Yandy Smith says she had the idea, she pitched it, and the contract she signed never paid her for what the idea became.
Smith is a co-creator of Love & Hip Hop and a former manager for the rapper Jim Jones at Atlantic Records. The show started, she says, with the two of them living on the road. “We lived our life on a tour bus ’cause he was always on tour,” she said. “We captured all kinds of craziness.”
She took it to VH1. “I got a development deal, and with that development deal we started shooting a pilot,” she said. She later worked with the producer Mona Scott-Young, who suggested the name. Love & Hip Hop: New York premiered on VH1 in 2011, and the franchise went on to add Atlanta, Hollywood and Miami.
Smith was an executive producer on the original series. She was not listed as a producer on the spinoffs, and that is where the difference sits. An executive producer credit names who made the show. It does not by itself pay out when a franchise expands into three more cities, and hers did not.
“I’ve made millions from ‘Love & Hip Hop,’ but I should have been in the hundreds of millions,” she said.
She says she signed with a music attorney. So the paperwork read like a music deal and not a television franchise: no ongoing compensation, no rights attached to the series that came after. She says she overlooked the business side of the title she was holding, which is a different admission from saying she was cheated. She had the room. She did not have the contract for it.
The franchise is now ending, with a final six-part special set for VH1 in the fall of 2026. Smith says the show employed hundreds of people along the way.
Her advice to anybody building something is one sentence long, and it is not about talent.
“Get your paperwork out right and don’t let anybody take your dream from you,” she said.
