What Happened to Blackstreet? A New Label Deal in 2026

Four voices, a Bill Withers sample, a Dr. Dre verse, and one of the most quoted opening lines of the decade. In 1996, “No Diggity” was inescapable, and Blackstreet were the smoothest group in R&B. Then the hits stopped, the lineup started rotating, and the name itself ended up in court. So whatever happened to Blackstreet? As it turns out, they never really stopped, and 2026 has been their busiest year in a long while.

01Profile

Group name

Blackstreet (sometimes styled BLACKstreet)

Formed

1991, 35 years ago as of this writing

Origin

Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA

Founding members

Teddy Riley, Chauncey "Black" Hannibal, Joseph "Street" Stonestreet

Current lineup

Chauncey "Black" Hannibal, Levi Little, Mark Middleton, Eric Williams

Genre

R&B, new jack swing, hip-hop soul

Signature hit

"No Diggity" (1996), four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100

Major award

Grammy, Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals (1998)

Current label

XOXO Entertainment Corp (signed December 2025)

That “current lineup” row is where all the drama lives, and we’ll get to it. The short version: the group performing as Blackstreet today includes two men who sang on the group’s earliest records and two who defined its biggest album, but it does not include the producer most casual fans still picture behind the keyboards.

02The Rise: From Guy to No Diggity

Teddy Riley’s second act

To understand Blackstreet you have to start with Guy, the trio that turned Riley’s new jack swing blueprint into a commercial force in the late 1980s. Riley wasn’t just a member; he was the architect, a producer whose drum programming reshaped R&B and who co-wrote and co-produced “Remember the Time” for Michael Jackson’s Dangerous era. When Guy came apart, Riley wanted a vehicle that could sing as well as it grooved. Chauncey Hannibal, a Virginia Beach vocalist and songwriter, helped him build it. With Joseph Stonestreet, they launched Blackstreet in 1991.

The 1994 debut nobody talks about enough

The self-titled debut arrived in 1994 on Interscope and went platinum in the US, which is easy to forget given what came next. It produced “Booti Call” and, more importantly, “Before I Let You Go,” a gorgeous slow-burn ballad that Hannibal co-wrote and that climbed to No. 7 on the Hot 100 and No. 2 on the R&B chart. That record established the group’s real identity: hip-hop-literate production underneath genuine four-part gospel-schooled harmony. Dave Hollister and Levi Little were the other voices on that album, and Hollister’s departure afterward set a pattern of turnover that never really ended.

”No Diggity” and Another Level

Another Level landed in 1996 with Mark Middleton and Eric Williams now in the fold, and it changed the group’s scale entirely. “No Diggity,” featuring Dr. Dre and Queen Pen and built on a sample of Bill Withers, spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100. The album hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and No. 1 on the Top R&B Albums chart for five weeks, going on to quadruple-platinum status, and it won the group the 1998 Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. There’s a footnote on that record worth knowing, too: the group has said the album track “Tonight’s the Night” was the first record Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo ever produced as The Neptunes, which makes Another Level a hinge point for the entire next decade of pop.

03The Turning Point: Two Groups One Name

Success didn’t stabilize Blackstreet, it stressed it. Finally followed in 1999 amid further personnel churn and was certified gold rather than multi-platinum. Level II arrived in 2003 and remains the group’s last studio album. From there the story stops being about records and starts being about who had the right to book gigs under the name, and that question went to lawyers.

Riley and Hannibal had jointly held the Blackstreet trademark since 1992. In 2011, Riley sued Middleton and Williams, alleging they had been performing as Blackstreet without authorization, arguing they had signed work-for-hire agreements with no claim to the mark, as reported at the time by Vibe and HuffPost. A couple of years later the fight turned inward: JET and other outlets reported Riley filed a roughly $1 million claim against Hannibal, alleging he had allowed a trademark renewal to lapse and then re-registered it in his own name alone. Hannibal has disputed Riley’s account and maintained the name is legitimately his. The upshot, per subsequent reporting and the group’s own materials, is that Hannibal holds the name today.

• 1991Blackstreet formed in Virginia Beach by Teddy Riley, Chauncey "Black" Hannibal and Joseph "Street" Stonestreet.
• 1994Self-titled debut goes platinum; "Before I Let You Go" reaches No. 7 on the Hot 100.
• 1996"No Diggity" spends four weeks at No. 1; Another Level becomes their biggest album.
• 1998Grammy win for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
• 1999Finally released and certified gold as the lineup keeps shifting.
• 2003Level II, the group's fourth and most recent studio album.
• 2011Riley sues Mark Middleton and Eric Williams over use of the Blackstreet name (Vibe, HuffPost).
• 2013Riley files a reported $1M claim against Hannibal over the trademark; Hannibal disputes it (JET).
• 2014Hannibal, Levi Little, Middleton and Williams begin performing together as Blackstreet.
• 2018Co-founder Joseph Stonestreet dies on June 25 at 56.
• 2023A New Jersey street dedication honors the group; Riley's absence is widely noted (Atlanta Black Star).
• 2025Blackstreet sign with XOXO Entertainment Corp in December; "No Diggity" passes a billion Spotify streams.
• 2026Riley publishes a memoir and issues a public apology to the group; Another Level gets a 30th-anniversary vinyl.

04Who Owns a Legacy

Here’s what makes the Blackstreet situation different from the usual legacy-act squabble. Most 90s groups fracture over money or ego and end up with one “official” version and one tribute-circuit version. Blackstreet fractured over authorship itself. Riley’s position, stated repeatedly over the years, has been that he built the sound and the brand. In a March 2026 interview with AllHipHop he was blunt about it, saying his career stands on his own work and that the group didn’t make him. The other camp’s position, articulated by Hannibal and his bandmates, is that Blackstreet was always a vocal group, that the harmony was the product, and that the brand belongs to the men who sing it.

Both arguments have merit, which is exactly why it never resolved cleanly. Riley did later assemble his own configuration, sometimes billed as BS2, with singers including Dave Hollister; fan-focused outlets report that project has been dormant for several years, though we haven’t seen an official statement closing it. Meanwhile the Hannibal-led group kept working, and working, and working, and slowly the market settled the argument on its own terms. If you bought a ticket to see Blackstreet at a festival in the last decade, you almost certainly saw Hannibal, Little, Middleton and Williams.

The 2023 street dedication in New Jersey became the public symbol of the standoff. The group turned up to have their name put on a sign; Riley did not, and outlets including Atlanta Black Star noted fans reading it as confirmation that the rift was intact. Three years later, the tone has softened at least on one side, which brings us to the present.

05What Blackstreet Are Doing Now

A new label deal and new music

The biggest development in years came on December 3, 2025, when Blackstreet announced a record and management deal with XOXO Entertainment Corp, the company run by Adam H. Hurstfield. The announcement confirmed the working lineup, original members Hannibal and Little alongside Middleton and Williams, and promised new music and touring in 2026. Coverage in Rated R&B, EARMILK and Digital Music News framed it as a proper new chapter rather than a nostalgia licensing play, and in January 2026 XOXO said it had secured multi-million-dollar backing from Korean investment partners to fund signings and development.

Partnering with XOXO Entertainment feels like the perfect alignment. This next chapter will be iconic. — Blackstreet, XOXO Entertainment announcement, December 2025

As for what the music sounds like, Hannibal gave a preview in a September 2025 interview with YouKnowIGotSoul, describing the new material as “classic Blackstreet, you know that 90’s feel” with a modern twist. A specific single title and release date had not been announced as of early August 2026, so treat the album as promised rather than delivered.

Still one of the biggest touring draws of the era

The live business has been the engine all along. In June 2026, Blackstreet headlined the inaugural RnB Summer Ball at London’s O2 Arena on the 19th, sharing the bill with Jodeci and TLC in front of a 20,000-capacity room, promoted by The Concert Organisation and AEG’s venue. Back home, listings show them playing amphitheatres and arenas rather than clubs, including a date at Detroit’s Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre on August 8, 2026, days after this piece was written. Tour aggregators list further US dates through the year, though venue schedules shift, so check the group’s own channels before booking anything.

A billion streams and a 30th birthday

In December 2025 the group announced that “No Diggity” had crossed one billion Spotify streams, a milestone their team says makes them the first 90s male R&B act to get there. It’s a genuinely striking number for a song released before streaming existed, and it explains a lot about why a label wanted them in 2026. On top of that, Another Level is getting a 30th-anniversary vinyl reissue, announced in July 2026 via uDiscover Music, pressed as a standard black 2LP and a limited “Marshmallow Opaque” color variant, with the “No Diggity (Billie Jean Remix)” bonus track included. Retail listings put the release in early September 2026.

And Teddy Riley?

Riley’s 2026 has been busy in parallel. His memoir Remember the Times, written with biographer Jake Brown and published by Simon & Schuster on February 10, 2026, covers Harlem, new jack swing, Michael Jackson, Guy and Blackstreet. He also relaunched Guy in late 2025 with a new lineup that does not include original members Aaron and Damion Hall, a move AllHipHop reported drew immediate criticism from fans. Most notably, in that March 2026 AllHipHop interview he apologized for how he’d spoken about his former bandmates.

I want to also apologize to those guys as well. — Teddy Riley on his former Blackstreet bandmates, AllHipHop, March 2026

An apology isn’t a reunion, and neither camp has suggested one is coming. But after fifteen years of filings and subtweets, it’s the warmest thing either side has said in public.

06Summary

Blackstreet’s disappearance was always more apparent than real. They stopped releasing albums after 2003 and stopped being a singles act well before that, but the group never left the stage, and the version of Blackstreet you can buy a ticket for in 2026 has been touring steadily for more than a decade. What changed recently is infrastructure: a label, funding, a streaming milestone big enough to make executives pay attention, and an anniversary reissue that puts their best record back in shops.

If you grew up on Another Level, the honest read on Blackstreet in 2026 is bittersweet. You’re probably never getting the classic five-man configuration with Riley at the board, and the legal history behind that is too long and too public to wish away. What you can get is four singers who have spent twelve years proving the harmony travels without him, a reissue of the record that made them, and the first credible promise of new Blackstreet music in more than twenty years. For a group that spent a decade arguing about who owned the name, actually using it again feels like the win.