ATG sizes it all up.
You could feel it coming, really. These days there's hardly a record industry meme more played than "NO MORE RECORD INDUSTRY!!!" The music biz as a whole is in crisis like the rest of us, hanging on by a thread and trying to remake itself even as its million quivering components are pushed and pulled through a million tubes. Yet despite a widely-expected imminent death for music purveyors, most of the major players have kept on kicking.
In terms of ushering in the new age, traditional Slayers of the Old Guard, i.e. Radiohead and Steve Jobs, have offered little more than premature experimentation, feigning attempts to break the dominance of label-backed CDs (In Rainbows and the MacBook Air respectively) before giving into the lure of old-fashioned shiny discs.
Hip-hop is different, though. When it comes to trends, industry-related and not, the genre has always been a leading indicator. And now, in 2009, hip-hop has found itself as the canary in the mine shaft - the first sector of the industry to fully succumb to the brave new era. Excluding freaks of nature like Lil Wayne, Kanye West and Jay-Z, it's safe to say that 90 percent of hip-hop albums released today are teetering on the brink of zero value, worth neither the plastic on which they're printed nor the gas, time and energy required to procure them. The final nail in the proverbial coffin, it seems, has come from none other than the album's lighter, more nimble, more immediately gratifying cousin. Blame it on the mixtape...
A brief history of the modern mixtape
Mixtapes have been around for nearly as long as hip-hop itself, but a lot has changed since the first days of deliberately dubbed magnetic tape. The platform's continuous evolution took it through several years of legally and culturally ambivalent territory, becoming the preferred medium of underground DJs and bootleggers, who pushed mashed-up vocals and instrumental samples as works unto themselves, each one heavily marked by its creator's vocal stamp.
Squeezed by both mounting pressure from the RIAA and the FBI as well as a stagnant consumer base of hardcore fans and kids on the corner, the mixtape entered into a new phase more suitable for the digital age. Somewhere between Chamillionaire's celebrated Mixtape Messiah series, DJ Drama's Gangsta Grillz, and Lil Wayne's seminal 2007 release Da Drought 3, mainstream artists and consumers alike began to see the basic idea of creating custom, yet "unofficial," music content in a new light.
Where hip-hop lives
More than any other genre outside of (and arguably including) indie rock, hip-hop sleeps, eats and breathes on the Internet. Rap City is ancient history, and syndicated radio is the last place any self-respecting hip-hop head checks for new music. MySpace pages and music blogs (like, ehem, the one you're reading) are the only outlets relevant to today's rap fan, and it's in this climate that the modern mixtape has risen to dominance.
From pre-album teasers like Kanye West's Can't Tell Me Nothin' mix and Nas' The Nigger Tape to buzz-building blog candy like Wale's The Mixtape About Nothing, Mickey Factz's Heaven's Fallout and Charles Hamilton's endless string of .rar-ities, the most vital hip-hop is increasingly found in mixtape form. And these aren't your daddy's mixtapes, either. Today the best mixtapes are so high quality and so high profile that the hoops and constraints surrounding label-backed releases seem hopelessly silly.
In the first four months of 2009, the most poignant hip-hop releases - Illmind's Blaps, Rhymes & Life vol. 2, Drake's So Far Gone and Rhymefest's The Manual - have all been free, downloadable mixtapes - each one featuring original beats, quality artwork and zero drops from DJs. Of XXL's oft-cited "Freshman Ten," the most vital young rappers working today, many don't even have record deals and only one (Blu) has released a traditional album at all.
Adapting the art form
Standing in between the superstardom and platinum records of yesteryear and the scores of new and talented rappers emerging every day, is the intractable valley of the Internet. The more these rappers establish themselves online, releasing quality products and building formiddable fanbases that exist only on the Web, the less common offline success (as defined by the modern record industry) will become. Huge-selling rap moguls like 50 Cent and Jay-Z are a thing of the past; replaced by a thousand brazen upstarts with zShare accounts and Facebook pages.
How many albums will the average rap fan buy this year? How much longer until insatiable hip-hop fans' hunger for free and legal music and industrious hip-hop artists' desire to see their work gain prominence conspire to render the modern distribution model an artifact of ancient history? The inescapable truth is that it's already happened.
The hip-hop album as we know it is dead. Long live the mixtape.
Mixtapes have been around for nearly as long as hip-hop itself, but a lot has changed since the first days of deliberately dubbed magnetic tape. The platform's continuous evolution took it through several years of legally and culturally ambivalent territory, becoming the preferred medium of underground DJs and bootleggers, who pushed mashed-up vocals and instrumental samples as works unto themselves, each one heavily marked by its creator's vocal stamp.
Squeezed by both mounting pressure from the RIAA and the FBI as well as a stagnant consumer base of hardcore fans and kids on the corner, the mixtape entered into a new phase more suitable for the digital age. Somewhere between Chamillionaire's celebrated Mixtape Messiah series, DJ Drama's Gangsta Grillz, and Lil Wayne's seminal 2007 release Da Drought 3, mainstream artists and consumers alike began to see the basic idea of creating custom, yet "unofficial," music content in a new light.
Where hip-hop lives
More than any other genre outside of (and arguably including) indie rock, hip-hop sleeps, eats and breathes on the Internet. Rap City is ancient history, and syndicated radio is the last place any self-respecting hip-hop head checks for new music. MySpace pages and music blogs (like, ehem, the one you're reading) are the only outlets relevant to today's rap fan, and it's in this climate that the modern mixtape has risen to dominance.
From pre-album teasers like Kanye West's Can't Tell Me Nothin' mix and Nas' The Nigger Tape to buzz-building blog candy like Wale's The Mixtape About Nothing, Mickey Factz's Heaven's Fallout and Charles Hamilton's endless string of .rar-ities, the most vital hip-hop is increasingly found in mixtape form. And these aren't your daddy's mixtapes, either. Today the best mixtapes are so high quality and so high profile that the hoops and constraints surrounding label-backed releases seem hopelessly silly.
In the first four months of 2009, the most poignant hip-hop releases - Illmind's Blaps, Rhymes & Life vol. 2, Drake's So Far Gone and Rhymefest's The Manual - have all been free, downloadable mixtapes - each one featuring original beats, quality artwork and zero drops from DJs. Of XXL's oft-cited "Freshman Ten," the most vital young rappers working today, many don't even have record deals and only one (Blu) has released a traditional album at all.
Adapting the art form
Standing in between the superstardom and platinum records of yesteryear and the scores of new and talented rappers emerging every day, is the intractable valley of the Internet. The more these rappers establish themselves online, releasing quality products and building formiddable fanbases that exist only on the Web, the less common offline success (as defined by the modern record industry) will become. Huge-selling rap moguls like 50 Cent and Jay-Z are a thing of the past; replaced by a thousand brazen upstarts with zShare accounts and Facebook pages.
How many albums will the average rap fan buy this year? How much longer until insatiable hip-hop fans' hunger for free and legal music and industrious hip-hop artists' desire to see their work gain prominence conspire to render the modern distribution model an artifact of ancient history? The inescapable truth is that it's already happened.
The hip-hop album as we know it is dead. Long live the mixtape.
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