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.