Marketing Hip-Hop Online

These girls are actually not hip hop, but the theory is the same. Their name is Kemistrie. Not Chemistry. Not even Khemistry or Kemistry. It’s Kemistrie. Here’s why I think that is bad.

I find that often, I hear about a new group or artist by name, and interested, I attempt to go to their website, or Google them. Sometimes, I run into the problem where I don’t know how to spell their name. This happens a lot in hip hop, due to the (over)use of intentionally misspelled names.

You know. Cuz it’s cooler.

But what happens, in my case anyway, if after a few tries, I can’t find them, I forget it and move on.

Think about this when you choose the name or moniker you go by these days. Remember that this is an internet/search/Google world we live in, especially as entertainers trying to make a mark. And while Google’s oracle-like genius will “suggest” what you might have meant, their clairvoyance is helped by there being a lot of entries online with something near to what you typed in. If you are very new, or there are websites with even more closely matching spelling, you won’t come up.

And then eye myte mis yor intyre webb syte, wich wuld suk four yu.

If your song is new, and you are sending it around to DJs and bloggers and anyone else who might listen, because so far, it’s not been on the radio, not been played at clubs, not appeared on any mixtapes and not had a video circulating…

It is not a “SMASH HIT”. It is not an ANYTHING hit. It is not a hit. A hit, can’t be a hit, until it is a hit. If the DJs and bloggers you wish to reach, have not already heard of it, and their role is to know about the hits, why are you telling them it is a hit? A SMASH hit at that? They know it’s not. You sound like everyone else who claims their fresh-out-the-frying-pan song is a SMASH HIT. Kinda dumb.

Hype is good. Good copy writing is one of the cornerstones of promotion and advertising, but stop with the SMASH HIT, CERTIFIED BANGER, HOTTEST SHIT IN THE CLUBS, hyperbole.

Convince me, without making it obvious that you are just talking shit.

We briefly mentioned this in a prior post, but it REALLY bears repeating.

Name. Your. Tracks. Learn about ID3 tagging. Do it now. Please.

If I get your song emailed, or I download it from a filesharing site, or I rip it from your mixtape, and the name of the track is something like, “Track 03″, I am not going to listen to it. At all. Ever.

You are asking people (not just me but ANY person) to take 3+ minutes out of their life to listen to the result your craft. To wade through 43,589,348,689,464,032 other songs at their fingertips at any given moment. To spend 3+ less minutes with their child/loved one/job, and you are too lazy/careless/amateur-minded/uninterested to actually somehow attach the name of your song to the file?

Not to mention of course, that if your song was to wind up in the hand/computer/iPod of someone who could actually make some kind of positive impact on your fledgling rap career, and this was all they had to track you down, guess what wouldn’t be your ticket to potential stardom?

Track 03.

UPDATE: Look! Someone agrees, and even gives some advice to help! It’s your lucky day.

GrindEFX.com notes a fairly inventive move by Mos Def, and highlights some problems with the idea.

Mos has teamed up with LNA Clothing to bring to the public the first “Original Music Tee”. The t-shirt will feature the cover of the album on the front, the track listing on the back, and a download URL on the tag.

I think this is a great idea, because not only will people be buying the album, but they will be promoting it by wearing the t-shirt in public. Free advertising is every artist and label’s dream! That is of course if people buy it, which brings me to some reservations I have about the idea.

Read the rest of the post here.

Randomly, Yung Cal hit me on facebook chat.

To be 100% honest, my mind is all over the place lately, I’m not 100% sure where/how I know Yung Cal.

But he hit me with, simply, this:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/604224219ec596ac/

Now, I am in no position at this time to spin any records, hook up any artists, or even listen and/or respond to, the dozens of pieces of new music that comes across my e-desk on any given day.

But, for whatever reason, I decided to click on it. It’s a zShare link, we’re all pretty familiar with them.

I got a pop-up. I closed the pop-up. There was a link that said “skip this ad”. I sighed, and clicked the link. Then the zShare countdown showed 45 secords before my download would begin.

I almost closed the window. Normally, I would have. Luckily, I’m lethargic tonight. My point?

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Mickey Factz

Recently, Honda enlisted up-and-coming artist Mickey Factz to endorse their Honda Accord. The resulting commercial is displayed below.

AdAge suggests that this is a smart marketing move on Honda’s part, and a great way to authentically incorporate hip-hop into their marketing. They say,

Hip-hop’s decade of bling is popping, and it looks more like the housing bubble than a champagne cork. So why, at this point, would anyone take financial cues from a culture marked by conspicuous consumption? Honda Motor Co. thinks it has an answer.

and

“We wanted the balance of having style, a cool look and a cool lifestyle, but doing it in a way that’s sensible for the times,” said Barbara Ponce, manager-diversity advertising at Honda.

Woooha.com’s Scott Yeti is quoted as saying that he “isn’t sure the campaign will keep hip-hop fans engaged”:

“It’s still too early to tell and maybe Honda has some more tricks up their sleeves with this campaign, but I don’t know if the hook there is strong enough to maintain a strong consumer base that will keep coming back.”

We’ll all have to wait and see. The general murmuring around hip-hop business circles is that it’s a good look personally for Factz, but may not be as effective for Honda, or engaging for hip-hop heads, as Honda would like.

Thoughts?

Jadakiss in Letter to B.I.G.

According to Gawker.com, not only is Coogi aware of the affinity the late Brooklyn rhyme God had for it’s sweaters, they used this connection to their advantage by compensating Jadakiss for the brand-drop in his tribute song “Letter to B.I.G.”

As we have seen in movies and TV, there has been a huge increase in product placement in recent years, the act of integrating a product or brand within actual programming. This practice has been rising exponentially in TV in particular to combat TiVo-like recording, where one can fast-forward through commercials.

As evidenced by Forever, the Chris-Brown-sings-a-four-minute-jingle-disguised-as-a-hit-single deal last year, this practice is increasingly finding its way into the music business as well.

Questions:

1. Is this kind of arranged, corporate-sponsored lyrics going to backfire at some point, as even the most naive-minded of audience members realizes they are constantly being duped and that there may be no “real” music anymore?
2. Should Jadakiss be “called out” for accepting corporate dollars in a song supposedly dedicated to a deceased friend (assuming the rumor is true)?.

As a personal commentary: Between this, and the Vince-McMahon’ing of hip-hop, I am getting very, very disillusioned by the music business, very, very quickly. Even more than before. And before was a lot.

Interestingly, MTV News quotes Jadakiss as crediting “stylist Groovey Lew (Groovey is also credited with giving B.I.G. his first Coogi sweater) for coming up with the idea”, that the idea for the song initially struck Jadakiss as “corny”, but that in the end resulted in a song where, “it’s nothing fabricated on there. It’s gotta be all real on there. Everything was personal.”

Now I think Jada is probably one of the top-5 lyricists out there, and I respect his work and work ethic, but as the Gawker post so eloquently said, “Maybe save the product placement for normal, non-memorial-to-my-deceased-friend songs?”

After receiving this unsolicited tweet:

Bigstevegee Bang it out my dude!! Black Rob – Jumpin’ Like Whoa http://www.zshare.net/audio…

and noticing that Bigstevegee’s last 20 tweets were pretty much the same thing to 20 different people, I tweeted:

Manny Faces Dear Music Promoters: Spam is for email accounts, not Twitter. Spam me there. Here, it’s like jumping into a conversation. Rude.

I got a couple of replies, giving me e-dap:

djdimepiece @MannyFaces LOL, I soooooo concur! PLEASE RETWEET!
shawtyslim @MannyFaces amen to that… Twitter is like the “last place we got left”. If this turns into myspace, I’m giving up
WILLIAMGONE @MannyFaces good point! stop it vlad!!!

(LOL @ that last one). So, I’m not alone.

I wasn’t targeting Vlad obviously, but @Bigstevegee, a DJ/mash-upper/remixer apparantly down with AV8 records, the “are-they-still-around?” label that releases white-labelish singles, remixes, extended party breaks and such.

Now, a “reply” normally implies that you are “replying” to something I wrote in general, or wrote directed at you. Big Steve Gee apparently disagrees, and decided to t-spam not only me, but a slew of tweeple with variations of the same message (see image below).

Bigstevegee, we may even have communicated in the past, and my apologies if I don’t recall you off-hand. But I too am a remixer/producer cat (www.mannyfaces.com). I think most would say I’m pretty nice, skills and marketing-wise, and as such, I have had nearly 2,000,000 downloads of my remixes, got thousands of MySpace friends and email list recipients, and most importantly to this issue, more than 7x the amount of followers on Twitter than you do. I occasionally tweet links to my remixes and blog posts, etc., but I make SURE I tweet other interesting, relevant, irreverant, humorous and useful stuff at least 9 times out of ten. It is what has make me #5 in my region with a 99.4 score (source: TwitterGrader.com). So here’s some advice on how it works:

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Noticed a posting over at MarketingBreakdown.com where Allen Woodstrom feels that hip-hop artists are not having any particular success marketing themselves through Twitter. Which is true, except that it’s not. He states, for example:

MySpace and Facebook have two major things that Twitter does not: users and features. It was estimated that Twitter has about 3.5 million active users. Compare that to Facebook and MySpace, who respectively have 175 and 110 million users and it’s clear which network has the greatest opportunity for exposure.

Unfortunately, he bases this judgment largely on major, established artists, (who are really not even trying to market themselves much on Twitter in the first place. They don’t need to.) It’s a little strange that he wonders about whether Twitter can launch a career like MySpace did to Soulja Boy and Sean Kingston, but his ‘research’ doesn’t take strong upcoming artists into consideration, when many (@charleshamilton, @mickeyfactz, @asherroth) have a good presence on Twitter, and smartly so, as Twitter users skew to include bloggers and journalists, the exact crowd who have been hyping the next generation of hip-hop artists in the first place.

What Mr. Woodstrom doesn’t realize is that the discovered-through-MySpace-buzz phenomenon is turning into the discovered-through-blogger-buzz phenomenon, which is fueled more by the type of folks who are heavy Twitter users, then by the regular MySpace users, regardless of how many there are. To say that hip-hop artists are not finding success using Twitter is not quite accurate, and premature.

- @MannyFaces

50 Cent aka Pimpin' Curly

The 50 Cent/Rick Ross ‘beef’ is difficult to ignore if you are a follower of things hip-hop. It is at the same time, entertaining, exciting, childish and distracting. Since hip-hop has a long celebrated history of competitiveness, at best on wax, and at worst, spilling over into ‘real-life’, hip-hop purists are not overly critical of the escalation of tensions between Miami’s Ross and NY’s 50. Though there are many around the blogosphere who would suggest that the concept of beef in hip-hop is played out, the competition and creativity often associated with hip-hop confrontation is undeniably unique, and a guilty pleasure enjoyed by many.

A recent post on DJ Brandi Garcia’s blog on GlobalGrind.com on the subject, struck me however.

Officer Ricky Cartoon

Essentially, Ms. Garcia genuinely seems to enjoys the banter and multimedia assault being dished out by megastar 50 Cent, admiring his creativity and determination to ridicule Rick Ross and in effect, damage or end his career. I completely agree with Brandi Garcia on her post, and find the same sense of enjoyment from the proceedings.

I also agree completely with her when she says, “I think so long as this stays on records and the internet and doesn’t go into the streets on some foolishness then its great for the game.  Definitely entertaining and isn’t this called the ‘entertainment business’?“. Of course, we all want this to be about competitiveness and oneupsmanship,  and not result in any actual confrontation, but it is the ‘entertainment business’ portion of her comment is what struck me as interesting, and again, while I completely agree, I have some thoughts on this, which I posted on her blog as a comment, and will also post here.

What are your thoughts?

Hey Brandi -

The way I have been thinking of this whole 50/Ross thing, ties into something you said. “Entertainment” business.

The problem to me is, I kinda thought this was supposed to be the “music” business, and even before that, just hip-hop. Oh I love a good rap battle, but that’s my point.

Where’s the rapping?

I see videos, YouTube, websites, blog posts, baby mamas, fur coats, wig-wearing.. I mean, it’s all highly entertaining, and I also MUST give 50 his props on creativity, shock value, and promotion ability.

But isn’t all this supposed to boil down to who is the best rapper? Is hip-hop beef about hip-hop anymore? Or is it nowadays just who can virally spread their message of ridicule through the internet faster.. Or who owns, or doesn’t own, a Lambourghini…

Chuck D once said hip-hop was “CNN for black people”.

These days, it’s more like WWE.

Charles Hamilton

Up and coming rap cat Charles Hamilton, a rapidly rising blip on the rap radar (sorry Elliott Wilson), known to anyone due to his very effective internet marketing prowess, stumbled a bit the other night at NY club SOBs, when he voluntarily, and largely “for fun”, challenged battle-rap veteran Serius Jones to a bit of hip-hop verbal sparring. It was widely reported amongst internet murmuring, that Hamilton lost pretty badly.

My good friend, and obviously, my Favorite White Boy, broke down his declaration of victory for Charles Hamilton that night, backed by a solid argument. Part of his reasoning:

Serius Jones is known primarily as a battle rapper.  Most heads saw him kill Jin on the mic a few years back.   This dude is comfortable in a battle going off the top.  And its not like Charles Hamilton doesn’t provide ample amounts of material to mock.  So, Serius in a battle is nothing new.  Oh, and he has an album to promote.

Charles on the other hand has been widely dismissed as a “rapper/blogger” who really shouldn’t be taken seriously as a hip-hop artist.  He wears pink and talks about air conditioners and God.  Its no small feat that this dude stepped up and went toe-to-toe with a battle vet and left standing.  And if you watch the video, he held his own.

Serius Jones

Ok, fair enough. However, I then conducted a quick, non-scientific poll. I twitter searched “Hamilton” and “Serius” and counted the responses that were more than just someone sharing a link. I counted any tweet that had an opinion. 11/11 declared that Serius “murked”, “killed”, “got in that a**”, or otherwise affirmed what I have felt is a general consensus that Hamilton lost this semi-friendly battle.

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