Cool your jets, internets. Yes, yes, yes, that new snoop video that's making the rounds is aesthetically packed full of LOLZ to the max. BUT YOU'RE MISSING THE BIGGER ISSUE:
A rapper with 14 years experience of putting out successful albums has changed his style up to sound like T-Pain, a guy with 6 months experience putting out records... who's whole schtick is based around singing through a voice box.
So that's the current state of hip hop... rap music... pop R'n'B. Super.
The jist: it's an op-ed piece written by Jermaine Dupri, where he argues that Steve Jobs/iTunes is enabling the consumer to destroy his "art" (keep in mind, this guy produces Mariah Carey albums). What kills me isn't his belief that he should have creative control over his material, but rather the fact that he's so fucking out of touch with reality. Dude thinks that (1) his listening audience are a bunch of assholes, and (2) by pulling music of iTunes CD sales would sky rocket.
My plan was to pull quotes and argue the article piece by piece, but I get too frustrated reading the source material. Instead here are the thoughts that jump out while reading it:
Radiohead's entire physical catalog is available on iTunes. There's even a radiohead reggae tribute album!
At no point did MTV insist that you spend $300,000 to $500,000 on your music videos, you just opted to, as you're and your cohort are a bunch of huge egomaniacs. You recieved just as much gain in promotion as they did "video television industry off of [your] backs". PS: video television isn't an industry
Isn't the idea of "tak[ing] back the power" by "sacrific[ing] some sales to make [your] point" a really really bad idea. Aren't sales of hip hop records already a mess?
"If they just want the single, they gotta get the album". Or they gotta download utorrent.
KRISS KROSS CAME OUT A DECADE AND A HALF AGO. GET OVER IT.
"I'm like an interior decorator who comes into a house and fixes up one room"... dude, that's so not gangsta.
Intros/skits on rap albums do not set the mood. They waste time. Kanye figured this out, and incidentally his album went gold the first day, fam.
"But at what point does any business care when consumer complain?". Uhhh, when they stop spending money on your product. Which in your case, is now. So please feel free to join the rest of us in the 21st century.
A quick FYI for those of you jumping at the soon to be released live Daft Punk album Alive 2007: all those torrents popping up claiming to be advanced copies of the disk aren't advanced copies, rather mislabeled/repackaged copies of the infamous Coachella 2006 bootleg.
The thing I don't understand is why the number of seeders on these torrents seems to shoot up by the hour. Downloading for the sake of hoarding doesn't make sense to me.
The ironic dumb thing about all this is that I haven't - and - have no intention of getting my hands on an advance copy of this album. I'm waiting until the actual release day, going to the nearest record store, buying a copy of the CD (!) and giving the subs in my car workout. Why? This is the first time in forever (since Neon Bible?) that I'm genuinely overjoyed about a release. Childlike wonder, here we come. Hell, when I listen to those hit and miss bootlegs from this year's tour I still get goosebumps. This is a good thing.
Related: Because I'm not the completest I used to be, I didn't realize that the basis for the Alive 2007 tour encore was a ultra-sublime Thomas Bangalter side-project track:
I always though this was a custom made loop for the show... you gotta admit it nicely ties up the whole Robot vs Human theme used through out the set. With that said, the bass line on this track is beyond blissful. Someone really should play with it a bit... hmmmmm, this could be a fake DJ project.
For those too lazy to click, the Canadian government has approved a new tax on mp3 sales... which equates to about 3 cents a track. Also, this tariff may be retroactively applied back to 1996. HUH?!
So, let's recap...
blank CD's are taxed about 25 a piece to offset the impact of piracy
mp3's are now being taxed to offset piracy
retail prices of mp3s go up. Or, if retailers chose to keep prices constant and eat the increase, they loose margin (keep in mind, retailer margins on mp3s are generally ~10 cents, and could be cut by 30% with this tax), and in turn are less likely spend money on marketing, innovation, or expanding their services.
the cost of legit mp3's moves further away from the cost of the (free) alternative
I'm suddenly compelled to link btjunkie.org
Listen, anyone who's read an economics book for 3 minutes can see this is a bad move. The gap between the legit and pirated needs to shrink, not grow. Online retailing of this stuff needs time to mature and consumers need time to change their habits before it gets bogged down with red tape. If some point of the piracy equation needs to tariffed, then do so at the ISP level. Not that that's really a good idea, but at least there's direct linkage between access and illegal downloading.
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