R&B crew Day26, who used to roll with Bad Boy Records, say that Diddy’s old MTV show Making the Band wasn’t built to help them thrive after the cameras stopped rolling.
Following in the footsteps of other ex-Bad Boy artists speaking out since Diddy faced sexual assault, racketeering and sex trafficking allegations, Day26 says the label left them hanging. The group, fresh off dropping their fifth album Day Ones last August, hit up The Breakfast Club this week to spill the tea about their post-Making the Band experience.
“Just the way the whole thing was set up, like, even from the contracts,” Day26’s Brian Andrews explained around the four-minute mark of the video below. “The way it was structured when the cameras were gone it was like, ‘Alright guys, it was nice knowing you.'”
Robert Curry spilled how the band had to battle for their next deal, with hit-makers Brian-Michael Cox and Troy Taylor pushing Bad Boy to back Day26.
“That’s what it took for us to even get in the door to do another project,” Curry shared. “They wasn’t worried about us like that. It was for what it was for.”
Willie Taylor jumped in, mentioning he’d already spent “ten years in” writing songs and was signed with Wyclef Jean, while Andrews had been with Mathew Knowles’ Music World Entertainment.
“We learned everything we knew from this situation, but it was was vets in the game,” Curry added. “We had to get bought out of our contracts.”
On why they joined Making the Band, Taylor explained it was because “you got your foot in but you ain’t all the way where you want to go.”
“I think that was more of a chance and we just took it,” he said.
Curry admitted he’d “always” dreamed of joining Bad Boy since he was a kid. “It’s like going after something that you’ve been going after all your life and it being right there, you might do some things that you wouldn’t normally do,” he confessed.
About fellow winners Danity Kane, Curry said the girl group couldn’t give them much Bad Boy intel since they were rookies too. He mentioned Day26 struggled to get radio play because people saw them as just a “gimmick for TV.”
“People really didn’t give us the chance for us musically,” Taylor noted. “They was like, ‘Yo, y’all coming to places and people coming to see y’all and y’all selling things out, but y’all don’t have a record that was pushing.”
Former Making the Band stars Aubrey O’Day, Dawn Richard and D. Woods from Danity Kane have also called out Diddy for sexual harassment and creating a toxic workplace. Woods told ABC News this week that Diddy put her in “dark, scary, predatory spaces” and would say “the most degrading things” to her.
