer to making music my focus, and then COVID hit and I was totally lost. I had a little studio but I lost it because I couldn’t pay for it. Because of COVID, I couldn’t even work anymore.”
But during those first months of 2020, Mota’s music was quietly gaining momentum. When his Immaculate Taste deal ended, his manager Tim had suggested they start waterfalling singles on the major streaming services, dropping consistently each month. At this point, Mota felt like he had nothing to lose by trying. In January, his first release “Look in the Mirror” got placed in Spotify’s Fresh Finds playlist. In February, the following single “Spin” performed well too. Then in March, “Do Not Disturb” did even better. He kept pushing in April with “I Can’t Hate Myself,” and that was a tipping point. The traction was snowballing, and Blackbear—who Mota had never met or interacted with—placed the song in the second slot of a Spotify takeover playlist, right after a Grimes track. “I Can’t Hate Myself” got over 100,000 streams in the first two weeks.
That’s when calls started coming in. At first, it was smaller distributors and indie labels, but then came Def Jam. An A&R at the label basically asked Mota: “What do you want to do?” From there, things moved fast. On one of the first Zoom meetings, Mota and the A&R were joined by a team of others. The A&R told Mota, “I asked who at the label would want to work on this, and everyone on this call raised their hand.”
A week later, Mota had a proposal, then hired a lawyer to sort out the details and make it official. Since everything was slowed down because of COVID, the back-and-forth with lawyers took a couple of months. During that time, another major label wanted to send Mota an offer, but he told them that he had already decided to sign to Def Jam and he didn’t even want to see the deal.
“It was crazy, I can't think of why I wouldn't want to see the other deal, but I guess I had already sold myself. I'm like, yo, I'm finna be on Def Jam. This is how it was written. This is a label that I fuck with, and they got a bunch of hitters. They got Bieber, they got Kanye, they got fucking everybody. I was so gassed.”
Mota signed his deal as the whole world was going to shit. “Everybody's sick and people are losing their jobs, and I somehow have landed my dream job. There was some guilt, because I had homies doing this rap shit for hella long, and they never got this opportunity. It was like, am I ready?”
Once Mota was signed to Def Jam, the first order of business was to get out to Los Angeles and into the label’s state-of-the-art recording studio. But there was one issue: there was absolutely no way that Mota was going to get on a plane.
“I’m going to be real with myself, I was scared of flying at the time,” Mota says. “I just didn’t want to do it, especially with COVID. There’s too much contamination, and with my OCD I was convinced I was going to get sick and die mid-air—these are the thoughts I was having, and it fucked me up. So I decided to drive across the country.”
The label didn’t blink; they got him a rental car and covered the cost of hotels on the way. When he arrived in LA, he found a gorgeous place sitting on the edge of a mountain in Beverly Hills, and he locked it in for six months, all taken care of with label money. Everything was exactly as he pictured it.
For those six months, Mota felt like it was really happening. He was taking meetings with label executives who worked with his idols. They laid out their plans to get him in magazines and set up opportunities that would take his career to the next level. He was working regularly at the in-house studios that he’d later find out were billed at $4,000 a night, all coming from his recording budget. “I had no clue. They were just like, ‘You want a studio? We’ll book one.’ I didn’t know any better. There was shit like that happening and it appeals to the vanity side of you. You feel like a superstar.”
After six months of living in Los Angeles, Mota decided to head back to New Jersey. He’d only dropped a couple of songs with Def Jam during that period, and they weren’t really connecting, but it felt like everything was headed in the right direction. He had some family things to take care of, and he figured that he would head home, get back to work, and nothing would really change. He broke the lease on the Beverly Hills house and had to pay a penalty, but the label took care of it, and they’d cover the cost of his apartment in New Jersey, too. On the long drive back home, he was confident that everything was on track. “I felt very much like, ‘We’re on the precipice of something crazy.’”
But when he got back to New Jersey, things started to feel different.
Whispers of a Kanye West album were circulating around the Def Jam offices, and in July of 2020, Ye announced that Donda was on the way.“ When an artist that big is moving, the whole building moves with them,” says Mota. “I was trying to get another song out and plan my album, but my release date kept getting pushed back because of Donda.”
Months went by, communication with the label slowed down, and the remainder of 2020 came and went. Still no Donda, and Mota was in limbo. Kanye frenzy aside, there were even bigger changes happening at Def Jam. CEO Paul Rosenberg had stepped down back in February of 2020, and interim leadership was facing pressure in the months since then. There were rumors of new leadership—specifically Tunji Balogun, now CEO of Def Jam—coming in. Mota didn’t know what that meant for him, but he knew that getting his releases pushed back for months wasn’t a good sign.
“When I left LA, that’s when it started to slip. I didn’t realize how different it would be in New Jersey, where I wasn’t meeting with the label as much and didn’t know what was going on. Everybody knew that Tunji was coming in, and they probably knew that Tunji was going to come in and change things. I could feel that we might not be a priority, and we could very well be shelved. I knew that I would have had to pay back a lot of money to recoup on my deal, and I knew there’s no fucking way, because I’ve only dropped three singles and none of them are really moving the needle.”
Months went by, and Mota still hadn’t heard much from Def Jam beyond feedback from his A&R on the next single. He dropped “First Gear” in April of 2021, and Mota says “it’s a cool song, but didn’t make the mark.” He and his manager tried to get Tunji on the phone, and they tried to gather whatever intel they could, but the remainder of 2021 felt like a waiting game.
Tunji officially started as CEO of Def Jam in January of 2022. Soon after, Mota’s A&R called him and told him that he was leaving Def Jam for a job at another label. “He was like, ‘You can come with me to Warner if you want.’ When he said it like that—if you want—I took that as, ‘Oh, you don’t care if I come with you or not.’ I told him I’d let him know, and I never spoke to him again until recently.”
The next morning, Mota called his manager. “I called Tim to see if he’d talked to Tunji yet. Maybe he’ll let us stay at Def Jam and we can just be under a new A&R. He was like, ‘Brother, they’re going to drop you.’ So I was like, ‘Well how much money is left in my fund? And he was like, ‘There’s nothing.’”
That call was followed by a message from Tunji: “He was showing love, but he was basically like, ‘Yeah, this just isn’t going to work out.’” Just as quickly as the deal had happened, it was taken away. It was an amicable split. “We could have been stuck,” Mota explains, “shelved like so many artists are, but they were actually kind of doing us a solid by just letting us go.”
Even though things ended as fairly as possible, Mota and his manager were both once again lost. “All those feelings I had when I was working as a waiter came back. Like damn, I got to go back to that shit, back to working jobs I hate and sleeping on couches. And now I have to go back to it having already signed to a label. In my head, I’m thinking everybody’s going to see that I got dropped. Who’s going to want to work with me after that? I just felt like such a failure, bro. It was rough.”
Photo by Elena Ganz
Photo by Elena Ganz
After getting dropped, Angelo Mota retreated. He spent weeks staying inside, sleeping in, getting high, having anxiety attacks, barely eating other than late-night junk food binges, and falling asleep with his jeans on. The only reason he was taking care of his hygiene was because his OCD came with anxiety about germs and cleanliness. His only mission was to escape and to get through the day, and each one was blending in with the next. He felt like his music career was over.
“I dissociated for an entire month, just numbing myself. I would wake up and I would smoke weed all day, and I would fucking take my Klonopin. I was defeated, just so defeated. The day after I got dropped, my friend Jeremy Stevenson, who manages BEAM, called me and told me, ‘It’s not going to make sense to you right now, but this is the best thing that could have happened to you with that situation.’ I was like whatever, another fucking industry guy trying to tell me that he gets it, dah dah dah. I didn’t want to hear it.”
Mota didn’t want to talk to anyone, his lease was coming to an end and he didn’t know where he was going to live next, and he was neglecting every relationship he had, both professional and personal. “I was just high for 30 days straight. And I had my regular OCD shit so I was obsessing about it and thinking about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. It was all day every day, and it was exhausting. So I got high. I had to find a way to shut that up, and that was the way that I found. I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. At those points you need to lean on the people close to you, and at the end of the day that’s what finally brought me out.”
A month in, Mota’s manager called. “He sounded so happy, and I was like, what's up? He was like, ‘You just got fucking booked for Day N Vegas.’ And I remember it felt like a switch. Immediately after that, I jumped from a depressive state to a super high manic. I’m on that. I’m going to make this work.”
Two weeks after that, Mota did a deal for his back catalog. When he signed with Def Jam, Mota only committed to giving them new music, not any of his previous releases. He actually tried to persuade them to take his older music too, because he thought that would lead to even more promo, but his manager convinced him not to: “Thankfully, my manager was like, ‘What the fuck? If they push the new shit, the old shit blow up. Don't do that.’ I was like, okay, bet.”
The deal on his back catalog made him enough money to pay his rent for a year.
A series of other things fell into place over the next months. Day N Vegas ended up getting canceled that year, but there were new offers, deals, opportunities, and a newfound confidence in Mota. He worked on a Grammy-nominated song (Lecrae’s “Too Much”), landed an MLB placement, and locked in a Genius distribution deal. He realized that the words of encouragement from his friend Jeremy the day after he was dropped turned out to be true. “It made me think back to what he said. He was like, ‘It doesn’t stop. This isn’t going to affect you in the way that you think it is. This is a blessing. They can only recoup on what they own, and you didn’t give them your catalog.’”
Mota still speaks highly of many of the people he worked with at Def Jam. With time, he’s come to understand that it’s just business, even if it sometimes feels impossible for artists to not take things personally.
“This is my life. Music is my life, so my career is my life. Hearing things like, ‘I’m not rocking with it’ or, ‘I can’t do anything with it’ can feel like a personal affront. It’s like they’re not giving you a chance to be. That’s not what it is, but that’s what it feels like.”
Mota started recording music when he was 17 years old, and he’s 30 now. He’s been through enough ups and downs to know that one thing, even losing a major label deal, isn’t the end-all-be-all. “I don’t see it as failure anymore, I see it as change. After that happened, I realized things kept moving. If I put in the effort, other opportunities would come around. Some work, some don’t. There were multiple times since then when something fell apart and I felt like I wanted to quit, but I didn’t. If you just keep going, it'll happen again.”
I ask whether, after everything he's been through, he's more skeptical of opportunities that come his way now. “I wouldn’t say I’m skeptical, I just know more. If someone takes me out to a dinner meeting and drops a thousand dollars on it, I know what that is. In the past, I would’ve been like, ‘Alright, we made it, let me call my boss and tell him fuck you I’m out.’ I understand it now, and it’s not a good or bad thing. Because I understand that, I feel a lot more confident. This is the first time I’ve felt like that.”
On May 15, Mota dropped a new song called “is this my life.” It’s the first release through Long Plays Only, the independent label he and his manager Tim started together. The track had the strongest first-week numbers of any song during Mota’s career so far. By the time this story is published, he’ll have followed it up with another single called “or not.”
On the day Angelo Mota finalized his deal with Long Plays Only, he also signed the lease on his new apartment in L.A., freeing him from the month-to-month battle to pay rent. To celebrate, there was no champagne popped this time around: “I just called Tim and told him I loved him, then went right back to work.”