Hip Hop is Open SOurce
email
print
del.icio.us
Published on: April 5, 2007
Source: HIP HOP MEDIA LAB | Written by: Terry Marshall
Part One by Terry Marshall • hiphopmedialab@gmail.com Hip-Hop Media Lab • Soul Survivors • 5th Element • Hip-Hop Sustains Nas proclaimed that Hip-Hop was Dead. Well the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) must not have gotten the memo cause it seems they are doing their best to KILL IT! Last week January 16 in Atlanta a 30-man (est) SWAT team raided the offices of the Aphilliates Music Group. Several employees were detained, CDs, studio equipment, cars and bank accounts were confiscated, and DJ Drama & DJ Don were arrested and later released on $100,000 bail. According to allhiphop.com they are being charged with the R.I.C.O. (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations) laws, which were created to bring down the mafia and were used to attack the Black Panther party. Now one is probably thinking that this is another black eye for Hip-Hop. Another case of some one making it but just couldn’t leave behind the lure of the streets. What did the police find? Guns? Drugs? No, the purpose of the action was…. Mixtapes! I guess they were expecting more seeing how one of the agents said "Usually, we find other crimes during these types of busts." But still, all of this over mixtapes? Well yes and no. The Players This isn’t the first time the RIAA has taken action like this and it’s a good indicator that it won’t be the last. RIAA stands for Recording Industry Association of America (www.riaa.com). It is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Their Mission “is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our member creative financial vitality� i.e.: make sure they make the money and survive. We’ll come back to that word vitality in a moment. RIAA’s 1995-year end report had a warning of “the growing popularity of illicit DJ mixes in CD format� (source NYT 6/16/05). On May 12th 2005, a day before the death of Legendary Justo Faison, founder of the Mixtape awards, RIAA announced a crackdown on “pirated CDs�. On June 8th 2005 a RIAA representative accompanied the New York Police on a raid of an east village video & record store, Mondo Kims. Five employees were arrested and 100s of CDs were confiscated. The police seemed to focus on Kim’s well-stocked Hip Hop section. A RIAA official released a statement saying the police department’s “steadfast commitment to the fight against piracy has stamped out yet another significant illegal operation�. Now the Police have arrested and charged DJ Drama and DJ Don with RICO charges. In each major raid the RIAA was trying to send a message. Mondo Kims was popular record shop that was frequented by industry types and the like. DJ Drama, who is on the cover of this months issue of XXL, is arguably the #1 Mixtape DJ in the country right now. He picked up 4 trophies at the recent Justo’s Mixtape Awards, Just signed a deal with TI’s (one of only 3 hip hop artist to have a platinum record this past year) Grand Hustle/Atlantic records, and his mixtapes series “Gansta Grillz� has a following that can challenge many Industry releases. In each case the association went after the big names to make a point that they were not playing around. But it’s the bust and raids that don’t make the headlines that should be more alarming. According to one popular Boston Hip-Hop DJ, the same week that The Aphilliate Music Group was raided, “all mom & pops stores that sold mixtapes were getting hit up 150gs each�. It’s these attacks that tip the scales of making this an all out war on mixtapes and Hip-Hop in general. Decline of the OLD Media/Its Bigger than Hip Hop But why? Again we ask “all over some mixtapes?� This is when we come back to that word ‘vitality’. In the RIAA mission its says their job is to “promote our members creative financial VITALITY�. Their client’s vitality is endangered. The recording industry, in fact the whole media structure, as we know it IS DYING! Look at the numbers: • (USAToday 1/5/07) Overall album sales from 2001 were 712million. By 2004 they were 666.7million. And they are still dropping; compare 2005 sales→654.1 million to 2006 sales→ 646.4 million. These drops don’t seem to be changing anytime soon. • (NYT 1/19/07) Time Inc. recently announced that it was cutting almost 300 jobs from its magazines in order to focus more on their websites. 172 coming from the editorial staff. Time Inc. is a unit of Time Warner, one of the 6 media conglomerates (G.E., Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, and CBS). • (WIRED Magazine 12/06) October 2006, NBC Universal announced a cut of 700 jobs as part of a $750 million retrenchment plan. Due to advertisers waning interest. They are being attacked from all sides: recording, print, T.V., radio, and the web. Because while all these drops have been happening there have been rises: • (USAtoday1/5/07) Digital track sales grew by 65% over 2005 and nearly caught album sales for the first time: 581.9 million tracks were sold, compared with 588.2 million albums. • (WIRED Magazine12/06) Youtube’s online audience grew from 5million in Jan 06 to over 35million in Aug 06. By Sept. 06 they were getting 70 thousand uploads and a 100million hits daily These are the 2 examples of the new media. The old structure is scrambling to get in because they are not equipped for it. A large part of that is because of how the new media is fueled. Not by YOU, as Time Magazine would like you to believe, but by EVERYONE. The record labels are trying to grab control of the digital album thing but that came about from them trying to stop the P2P file sharing. Myspace and Youtube would be nothing without millions of people providing the content. What makes that content so potent is the networking it opens up. Mixtapes create a grassroots distribution network that provides big name and unknown artist access to place where they could not have gotten on their own. The old structure was not built for the PEOPLE to have so much power. They are losing control and they know it. Instead of figuring what they may have done wrong to end up in this place, they come after the consumer and increasingly the producers and emergent network of this new medium. They shut down mom & pop stores for selling mixtapes. They sue 12-year-old suburban kids for downloading music. They arrest mixtape DJs, that get their music sanctioned by the record execs, and confiscate all of their equipment. The Mixtape Game So what does DJ Drama & DJ Don’s arrest mean for the future of mixtapes? Well for one it has terrorized the mixtape community. As you read this 100s of online mixtape sites are disappearing. The mixtape industry is moving more and more underground. Soon it might be easier to find an I Love Castro poster in Miami than to find a mixtape. What would that mean for Hip Hop? In today’s Hip Hop, mixtapes are the corner stone. As a subaltern part of the record industry mixtapes have operated off the original essence of Hip Hop. I’m neither being nostalgic nor purist. The first mixtapes started circulating around New York in the late 70s early 80s as DJ recordings of Hip-Hop Parties. You could hear the latest mc battles or the hot party you missed. It was one of the biggest reasons hip-hop was able to spread to all 5 boroughs of New York and across the country. Kid Capri is largely responsible for how we know mixtapes today. In mid 80s He began producing them in his house and made them clearer than the club versions. Down the line others innovated by taking acapellas and mixing them over different beats and creating the “exclusives� mixtapes (songs that have not yet been released by records labels). Along the way this progression has given rise to many things: • Alternative Economy: many local neighborhood store service mixtapes to communities, Many Previously unknown DJs and MCs blow up off of mixtapes. • Alternative distribution network: mom & pop stores, street vendors, trunks of cars, and even some major retail outlets serve as part of a grassroots network • Promotion service: Mixtape DJs break records better than mainstream corps. Primarily because of the relationship to the streets/people • Alternative media: mixtapes are often experimental spaces for new styles, new beats. MCs and DJ often get away we saying and doing things on mixtapes that their major labels would let them. Many record labels (the same one that the RIAA say they are representing) caught on to the importance of this network. They give songs and money to DJs to make a mixtape around their artist. After 50cents meteoritic rise through the mixtape game, it would seem like some labels have a whole mixtape arm! Now here in lies what makes mixtapes, as opposed to downloading, difficult for the RIAA to tackle. They hold a peculiar position in that they help with sales and promotion of official albums while at the same time challenging copyright laws. Mixtapes like hip hop its self is a collaborative process. Remixing, sampling, tagging on a wall. All of these things challenge what we consider to be “legal“. Mixtapes push the barriers of the old copyright laws. May be its time we made new ones, to fit our reality and our culture. In Light of this state/corporate terror what can we do? Artists should start to look into creative commons licenses: www.creativecommons.org We can even create our own much like the FAM Foundation: http://freethiscd.com/ There are already examples of folk doing this: www.freshoutmedia.com/about-us Fresh out Media allows artists to upload their songs onto their website for free promotion under the creative commons license. The Hip Hop Media Lab, which produces mixtapes with independent artists, is starting to use a version of the creative commons license as well: www.myspace.com/hiphopmedialab With Hip Hop being ‘Dead’ and ‘Killed’ maybe we can save it by doing what folks did in the beginning. Take what we’ve been given and do our own thing. OPERATION RESTORE DRAMA is being set up to by Wend day to help support DJ Drama & DJ Don. For more info send e-mail to: RapCoalition@aol.com
