Montego Bay-based dancehall group Merital Family has announced that they are officially parting ways with the Portmore Empire, and will be handling their own booking and management in the near future.

“For the last year and a half, we ah get stifle, we ah get overpriced, dem a tell people say we de pon tour and we de ya nah go nowhere. We ah suffer, we nah get no promotion, we have kids to feed and me have my mother to take care of,” one of the members of Merital Family said.

The group shot to fame in 2010 with the My Money Ha Ha song on the Stripclub riddim and featured a hilarious Vybz Kartel cameo where he delivers a Santa-like laugh. The song, on the Adidjaheim/NotNice/Concussion labels, hit #1 on several major charts in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The group also did well other popular songs such as Pray, When We Party and Bad Like We on the Clappers riddim.

“From wah day ya, mi see riddim a mek and no Merital, no Jahvinci not on it and when we call Notnice, him say ‘ah the Teacha set it’. So wah kinda suffocation this? We have been loyal to the organisation, and it is not being loyal to us…no video, no promotion, no recording. Mi fed up and tired. We caan reason or have a number for the man who run the organisation that we are supposed to be signed to,” another group member said.

The release said that the level of segregation and separation insisted on by Vybz Kartel had stifled his opportunity to meet with and collaborate with other artistes.

“Mi come to do music and sake ah the Empire, we never get to contact certain producers and artistes, or meet with icons in the business like Bounty Killer, just because of the Empire,” a member of the group said.

They said that they were peeved that Vybz Kartel had neglected to mention them in the writing credits of the hit song, My Money Ha Ha.

“VP Records called us about doing some promotion of the song, and that’s how we found out it had been sold to a record label. So we called Tarik ‘Russian’ Johnston and asked why him never tell we about the money and he said ‘Kartel ah yu leader, mi think he would let you know’, and then we checked with our publishers and they told us that the credits for the writer of the song was Adidja Palmer and it was produced by Russian, that’s all, no recognition, nothing, what about our publishing and our rights? We have our song before we met Kartel and the song became a hit and we no achieve anything from it,” he said.

In the meantime, the group has continued to record songs, voicing Tell Me Why for the Young Money label for Good Good Productions, and ‘Dancing’ on the TYPE R label. They also recently recorded ‘On and On’ on the Gangsta City Part Two label.