I originally went into an in depth explanation of this in my original post, but decided it was a rabbit trail. Oh well. Essentially, artists have a lot of "cre

I originally went into an in depth explanation of this in my original post, but decided it was a rabbit trail. Oh well. Essentially, artists have a lot of "credit" (i.e. they can elicit services for cheap due to the massive exposure it might get), but very little cashflow. They usually pay their living expenses through signing bonuses and use the rest of the contract money to finance the production of the album. In this specific case Kanye used a large amount of his own signing bonus for Late Registration to pay for the videos, while using the bare minimum the studio would give him to pay for just the directors. While theoretically he still would have had a lot of earning potential, and probably would have kept at least some of his "credit" if LR failed, he still would have been extremely cash poor. Kanye frequently talks about how bad he is with money and spending habits, so his financial situation was most likely pretty precarious. Side note: this is part of the "scam" of record labels... they purposely keep the economic buying power away from the artists' wallet and keep it tied to the artists' image, which just so happens to be very dependent on the studio's continued marketing efforts. Kanye actually addresses this in an interview, where he talks about "who is really free?" when comparing an up and coming artist in a Maybach to a homeless man on the side of the street.