How I grew to loathe the Mixtape

I am very aware that this article will be dripping with delicious irony and a small amount of hypocrisy, but I am going to write it anyway bare with me.

What started out as a plague has reached biblical proportions, urban music is gripped in this idiotic idea that in order to break an new or established artist one most give away volumes worth of music for free. It wasn’t always like this though there was a pretty good system in place and it did more and reached more than anything the record labels artist and DJs could ever have hoped to dream of. I am of course talking about the glorious mixtape well in its original form, but to explain why the current system is the worst, one most go back to the beginning.

 

Mixtapes as they are commonly known today started out as a way for DJs to showcase their skills so that they could get work. Local DJs would routinely put together a demo of 30-45 minute sets blending various songs together in a “mix” if you will. The idea behind it was that they could go to club owners and promoters and show off how good they were and why they needed them to play their next party. As this method grew legends like Ron G started to make these tapes with more style and flare featuring new and exclusive songs or even making remixes with the music blending multiple songs together etc… while others used their fame to work together (I put it in bold because when you see what happened next its actually kind of funny) with record companies to break new artist by allowing them to give shout outs or DJ Drops as they are more commonly known today or even dropping a quick verse on top of a popular instrumental. When I say this was huge I mean this idea of using ones fame to regulate what and when music dropped was unprecedented especially by outsiders not associated with record labels. It didn’t take long before people recognized what was happening and began to capitalize on their new found fame and position of power. I still remember sitting around with my friends waiting for the new DJ Clue mixtape with baited breath to drop because that was our window into the new releases weeks before they came out in stores, you see kids there was no internet, twitter or blogs to blast out somebody’s song everybody had to rely on the DJs and when you have a concentration of power like that people become uneasy. DJs became rich over night and greed got the better of people. What was most shocking at the time was here were local street dudes who had as much power and influence over a song becoming a hit as were people sitting in the boardroom and I don’t have to guess people at the top must have been freaked because an assault came down, being a DJ was almost criminalized no scratch that it was criminalized and a monster was born.

I look back at this brief time with fondness because while people at the top were unhappy with the beast executives like Sean Combs, and Dame Dash had help to create, and the centralized power a few DJs had, nobody seemed to notice the insane growth in the music industry. While rap music is a billion dollar a year enterprise now, one of the reasons for this new found growth was brought to you by your local DJs. When people turn on the radio or TV now, you can find rap music everywhere, even top40 and pop stations routinely play this music, but at the time when all this was happening rap music was like leprosy on MTV they didn’t want anything to do with it, Snoop Dogg wasn’t a regular on the sets, radio stations didn’t play it except for a few choice songs and even they didn’t get prime time billing in the middle of the day. This was it, and somehow people got the word out and new artist were discovered everyday through this method. As fond as I look back at this time I am not naive I know the politics of the day were ugly and with every unregulated venture, back room deals were made to feature artist and not feature others. What it took to be discovered went from a handshake to demanding a brand new car and so on but I would trade for all that muck and grime in an instant instead of what has grown out of it.

Record companies went H.A.M., think about the war on drugs and replace cocaine with CDs and you would have a little bit of a understanding how far the hammer dropped in the name of saving a industry that didn’t need saving. All that drama went on to ruin the one system that was working despite all its flaws. FBI raids happened routinely, DJs were arrested fined jailed and the record industry broke its back. The reason why I shake my head in disgust is that while you see people from the RIAA cry and complain about people stealing, these idiots yeah I said it went from giving away a single song to albums and albums of material now you tell me which is worse? It was always against the law to make blend tapes or CDs but they enforced it like DJs were in the Gambino crime family, and in an instant the one thing that benefited everybody under the table was ruled public enemy #1. Unfortunately it didn’t change the bottom line immediately in anyway shape or form because people adapted, if it had however I think executives in the offices would have probably noticed that the crackdown wasn’t such a good idea. Despite all the nonsense that was involved with the big named DJs smaller local DJs still did their part promoting artist and music and they did it for free. Here you had a system where record companies stopping on your neck and serviced local DJs with new music before it was released and they went out and promoted the hell out of it for free in spite of it. It cost them nothing and everybody reaped the benefits, I’ll say it again for FREE.

 

When all of this was happening, magazines devoted to music still weren’t featuring artist like they should and radio/TV still treated rap music like a plague so instead of bowing down to the pressure people gamed the system and the monster was created. Before all this mixtapes were literally mixes of all different artist with new or current songs of the day. Now that this was outlawed and the police were cracking heads for even having it the idea evolved. Instead of dropping a verse people like 50 Cent started creating all new material to be released on CD or tape but it wasn’t a album. The quality wasn’t there, the songs weren’t mixed at all they were just a collection of new songs nobody had ever heard over other rappers instrumentals and that grew into making completely new music. As much as this was an evolution I’m not so sure it would have taken this form if artist hadn’t become desperate. Oh it was dire people were being sued, if real songs somehow ended up on these CDs the judge was throwing the book at you. And so they had to start doing something new. I don’t think 50 Cent was the first but he is probably the most famous, partly because of his taking shots at Wu-Tang and Jay Z constantly which led to a young man named Marshall Mathers discovering his music and the rest I guess is history.

 

The saddest part about the current state of the mixtapes is all the ingenuity is gone, the creativity is dead. Once the word got out that 50 Cent made mixtapes and got a deal people equated the two of them together and the legend grew. I can’t say for certain that he was signed because of other forces at play but it didn’t matter all people heard was record deal and mixtapes. And the great photocopy machine got going full steam ahead, the who what when where and why didn’t even matter. The idea of mixtapes is so far removed from its original form calling it a mixtape is almost like “hipster” “irony”. Artist today don’t even use DJs any more they make it themselves welcome to the 21st century. What started out as a way to game the recording industry and the RIAA into leaving rap music alone has turned into the bubonic plague.

I know it’s funny to hear a DJ say but I loathe everything about the current state of music and the mixtape. Artist have, it seems lost their damn mind when it comes to it. Right now as I type this established artist with gold and platinum plaques on their wall are putting more effort into a free cd then their actual album, and that’s just sad on every level. It would be bad enough if that was the worst but because these CDs have to be all new material people have gone to the lengths of putting real songs they would normally sell on them in an effort to appease the mixtape gods. Rappers are even avoiding paying producers for their music by tossing it into this abyss of nonsense and nobody thinks this is a problem. If my disgust isn’t apparent already I’ll just spit it out I hate mixtapes. What was once a very useful tool when the system was working against you to promote yourself has now become the exact opposite. How does one stand out exactly when everybody is doing the exact same thing the exact same way, coupled with the internet and the line you don’t cross becomes your home.

I’d like to use an analogy to sum up if you don’t mind. In the rap world today everybody is a drug “kingpin” so this should hit close to home. Imagine if you will a world where all the drug dealers went around giving all their crappy drugs away for free and if that wasn’t bad enough, then they moved on to the good premium stuff, and nobody could tell them apart because they all make the exact same watered down garbage. Now after a while when all the drug fiends are overdosing on all this free basedgod goodness they finally pulled out the drugs they were going to sell but everybody is high already so what is the point? Now in movies that would be the end of the story but this is the real world so all the people behind the scenes who make this organization work quit because nobody is making any money, the growers the suppliers they all can’t afford to keep the charade up any longer so they go out of business. Now substitute suppliers with producers/song writers and change drugs to music… Surprise!!!

Now you don’t have to be Tron the drug dealer pleading the fif or Donald Trump’s hair piece to recognize this is not a bi-winning business strategy in any market.