January 18, 2007

A Few Words on Drama and Cannon

Business…I did the AM Jump this morning for Page 2.

You’ll see the last major item on the list is about DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, aka The Aphiliates.  As I mention there, I’ve known Don since I was 16.  I remember when his beats were trash and he wasn’t much of a deejay, and I remember the day in 2001 when, after hearing an album he’d produced for the artist formerly known as Jaylyrikal, I stopped him on the street just to shake his hand.  So while Don’s not a close friend, we do go way back, and it’s always good to see him on those rare occasions we cross paths at an event or something.

So no, I’m not really unbiased.

Further, I’m super biased against the RIAA and its sharecropping business model.

I respect their hustle.  I believe the industry really thinks piracy is to blame for sagging sales.  But I also have seen enough to believe that they’ve got the game all wrong.  A former professor at Carolina, Koleman Strumpf, co-authored a paper that found that downloading negligibly affected sales.  They found that, to affect the sales of one album, it takes 5,000 downloads.  Not a big deal at all.

I haven’t checked research on mixtapes, but I’d imagine you’d find similar evidence.  Mixtapes have long been a great promotional tool, a fantastic way to get records out and to get a read on what the public is feeling.  But the strange thing about mixtapes is the difference in how labels and artists view them.  Labels don’t like artists making artist on their own time from music recorded on the label’s dime.  Makes sense, but that seems a fair trade.  Get the pub however you can get it.

(Oh, and if artists’ deals weren’t so shitty, maybe they wouldn’t feel compelled to go for the dough on the side.)

So forgive me if I think it’s silly for the RIAA to mount a campaign that now has Drama and Cannon in jail on friggin’ RICO charges.  These cats advertise their mixtapes loudly and proudly.  They aren’t running some sort of covert criminal enterprise.  They’re selling mixtapes.  C’mon, man.

Know what’s crazier?  According to my sources, Drama and Cannon were originally denied bail!  For selling mixtapes?  Are you serious? Huh?  Blame that on hip hop, I suppose.  The Fox 5 report of the raid would have you think The Man crept in and busted them for slangin’ heroin or something.  It was treated almost as though Gangsta Grillz was a front for something deeper and more criminal.

Not quite, folks.  They’re selling mixtapes.

The scuttlebutt among Atlanta industry figures is that this arrest stems from something else, some separate agenda.  I can’t speak on that, and I haven’t had the chance to talk to people more closely connected to the situation to give a real answer to what’s going on.  But it don’t take much to see that this is a bit nutty.

Moreover, this could change the game forever.  This raid could spell the end of the mixtape as we know it.  That would be really bad.

9 Comments »

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1. I agree man. It seems like the RIAA is doing more harm than good to the record industry with this one. Mixtapes are a great promotional tool for new artists and their projects. It will be interesting to see what happens with this. Yet again I have the feeling that they are resisting the times instead of going along with them and finding new ways to make money.

   And I agree that the morally bankrupt nature of these record deals is largely to blame for the mixtape hustle. They seem to have forgotten the main hustler rule…from top to bottom, everybody gotta eat…or they will come and take yours.

   Comment by C — January 18, 2007 #

2. It won’t spell the end of mixtapes… maybe it’ll spell the end of DJs making money off of mixtapes…

   But then again, you can do what some cats are doing already - selling CD jewel cases for $10 and including a free CD!

   But yeah, I think mixtapes will probably just be for free or go back to the underground with a label that says “For promotional Use Only” but it’ll cost you $8…

   Comment by Quibian Salazar-Moreno — January 18, 2007 #

3. This is a goddamn shame! Was there any way this could have been settle without treating these DJ’s like extras in “Goodfellas”? The RIAA and the big media in general are in such a rush to solidify and perpetuate their cash flow they have forgotten what they are in business for….to make consumeable entertainment. By definition, you have to produce what people what to purchase, how they want to purchase it. If you attach criminality to the consumption of what your business creates you threaten the existence of your business model. And unless your business is that of a drug cartel, I guarantee you that negatively impacts shareholder value. All of the money, effort and goodwill being squandered by big media “protecting their rice bowls” will end in its collapse as we know it. Something else will take its place, that is certain. But by that point, I hope that people who have started this will have lost their jobs and are selling oranges on the side of the road.

   Comment by Tommie Foster — January 18, 2007 #

4. Bo wrote:
   Colt Brennan returns for another year of being called “system quarterback”

   Bo, do you think he was ready to go pro? I think he could use another year of development. He won’t have the year next year that he had this year. Hard to do that insane, record-breaking shit twice.

   Comment by Rex — January 18, 2007 #

5. “Mixtape” is now just a terminology, right? They’re not tapes any more are they? But, Terrence did pass Ludacris a cassette. Of course, ‘Cris laughed at him.

   Something else about the RIAA that is TOTAL BULLSHIT…

   They require live bands playing around town in bars and restaurant to pay a licensing fee to the RIAA in order to play cover songs.

   That is the definition of an “evil empire.”

   Comment by Rex — January 18, 2007 #

6. You are SO wrong for you comments about Oakland as it relates to S. Jackson Bo.

   Wrong, but true.

   LOL!!!

   Comment by dameSTATii — January 18, 2007 #

7. And Drama is a fellow incoming c/o 96 AUC’er as well. I hate to see this happen to such a good dude.

   Comment by dameSTATii — January 18, 2007 #

8. [...] Yesterday I wrote about a new initiative from Mat Johnson.  While thinking more about the idea of open source culture, I ran across this story.  Like I said yesterday, book publishers are in a bind…no pun intended.  Profit margins are shrinking as consumers are spending their money on other forms of pop culture, or increasingly not spending money at all.  I can get the entire Wheels of Time series on pdf from Bittorrent if I wanted.  And classics like The Art of War have long been available in various electronic formats.  One of the most efficient ways to make more profit from the book publisher’s standpoint, is to reduce risk.  How do you reduce risk?  By publishing known quantities.  This is one of the many reasons for the success of urban fiction–at least at the outset, many of the writers in the genre had already made their names doing the equivalent of selling mixtapes out of the back of the van. [...]

   Pingback by Networks, publishing, and the Reduction of Risk at Dr. Lester K. Spence — January 21, 2007 #

9. I am still trying to get over this. I’m reminded of a quote by Min. Farrakhan who said that sometimes the black community “treats me like a prostitute. you kiss me in the night, but in the daytime (in public) you don’t want to know me.”

   I think the same thing can be said of the record labels leaving mixtape DJs hung out to dry. Guess they forget who spins their records on radio and in clubs. Like the saying goes, follow the money and you’ll know who dimed on them. Yeah 2 cops in Chitlinswitch GA were just walking by a record store and ’shazam’ record piracy laws popped into their heads. Yeah right…

   Comment by Kristasphere — January 23, 2007 #

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