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XXXTentacion Reportedly Had A Massive Career Breakthrough Weeks Before He Died

The news just adds to the tragedy of his death.

A new revelation is coming out just weeks after XXXTentacion was murdered in South Florida.

According to the New York Times, the rapper signed a $10 million album deal with Empire. His album 17 was released under the the same independent music distribution company, and after the success of it, X was offered a huge deal for his third official project.

Ghazi Shami, who helped X break into the mainstream, wouldn’t specify on the terms of the deal but did confirm that the 20-year-old, born Jahseh Onfroy, completed “a significant amount of material” for the album before he was shot and killed on June 18.

During an interview with Beats 1 earlier this month Shami mourned the loss of his protegé. "His loss is catastrophic,” he said. “There's a whole generation of youth that looked to him for a voice. I think that watching him mature as a human being in just like, the 14 months that I knew him—16 months, whatever it was.

“I mean, to see him go from a child—he was 18 years old when I met him in the jail and did a record deal with me—to where he was at now, just before it passed away,” he continued. Just the conversations he was having with me, and the things that he was focused on, and the things that he wanted to accomplish, showed the potential of what he was going to contribute to the world. I think it was cut catastrophically short.”

The death of XXXTentacion resulted in a spike in sales of his first two projects. Both 17 and ? reached the Billboard 200’s top 5 last week.

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