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.

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?

[More]

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?

Nicely written piece by DJ Xplosive (XplosiveWorld.com) with an impressive take on Hip-Hop music, industry and adaptation that can easily be applied to many different industries, companies and marketing strategies.

A couple of excerpts:

I’m proposing a stimulus plan that calls on some of hip-hop’s most powerful names to start releasing the music they have been holding back (and, by the way, do it for free). Dr. Dre, we need you right now. Jay-Z, let’s start getting those tracks from Blueprint 3 out to the masses. This message applies to everyone who is holding back gems because they are waiting for the climate to improve. I’m here to tell you the climate for releasing an album is never going to get any better. Hip-hop fans need to be hit by a barrage of new music that reminds us of why we fell in love with this culture to begin with. Our morale couldn’t go any lower.

and

I believe that getting fans excited about the music again is the first step in revitalizing hip-hop culture. It would provide a renewed sense of optimism among hip-hop fans, which I believe would improve conditions throughout the industry. Much like the stimulus plan recently passed by the Obama administration, the results of this stimulus also may not be immediate.

This stimulus plan involves improving our psyche, rather than serving to benefit anyone financially. The money will come, but that’s not what is most important right now. We as fans need to love hip-hop again. Improving the quality of music and providing the industry with something we can truly be excited about will most certainly lead to a revised plan from the hip-hop community as a whole. While sales may not improve, it will actually encourage people to start thinking of ways to become profitable in this new age of music whether it’s from becoming smarter in tour packaging to creating new online revenue streams. The desire to fix the problem will grow stronger once the overall morale is improved.

Right now everyone is dumbfounded, looking for a solution to the problem of the internet. In case you haven’t noticed, the internet is anarchy. There is not going to be a solution, formula or even a game plan that works because we can’t control an environment that evolves through unfettered innovation. The best the industry will be able to do is quickly adapt to change. That means if your label, management company or agency isn’t staffed primarily by a bunch of internet geeks that are able to identify trends, stop on a dime and shift gears in the way they’re working, then you’re fucked.

I’m also working with a client in the journalism industry, trying to convince them to embrace, adapt and adopt new media strategies, and what jumped out at me after reading this posting, is the similar message. Creating excitement. Without the people evangelizing your brand, or your industry, they will undoubtedly succumb to the naysayers and gloom-and-doomers, dragging you down with it. Today’s industries, especially those dealing with different forms of media, MUST NOT WASTE TIME wondering when and if and how. They must plunge in, feet first, and become a part of this new wave of industrialism or they will simply be left behind. No one knows the answers yet, so get in there and figure it out as you go along like the rest of us. Don’t wait for the next company or entity to figure it out. BE the next company or entity.

Good post Xplosive. Read his whole post here.

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:

[More]

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

Vibe Magazine

According to Gawker (via ByronCrawford via NicoleBitchie), Vibe Magazine may be in financial trouble.

This, of course, is not surprising in the grand scheme of things, economy, publishing biz, etc.

But a commenter on the Gawker story had a very interesting viewpoint.

Chartreuse says:

Here’s the deal.

The audience who would read VIBE are all on the internet reading sites like Allhiphop.com, worldstarhiphop.com, NecoleBitchie.com and the like.

Their online execution has been awful.

Well, that actually makes a lot of sense. We see others in the online hip-hop world discussing whether blogs/sites are preferred over magazines these days, and in general, advertising dollars continue to drain from print and heading online, which can quicken the demise of print properties (and hip-hop sites do seem to be increasing their viability, and advertisers seem to notice… Check NahRight’s recent Mickey D’s ad takeover!). Could this increase in e-street-cred that these sites and blogs are receiving help put the nail in the coffin for Vibe, The Source, XXL, and the like?

AListRadio.net

Maybe I’m not normal. In my living room, I don’t have a radio. I do have a little office area, with a desk and a computer, and a nice amp/speaker setup to go with it. So tonight, I was playing on the Wii with my son (and by playing, I mean losing to), and then eventually, I played with my woman (and by played, I mean finally felt worthy because I won).

Anyway, just before I had left the desk area to play Godzilla Unleashed, I got an IM from alistradio on AIM. See, one time I was tracking down DJ Bobby Trends for a possible feature on one of our client sites, Birthplace Magazine, and I came across AListRadio.net, an online “radio” station where Trends has a couple of shows. I got on their IM list and they always shoot an IM when it’s time for a new show. So I logged in, to jam a little while I got my head served to me by the Prince of Nintendo over here.

Basically, ALIstRadio allows DJs, some very well known, others moderately so, to rock a show for 2-hour timeslots, with live audio and video streaming to the net. The night I first listened, I checked Bobby Trends show and he had on Uncle Murda and Mickey Factz. The combo of these two alone was something you wouldn’t normally get on commercial radio, and the whole AListRadio structure struck me as an interesting experiment in the internet radio world.

[More]