1 response to "Weekend Brainfood, September 20th 2008"

The Audible Hype $0 Music Promotion Plan

By Justin Boland on September 06, 2008

Promo

25 comments



This is dedicated to broke rappers everywhere.  This is a detailed, step-by-step tutorial on setting up your online operation right.  It involves spending no money whatsoever, and you could easily sit down and get it all done tonight. If you find this useful, please pass it on.

1. Get a Gmail Account.

Sign up here. This doesn’t mean you need to get rid of your existing email—you can easily set up gmail to forward your messages to your current account.  Even if you’ve already got a personal gmail account, get a professional one, too: just plain looks better when you’re handing out contact info.

This isn’t about looking good, though, this is about the tools that a google account will give you access to: blogger, analytics and alerts.

For more on optimizing gmail to make your life easier, check out this LifeHacker tutorial.

2. Get a Flickr Account.

For free image hosting, nothing beats Flickr. Photobucket is an unreliable and bloated piece of shit, Flickr is a truly dope free service.  There is no competition.  Once you’ve got your account set up, you can customize it and search to see if any of your friends and contacts are using Flickr and get in touch with them.  The main workhorse function of Flickr, though, is hosting your images so that you can use them on your website.  This brings us to the real meat of this article: getting your free website on Blogger.

3. Get a Blogger Account.

For those of you who can’t afford website registration and hosting, here’s a simple, reliable and free solution.  I’ve talked to a number of rappers (without websites) who acknowledged they knew about the Blogger option but never signed up because it looks like shit.  They’re right about that, but it’s not an excuse, just ignorance.  You don’t need to use default Blogger templates, you can customize as much as you want.  Take a look at the DJ Multiple Sex Partners blog: you won’t recognize anything from a cookie-cutter template:



So first things first: go to blogger and sign up right now. I generally start with one of the Minima themes—they’re the easiest to customize after the fact. Once you get the account, take these immediate steps:



Remove the two “gadgets” that come pre-loaded in the sidebar: About Me and Archive.  Both of them are useless and ugly.  There’s two types of gadget to add: Link Lists and HTML/Javascript.  Link lists are, of course, your personal network—give some shine to artists you’re connected with, recommend websites that have been useful to you, and direct readers to your other online presences.  HTML/Javascript gadgets are just a block of whatever code you want to add, such as clickable image links to download your music, or a more customized “About Me” if you want to give people a summary of what you’re about.

Here’s an example from the Algorhythms blog: we’re pushing the first EP right now, so the blog design is deliberately minimal so that the album icon will jump off the screen:



For those readers unfamiliar with basic HTML, here’s the code you’ll need to set that up for yourself:

<center><a href="insert your link url here"><img src="insert your image url here"></a><br>insert your text here</center>

Now change the actual look of your blog: go to “Fonts and Colors,” which provides you with a preview of what your site will look like.  This might look overwhelming but it couldn’t be simpler: just click shit and see what happens when you change it.  In the space of 3-5 minutes, you’ll be able to make your blog look pretty damn slick—or at least suit your own horrible taste.



Finally, here’s the trick for removing the Blogger-branded “navigation” bar at the top of every Blogger page: go to “Edit HTML” in your Layout panel and scroll down to the Header section:



That first line of code in the image is what you drop in, and it goes like this:

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none}

3a. Simple SEO for your Blogger Site.

I won’t get into details at all.  In fact, I’ll just give you a template.  What Blogger sites don’t have is metadata, and this is a huge problem.  You really need the metadata in order to get ranked higher on search engines—the automated “bots” that do the indexing love metadata, and without it, they’re not interested in your little site.

First of all, put in a custom title.  To do that, you’re going back to the “Layout” part of your dashboard, then clicking on “Edit HTML.” The title is up at the top, and the default code looks like this:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Delete the crap in between the two <title> tags—and put something more descriptive.  For instance, on the DJ MSP Blog, I’ve got “DJ Multiple Sex Partners | World-Around Records” which covers all the major keywords I want to be known by. 

Now, directly below the <title> section, make some space and insert the following code:

<meta content=’list, around, 20, keywords, separated, by, commas’ name=’keywords’/>
<meta content=’Give a short, concise description of exactly what your site is’ name=’description’/>
<meta content=’public’ http-equiv=’cache-control’/>
<meta content=’never’ http-equiv=’expires’/>
<meta content=’index, follow’ name=’robots’/>
<meta content=’7 days’ name=’revisit-after’/>

To give you an idea of how to fill those gaps in, here’s the metadata from the DJ Multiple Sex Partners blog:

<meta content=’dj, multiple, sex, partners, world, around, records, hip, hop, producer, wombaticus, rex, humpasaur, jones’ name=’keywords’/>
<meta content=’Music and .wav samples from Russian hip hop producer DJ Multiple Sex Partners’ name=’description’/>

Of course, you can get way deeper into Search Engine Optimization, but this is really all you need to start getting listed high on Google.

4. Set up Google Alerts.

Click here to get started. This is one of the single most valuable tools google has to offer—and yet I’m amazed how few people have heard of it.  Here’s the deal: google will send you daily updates every time they index a page with your name on it.  Every time someone mentions Algorhythms, for instance, I read about it within a day or two.

Your basic google alert regimen should be: your name, the name of every album you’ve done, and the name of your label if you have one.  Personally, I have alerts set up for every artist on the World-Around roster, so some days I’ll have almost 20 alerts.  Often times they’re nothing special, or material that I’ve done myself, but I find new outlets and connections multiple times a week.  Knowing what people are saying about you is kinda important. Alerts save you the wasted time (and nagging shame & humiliation) of repeatedly googling yourself.

5. Set up Google Analytics.

Out here on Teh Internets, the most valuable form of information is metrics—hard data about the traffic your websites are getting. Google Analytics is powerful and free.  You can get geographical breakdowns and insanely detailed reports.  Here’s a sample screen—as you can see, Audible Hype really doesn’t get shit for traffic, but I’ll be honest about it:



Here’s a few of the most valuable features for the DIY hip hop entrepreneur: Keywords, which shows you what people are searching for that leads them to you, and the absurdly powerful Map Overlay, which shows you geographic breakdowns of where your visitors live.  Audible Hype gets most of its traffic via Illinois (where I currently live), California and New York State:



Obviously, once you get your blog/site up and running, you want to be seeing a response in your local area.  The Map Overlay will even break it down to individual cities on the state level, so you’ll be getting a detailed sense of who your site is reaching.  If you find out you’re getting a ton of traffic in City X, it’s probably time to use that information and try to get some gigs in City X.

6. Get a Mediafire Account.

Mediafire is an amazing service: you can upload files up to 100mb and they’ll host it for free.  They also have a great control panel where you can keep tabs on how many times your files have been downloaded.  This is a valuable source of feedback: if you’re giving away a mixtape and it gets over 100 downloads, that means you definitely shouldn’t be pressing 500 copies of your next album.  If you’re giving away an EP and you’re getting close to a thousand downloads, it’s probably a safe and profitable bet to press 500 copies of your next album.

This is also a great way to test your promotion. Keep track of your numbers in a notebook.  Start looking for connections between your online promotion and your downloads.  For instance, when you put up a myspace bulletin, what kind of impact does that actually have?  Believe me, 99% of the people who click through your link and check your music out will never write to you and let you know they did.

7. Your Digital Footprint.

There’s no shortage of social networks to choose from, but there’s two that are essential for independent artists:

Last.fm. Now that myspace plays and friends can be completely fabricated, everyone’s looking for more meaningful metrics—and Last.fm provides it.  Rather than restate the case for Last.fm here, let me just refer you to Andrew Dubber’s excellent summary.

Facebook. Now that Facebook has broken 100 million users, it’s probably about time for you to get yourself on Facebook Music. It’s a more complicated process than signing up for MySpace, but it’s also very much worth it.  For a shining example of using Facebook right, check out the QN5 page.

Right now, I’m running a World-Around Twitter account—you can check it out here—but it’s very much an experiment.  I am assuming that by providing a steady stream of useful information, I can make it into a valued resource for people.  So rather than updating about what I’m eating for dinner, the WAR Twitter will be focused on good information and links to quality articles.  If you’ve got experience using Twitter as a promotional platform, I would love to hear from you.

Of course, I’m assuming you already have a Myspace account—if you’re looking for advice on how to run that more efficiently, I’ve already covered that topic: How to Defeat and Kill the Devil MySpace.

Finally, don’t build your own social network. Your fans, and potential future fans, are already on multiple social networks your requests will only be an annoyance for them.  Besides, every major hip hop label is trying to do the same thing, and you’re not going to beat out Rawkus or Loud anytime soon. Use existing social networks—it’s a bigger audience and you don’t have to do as much work.  This seems obvious enough, yet I’m constantly getting requests from chump rappers to join Ning sites with less than 20 users.  We are all idiots at times, and we are all assholes at times, but avoid doing both at once.

Last Word

Once you’ve completed this, you’ve got the platform.  Your online presence looks professional and you have all the tools you need to push your music on the internets, and get valuable feedback about how your efforts are going.

As I wrote this, I was trying to “un-know” all of the technical crap that I take for granted.  If you have questions, or suggestions for improvement, please pass those along.  I want to make this the best resource possible.  Also, check out the Audible Hype forums, which I’ve been loading up with useful content for a couple months now.

Thanks, and good luck.

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25 responses to "The Audible Hype $0 Music Promotion Plan"

Getting Ready for a Long Cold Winter

By Justin Boland on August 28, 2008

Business

6 comments



One thing is already pretty clear: 2008 is not going to be a good year for the United States of America. Although Audible Hype is allegedly about DIY hip hop and making a living off music, let’s all pause to acknowledge the grim panorama of The Big Picture.  The United States economy is currently bleeding to death and we’re headed for a long cold winter.  With bank failures and corporations collapsing, the losses of jobs and property will have thousands of complex and horrible effects.  Here’s one that’s insignifigant to everyone but Audible Hype readers: everyone will have way less money for CDs. For T-shirts.  For vinyl.  Even for shows.

This obviously points towards a narrowing market, and as a total unknown with a startup independent label, you can bet I’m super-psyched about this.  The rest of 2008 will be a challenge for everyone, especially the little guys.  This is about how to survive and thrive—simple concepts, proven techniques, and valuable role models.

Start with Simple Psychology.

Here’s the single biggest thing you’ve got going for you: everyone else is getting frustrated and having a hard time, too. When the going gets hard, what do you do?

Statistically, you give up. Yep.  That is what the majority of people do when they’re frustrated.  I know a couple hundred insanely talented rappers who got sick of dealing with the bullshit, and they gave up.  During bleak times, simple tenacity will win out over most any other strategy. 



Music At A Price Your Customers Can Afford

Free CDs will never go out of style.  Like any tool, there’s a right way to use them, and a surefire method for acting retarded.  I’ve seen a lot of people walk through a bar, hand a CD to everyone that would reflexively reach for one, say the same single sentence script to every person, and walk out feeling like they’d accomplished something.  They did: they just wasted a medium-sized chunk of money and provided another small life irritation for a bunch of bar patrons.

Telemarketers are assholes, right? So don’t market like a telemarketer. Free CDs will never go out of style because they’re always appreciated by people who want your music. When someone asks me if I’ve got a CD out and I can just hand them one, I know there’s a 50% chance they’ll actually listen to it.  When I walk around confronting people, with no context, and giving out that same CD, I know there’s a .05% chance they’ll actually listen to it.

Only One Part Actually Matters.

I realize that what I advocate here at Audible Hype is not for everyone.  I do get plenty of emails from artists who think I’m giving them “too much homework,” and I love getting that kind of feedback because it’s a daily reminder of how weak most of you humans are. I appreciate the encouragement. 

Between the recording, the mixing, the mastering, the design, the manufacturing, the promotion, the marketing, the booking, the touring, the research, the reading, the websites, the blogs, I know. It’s a ton of tiny detail shitwork, but I’m putting this early in the article because I’ll drive it home again at the end.  Only one part actually matters, and that’s your relationship with your fans. As long as you stay in touch with them and treat them with love and respect, you’ll survive into 2010. 

Up Your Skillz



Let me introduce you to Nick Williams.  Nick is a pretty amazing drummer, but he’s also a lighting designer, a live sound tech, a beat producer, a soundtrack composer, and one of the fastest Pro Tools engineers I’ve ever worked with...oh, and a “Geek Squad” manager at the local Best Buy.  (I’m waiting tables, myself.) The point I’m making is far from original but it needs to be repeated: most of the normal people in your life will tell you that you “do too much”—the reality is that you’re not doing nearly enough. The more you can develop new, useful skills with your free time, the more you can accomplish in the future, and the less you’ll have to rely on other people.

Other people, as we all know, are notoriously unpredictable.

Focus on Meaningful Metrics

Hip hop is a street culture and putting up flyers is a rite of passage for literally millions of kids around the world.  I’m a hick from Vermont, though, and I think of advertising as a form of pollution. We burn down billboards where I come from, so you can imagine how I feel about putting up posters around town.  In any mid-sized city, there’s about 20-30 stores that are worth putting up a colorful, well-designed poster in.  These are the venues that your demographic is actually going to on a regular basis, and these are the venues that will actually keep your poster up and display it prominently. 

Internet marketing, in case you haven’t noticed yet, is pretty much FUCKING AMAZING.  For instance, it costs you money to print up posters and put them up around town, yet it can make you money to do promotions online.  Here’s another great example: unless people specifically tell you where and how they heard about your event, you’ll never know what worked and what was wasted effort when you do a print campaign.  On the internet, however, you get automatic feedback, site metrics, user data—from everyone who sees your promo.

Helpful hint: download statistics are the most reliable indicator of album sales. Your myspace friend count reflects reality about as much as the mind of George W. Bush does.  So rather than fight piracy, host your music yourself.  You can do this right now, for free, via MediaFire, who are professional and upstanding folks.

When You Have Time But Not Money...

...obviously, you invest the time.  I am really staying on my own case in 2008: I can’t be wasting time with bitchery and complainifying. Time spent “explaining” why I can’t afford to manufacture and promote my albums is wasted time.  I have plenty of work to put in, and until I have my operation running right, I would be insane to expect money.  (Especially based on some notion that I “deserve” it because of some magical “talent.")

Likewise, most of the rappers who contact me via Audible Hype complaining about how hard it is to promote their albums have not taken any of the simple, powerful and free steps that you can take right now. Do you have a blog? Get one for free right now. Do you have a paypal account? Do that. Get your music on Facebook, Last.fm and iLike, tonight.

If you don’t have the computer skills, that’s actually not an excuse. From html to css to photoshop to pro tools, anything you need to learn, you can find excellent free tutorials to teach you, online, right now. 

Remember, depression is counterproductive and self-indulgent. The time you spend brooding is time you could spend building. 

Role Model #1: Tonedeff

Even people who hate on Tonedeff’s music admit he’s one of the most skilled rappers on a mic.  Critics are probably not what bothers Tonedeff, though: what worries him is people who’ve never heard of Tonedeff.  The man is fiercely independent and he’s one of the best living examples of DIY hip hop you can study.  He’s built his label, QN5, into a powerhouse. Anyone can jack up their myspace play counts, but you can’t fake metrics like the CunninLynguist’s Last.Fm stats.

You produce, emcee, sing, run your own label, produce for your artists, feature on a variety of projects, perform a great live show, back your artists up on stage, how do you have the time and energy for all that?

Tonedeff: I don’t have any time, basically my life is a series of chores, tasks, favors, deadlines and money stress, that’s my life. Ever since I was a kid I just always wanted to make records and put things together. I really enjoy being a collaborative person, working with other people and helping their sh*t look better and sound better via my talent. Anyway that I can help, because I like to see people succeed and I’m a real team player. In fact I tend to help other people more than I help myself.

Role Model #2: Wordsmith

I start my day at 4:00 AM, 5 days a week and travel over an hour from Baltimore to Washington DC for work. During the drive, I am usually practicing my lyrics for different songs I want to perform at upcoming shows.  When I get to my job, I carry in a book bag that has my rhymebook(s), beat CD’s, and 100 blank CD’s into work. I do an important job, but that doesn’t stop me from spending all 8 of my hours at work burning copies..

That’s just a small sampling of what Wordsmith has to offer.  The dude is an inspiration and a great reality check: if there’s anyone in your city hustling as hard as Wordsmith, they’re already eating your food. That doesn’t mean you failed at life, just means you’ve got some catch-up work ahead of you.  Start here.

Wordsmith also faces the classic emcee problem of someone else biting your name. In his case, that someone else is a slightly goofy looking kid from the UK, and a much younger cat from Rhode Island so for what it’s worth, Audible Hype is only concerned with the real Wordsmith from Baltimore.

Role Model #3: Atmosphere



It’s worth considering that maybe hip hop is suffering because 99.9% of you are doing it wrong. There’s an independent group out of Minnesota—seriously—who had their last album debut at number 5 on the charts.  Not the college radio charts, the Billboard Top 200—so clearly Atmosphere is doing something right.  Here’s a break down from Brent “Siddiq” Sayers, courtesy of this highly educational article from Pulse:

“Atmosphere’s the flagship artist: Sean [Slug] has been doing this longer than any of them and has built Atmosphere to the point, touring-wise, that they can sell out bigger rooms. So he’ll bring [Brother] Ali out on the Godlovesugly tour when he’s never been out there before. It’s up to the artist to put on a great show and be responsible, but they learn because they watch Sean: Sean’s on time, Sean does all his interviews. Sometimes we’ll do 16, 17 shows in a row non-stop. So when you roll like that, you learn the ropes. We brought Ali out, P.O.S. went out the same way and it’s been continuous where we bring developing artists out and they see from the ground level how much work this really is. Touring has been that foundation pretty much since the beginning and at least since I’ve been here.

That was part of my goal: to really implement a touring structure in Rhymesayers, because that’s one of the things I first saw when I saw Atmosphere play the Entry. When I met Sean, I was like, man, you gotta take it on the road. We just started doing it, grinding it. Driving to Texas, doing a show. Going to Chicago, doing a show and driving back overnight because people had to work the next day. Sleeping on people’s floors. Whatever it took. A lot of people that are newer don’t know that it’s been a long time coming. Atmosphere didn’t just sell 100,000 records.

The Last Word from Seth Godin



This passage from his recent article, The Secret of the Web, really resonated with me.  Well, more accurately, it really, really pissed me off because it confirmed one of my darker suspicions.  Running World-Around Records is rewarding, but mostly frustrating as fuck.  The gap between putting in work and seeing the results is something I constantly have a hard time with.  I constantly have to remind myself that this is a path I chose, consciously and deliberately, and this frustration is the inevitable consequence of Doing It Right.

I’m not doing this to make money.  I’m doing this to make music for a living.  I’m doing this to build something larger than myself that will create positive changes. 

Boingboing is one of the most popular blogs in the world because they never gave up.

The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly. You friend someone on Facebook and two minutes later, they friend you back. Bang.

But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.

The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take, guys.

Resources for Dedicated Primates



If blogging and internet media is new to you, there’s 10,000 blogs about blogging.  Pretty much all of them are superficial horseshit, but the greatest exception is DoshDosh, written by a Pseudonym pseudonamed Maki. . Every article is a tutorial, raising detailed questions and providing detailed answers.  It’s an amazingly useful resource and it helped us out at Back Brain Media, especially in the past year.

Start with his concept of “Opportunity Costs”—and if you’ve never heard of SWOT Analysis, get familiar with the most important tool a DIY capitalist could have.  I also highly recommend his reality check, Social Media Networking and Return on Investment”. 

Other important articles for beginners: How to Promote Your Website for $100, Blogging Mistakes Roundup, and finally The “Free” Business Model: A Strategy for Attention, Traffic and Profits.



Another great resource is Andrew Dubber, author of New Music Strategies, and the excellent report “20 Things You Must Know”, which is still the most relevant and concise dose of reality I’ve found.  Dubber is currently working on the (insanely ambitious and quite admirable) sequel, which will basically be the most complete FAQ for music promotion online in human history. 

Here’s a few exceptionally useful chapters:

Are CDs Dead?

How Can I Sell My Music Online?

Is the Long Tail Good for Musicians?

It’s Actually Not a Competition

Your fans will be your fans no matter what. 

Your fans are not into 95% of other rappers, but they are into you. 

Most of who you consider competition actually pose no threat to your success or your fanbase. 

Most of them are in fact struggling musicians just like you. 

Most of them could probably help you out, if you swallow your pride and make contact.

Most of the time, we waste our time. 

We can always be working on improving our own operations.

We can always be doing more to help.

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• Part Three: Yes, Touring is Really Necessary in 2008.
• Assessing The Environmental Cost of the Record Business
• Music Business 2.0 Without the Bullshit
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6 responses to "Getting Ready for a Long Cold Winter"

The DIY Hip Hop Business Master Class

By Justin Boland on August 21, 2008

Business

9 comments

This is a collection of the best, most useful highlights from interviews with hip hop legends and DIY entrepreneurs.  There’s tons more information in the Audible Hype forums, and if you’re new to the site, start here.

?uestlove



When we were out there on The Chronic battlefield, from ‘92 to ‘97, me and Rich [The Roots’ longtime manager] were racking our brains on how to escape from the pack, how to matter. A lot of people accuse of us over-thinking. And that’s OK. But we looked at every successful artist. We pored over charts in industry magazines going back decades, looking for commonality. And what we found was that anyone who was successful was not isolated. Besides a couple of one-hit wonders in the ‘60s (there was no ‘movement’ behind “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” or “Monstermash"), every big act was part of a larger movement. The Beatles were by no means by themselves. The British Invasion also meant that you had the Stones, the Kinks, The Who. Likewise with hard rock—Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin—or the Philadelphia sound—Billy Paul, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, the Three Degrees.

Once Illadeph came out, me and Rich were like, we’ve got to get a movement. We weren’t trying to be the Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer of this. So around ‘97 or ‘98, when we went to Geffen, we told them upfront that the only way this was gonna work was if we could be like Noah and bring a bunch of other complementary artists on board with us.

Source: Indy Week

Wendy Day



The basis of any successful project is the music. The music must be banging and must have appeal outside your inner circle. That means you don’t just play it for your boys, you play it for people you don’t know who are most likely to be honest with you about whether or not it’s on point. When putting out Do Or Die’s first single in Chicago, “Po’ Pimp,” we gathered together all the local mix show DJs, club DJs, and some of the local retailers and played a few songs for them. They unanimously picked Po’ Pimp as their favorite song, so Do Or Die had reconfirmed exactly which single to press up (and the DJs felt like they played a part in choosing the single). Why spend tens of thousands of dollars on pressing and promotions if you aren’t certain you’ll have the support of the local DJs and stores?

Once you decide on the first single and press up your record, you market it within a small geographic area that you can affordably control. Unless you are backed by millions of dollars and a flawless major distributor, you don’t want to start nationally because you can’t be everywhere in the country at once. The larger labels have staffs and budgets to accommodate a national release, but since you don’t, start with just your city or town and no more than a few nearby. I usually draw a circle around the city where the artist is based. I make the circle about a three to five hour driving radius, and that becomes the target area.

Make certain you’ve done the research in all of the areas you choose where the record will sell. Choose areas where the artists can travel cheaply and easily, since they may need to travel often into those areas to support the record. For example, it would not be a wise decision to choose New York, Houston, and the Bay Area for simultaneous release because the airfare alone would kill you financially every time your artist needed to travel to support the record at radio or retail or with a show.

Source: The Day Report

Paul Wall



“When I was 14, that’s when my life changed because that’s when I got really heavy into street promotions. I worked and did a lot of stuff for Def Jam and stuff for Cash Money, before they signed their major deal. But, doing the street promotion, a lot of that was me just learning and working the game because I was always taught and my mother always embedded in me, that if you work, you’re going to get paid.

If you don’t work, you’re not going to get paid and no one was going to give me sh-t. So I took that aspect and worked, worked, worked. I built up reputations with different store owners being that I was doing retail promotions and different DJs being that I would service them with records. When I brought them the new Jay-Z record, they remembered me like, “What’s up.” I built those relationships up. . . I still took that job with pride, worked it to the best of my ability and it gave me respect within the industry to what I was doing: building up relationships and rapport with different record labels or producers.”

Source: Baller Status

El-P



In the early days of your career, what do you think paid off most for you?  Because it isn’t always a given that talent is going to rise to the surface, and nowadays the industry is even more oversaturated.

It’s a combination of a complete, blind arrogance—don’t let anyone tell you that you suck, even if you suck—and ridiculous amounts of energy and overstated ambition.  That’s it.  If you have those things, just keep fucking going until you can’t.  If it changes or you don’t like it anymore, move the fuck on.  Until then, just write and be passionate and do the thing you believe in, period.  Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t.

Source: The Red Alert

As being the leading figure of Def Jux, do you need to do some A&R or are the albums the people hand in, in no need for you to do anything?

I definitely get down and dirty with cats and build with them about their records. I don’t cross the line, but I’m really interested in what cats are trying to do. And I think that a lot of times the cats that I work with, are interested in talking it out with me. Obviously on the CanOx album I played a big role. I think I played a very big role in the Mr Lif album, even in the EP. Because we are just really good friends, and we always build with each other about shit. With a cat like Aesop, I just let him do his fuckin’ thing.

When I met Aesop, he had two albums under his belt. So he just kinda gave his album to me. With Murs, it’s pretty much the same thing, except of the collaborations that we did. So it really depends. It depends on what the relationship is. It depends on what the vibe is. I’m certainly not the type of cat to, infringe on somebody’s ideas. What I do do, is, if they want it, I give suggestions, in terms of anything that I can help with. But I do believe in trusting people. Trusting the artist. Because I always wanted people to trust me. And I hated to be in a situation where I had to explain something to somebody, who clearly wasn’t feeling what I was feeling. I don’t think it’s ever really like that at Def Jux. If anything, it’s all on some positive reinforcement shit.

I like to get down with cats that really think about it. Cause everyone knows it’s a team effort, and you want everybody to come up with the best possible thing going. But I would never, for instance, give a suggestion what to write a song about. Or, ‘why don’t you do the chorus like this?’ That’s not my shit. But if somebody wants to talk about help with producers, or sequence the album. Or an idea for a way to bring the concept they have in mind to life, I’m 100% down to talk about it. But at the end of the day, it’s up to the person whose record it is, to either take my suggestion or not. I try to be there if they have a questions and if they trust what I try to say.

Source: Urban Smarts

iCon the Mic King



What’s your perspective on the business of collaborations? Can established rappers make good income off that, or do they mostly undervalue their verses and beats?

“Collaborations are a complicated issue, man! I don’t personally believe it does much to validate anyone especially in the information age. I feel like people download the song and skip to featured verse listen to it a couple times and then erase the song. Let’s say it’s a hot song, it’s a hot song of yours that you can’t really perform unless that person is around. Businesswise it’s both. Established rappers can make good income off it but a smart businessman prices his product in the range of his customer so you have [insert rapper here] selling verses on his myspace for $500 or [insert producer here] selling beats for $50. I understand where they are coming in that you price it lower you sell a bunch, but it destroys utility. Most times people ask me to collab and I request what I am worth they say “well I can get [insert rapper here] for $500 man you gotta come down.” The economies of scale of collaborating are much different now than when rappers were much less accessible.”

Source: Audible Hype, baby

DJ Vlad



A lot of people email me everyday to try to ‘network’. Most of the time, they don’t understand what networking really means.

Your network is people that you have done actual business with - not people that you have seen in the club. I’ve had conversations with Jay-Z, 50 Cent, and Puffy multiple times. I didn’t have any business that I could bring to them at that time, so they’re not in my network.

“I’m hot but I’m broke, put me on” is begging.

“I’ve got a project with a budget that I want to work with you on. We have $10,000 dollars for you upfront” is networking.

Professionals network with other professionals. Hobbyists network with other hobbyists. If you make your living off your music - you’re a professional. If you don’t earn your living off your music - you’re a hobbyist. This is not my opinion - it’s the dictionary definition.

Slug



“I don’t really do many collabs, but when I do I hardly charge people. Anyone I do charge, it’s because I know they have a budget and when I do charge I make them give it to charity. I don’t actually collect a check from them. My job in this shit isn’t to make money off of my voice or my rapping, but to figure out how to be good enough business wise, to make my art make my money for me, rather than make the art the money.

Sales are one thing, but to me those are called royalties. It’s not like every time you buy a CD I’m popping off. No, you buy a CD and you’re helping me cover the cost of making the damn CD for starters. You’re also helping me cover the cost of bringing the CD to your city, bringing a tour to your city that is also bringing three other rap groups to your city that you may have never experienced. It’s not like I’ve got this incredibly genius business strategy. I ain’t really supposed to get rich off of rapping; I’m supposed to get rich off of everything else that makes itself available to me because I rap.

I really don’t give a fuck if people hate me. The elitists or the underground people that say “ohh fuck him, he’s a sell out.” Naw, actually fuck off. I know what I’m doing. I know what my choruses sound like. I know what my beats sound like. I’ve never paid anyone to play my record. I’ve never played any of the games trying to sell lots of records. The closest I’ve come is making videos, but videos are fun, man. I didn’t make videos so that MTV would play them. Hell, MTV didn’t play the shit. I made them because I wanted a visual to go with the song.”

Source: Impose Magazine

Buck 65



“For me and for most musicians these days, we pretty much have one option left to put a career together, which is to tour. And to really make a living, you’ve got to tour all the time. But if that’s becoming the case for everybody, you’re going to have every band on the road all the time,” Halifax-bred hip-hop MC/producer Rich “Buck 65” Terfry, who handles most of his own touring affairs, recently remarked to me.

“When I was booking the tour I’m currently starting in the U.S., we were having some real problems. We wanted to go into, you know, Albuquerque, New Mexico, during this particular week, but even way in advance there were so many other bands and only so many rooms. And we came to find out that we’re in a time right now that’s kind of unprecedented in the amount of bands that are out there on the road. So that’s going to spread things a little thin.”

Source: The Star

Of Course There’s Gonna Be a Sequel...

This is not the end.  There’s a lot more information floating around out there—and a thousand more voices I could have included.  If you’ve got suggestions, quotes, or just a heads-up on people I should be checking out, please leave a comment and LET A MAMMAL KNOW.  Thank you.

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