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Neil Levine is an American music industry executive. He is best known as the founder of the hip-hop label Penalty Recordings, and is currently the CEO of its successor company, Penalty Entertainment. Levine helped to launch the careers of artists such as Capone-N-Noreaga, Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, and Tha Eastsidaz.
In 1995, Levine launched Penalty Recordings, which operated as a joint venture between himself and Tommy Boy Records, founded by Tom Silverman. Tommy Boy, at the time, was fully owned by Warner Bros. Records, and Silverman reacquired half of Tommy Boy in 1996 not long after the Penalty deal.
Penalty's initial releases included singles and albums by artists such as Lord Finesse and Capone-N-Noreaga. Other artists on the label during the mid-to-late 1990s included Skull Duggery, Crooked Lettaz (David Banner and Kamikaze), and Half a Mill.
After Tom Silverman bought half of Tommy Boy back from Warner Bros. Records in 1996, it continued as Penalty's distributor. The label saw two of its most successful releases in with Noreaga's first two solo albums, N.O.R.E. (1998) and Melvin Flynt – Da Hustler (1999), the former of which launched the hit single "Superthug", one of the earliest hits produced by The Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo).
He re-established Penalty in 2002 as Penalty Associated Labels, which became a joint venture with Ryko Distribution, a company for which Levine would also serve as the general manager of. Artists signed to the Penalty labels at this time included MC Eiht, The Beatnuts, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest), and Penalty also struck a deal to produce and market the AND1 Mixtape series.
In 2006, Levine was hired by EMI Music, where he worked as the head of Imperial Records and later the head of the urban division at EMI's Capitol Records. While at Imperial, Levine oversaw the creation of Fat Joe seventh studio album, Me, Myself & I. Two years later, he moved to Sony BMG, where he served as an A&R executive for Jive Records and the head of the newly formed BMG imprint Battery Records.
Deciding to go back to running his own label, Levine established Penalty Entertainment in 2014, re-signing Capone-N-Noreaga to a new deal, and striking deals with established artists such as Trina, Joell Ortiz, eMC, Statik Selektah, and KXNG Crooked (aka Crooked I) and new artists such as BeatKing and Hi-Rez. In 2022, Levine launched a management company, Home Club Management. As of 2023, Levine is an adjunct professor teaching music business at NYU Steinhardt and Marymount Manhattan College.
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