GetAtMe

From its inception HipHop has always been part fantasy (the dream) and part reality (the business), but the one constant in hiphop has been the competitiveness in sales (until now…).  HipHop started out like a musical Hunger Games where the strong survived not only in show arenas but also in retail and mall stores.  When we had stores, there was very little fugazzi, you either sold or you didn’t.  The flea markets were the purest form of street metrics because hiphop core fans populated the malls on Thurs thru Sat picking up whatever they were out to get and usually that new mixtape joint was on the list.

People still buy that way.  The bootleg movie industry is constantly engaging new agents to ply their wares.  These bootlegs provide the same service that music leaks provided.  They either drove word of mouth or they would kill a project that wasn’t gameday.  Now of course the media relation professional hated these leak masters because they became shepards of consumer taste and in the current digital marketplace of “will it fly or will it die” economics, this relationship has now become really strained.  So what was the music industry professional solution?  Hire bored online trolls to combat the influencers.  Now here’s where the problem exists, we now have a troll as an artist and now trolling has become a market strategy.

Trolls now sit on threads like Boxden and Reddit, on sites like Facebook, Twitter and IG, and to a degree try to legislate consumer taste.  Like the noisy kid in the class the troll’s process is to disrupt things until they get the desired attention.  In the digital age this type of marketing can be sort of short sighted, why because these trolls can only distract, they cannot drive sales or really control the engagement of the buying consumer (the consumer is at least 5 weeks ahead of the music professional marketer and their choices are based usually on I got it first so I can tell others what the deal is (the footprint of organic growth).

Can HipHop survive the Lil Yachty’s, who troll for attention in hopes of recruiting someone else’s fans by calling the fans current choices of artist lame?  Will this work if they artist never really sells in the scale that labels need to stay liquid and functioning.  You already know that answer.  Why because someone knows the numbers of who sold and who didn’t and at the end of the day, the sales are the final judges in an artist’s commercial success.  How many fans voted with a purchase of an artist’s music?  That’s all that really matter…  Remember “there’s nothing wrong with the music business that a good record can’t cure…”

#ItsAboutTheMusic

#GetAtMe