Hip Hop 2009: 5 Big Open Questions

Posted by Justin Boland on Sep 08, 2009 | 0 Comments

Now that the audience for Audible Hype has grown, I’d like to spark a few conversations.  I’ve been amazed by the folks who have dropped comments and gotten in contact with me, and I’ve got 5 Big Questions.  I’m not asking you to answer them all, but if you can speak on any of them…please do.  It’s going to be a long, cold winter and we’ve gotta figure out how to build art into income. Join the cipher.

1. What’s the one single website or social network that’s given you the highest return on investment and the best results?

Where do you concentrate your time, and how do you reach the most people?  How much has your daily Internets routine changed in the past 12 months?  Is Myspace still useful for promotion? And finally, the question I ask in nearly every interview I’ve done: what tools have you found to help you stay organized?

2. What are the best countries in the world for hip hop?

Wikipedia can get you up to speed on the big picture, but it’s the details that interest me. Sure, France makes up around 6% of the global music industry, but that information is only useful to me if I’m running a major label big enough to have aggregated content.  Since I’m just running a small hip hop label, my questions are way more specific, and it’s all about hip hop. Who has the most hip hop fans per capita? Where are the album sales shockingly strong for hip hop, overseas? Why is it so hard to get ahold of useful data in the Information Age? Should Nielsen be adding their demographic data to Wikipedia and going open source to stay relevant?

3. Are blogs about to be the dominant source of new music?

Commercial radio reaches way too many people to argue this yet, but in the near future, I can see blogs evolving into a major source for new music.  Content-wise, the vast majority of hip hop blogs are identical Wordpress projects, and most of folks running hip hop blogs reach a small audience and mostly function as an echo chamber or relay system for the big dogs. A handful of major players debut content that then filters out to (many) thousands of smaller fish.

Being a weirdo, I’m interested in a different kind of content revolution.  Hip hop blogging could (and should) be a wide open format with room for hundreds of unique approaches.  Yet aside from very dope exceptions like T.R.O.Y. Blog, the template is exactly the same for 99.9% of these sites: regularly posting links to download new tracks.  In the age of Google Analytics, all that economics horseshit about the Invisible Hand of the Markets has never been more true than our Attention Economy.  Everyone’s doing the same thing because it works for bringing in traffic.  These kids are not superstitious lemmings, they’re watching their numbers, seeing results and going with what works. 

I don’t think blogs will ever be mainstream like FM radio.  But I do see blogs being the dominant players in the future of whatever digital, streaming solution replaces FM for good.  The audience demand for new music is much greater than the audience demand for opinions about hip hop. People will look to reliable brands, content cultivators who have similar taste and always dig deep for new dope.  I could see Nah Right being way more successful as a podcast, despite the fact they get comments into the triple digits on every post they’ve made this year. (For another great example of blogs scaling up, check out Indiefeed Hop Hop.)

4. Do we need fewer options and less choice?

The worst part about filling out a sign-up page is, it’s been the same damn form, every time. The same information is requested by pretty much every web app, social network, music service, terrorist cell and online store I’ve been a part of.  I have a “Skeleton Key” document containing all the user/pass combos I need to keep track of for World Around day-to-day, and it’s got 62 lines.  That’s just stupid.

Because of this sad state, most of my thinking in 2009 has been about eliminating wasted time and doing more with less.  One of my hidden projects has been rebuilding the Audible Hype $0 Promotion Plan, which is too complicated and concrete.  It also doesn’t reflect the fact that $0 is not cheap-there’s a serious time commitment to online promotion.

Since I’m irresponsible, I mostly advise artists to keep things simple, ignore the major networks, and establish only a hosted Wordpress/Google/Tumblr blog and a Bandcamp page.  (That’s the short version. I explain in more detail here.)

You can also consider this same question from a consumer perspective: is the average hip hop fan overwhelmed and burned out by the sheer number of new artists and releases? This is something I talked about in Year of the Glut-and Refe from Creative Deconstruction has a good thinkpiece about the Paradox of Choice.

5. Who’s going to jump on the next 10,000 MTV’s?

From a recent NPR report that jumped out at me like Natalie Portman:

“One commercial broadcaster in California has found an innovative use for his extra airwaves. Gary Cocola owns about 30 low- and full-power TV stations in California and Idaho. He’s decided to rent airtime on his new digital channels for $5,000 a month. So far, he’s had one taker: the Vietnamese Broadcasting Service, based in Southern California.

“One of the things that I’ve found is that there are many local people within the community that have never had the ability to have their own TV channel. I believe that’s really where the ideas have come from,” Cocola says, adding that he has other deals in the works.”

Yeah, $5000 is not cheap…but yeah, it sure is cheap for California. That’s Fish In A Barrel type population density, and equal footing with Murdoch.  Owning a TV station has great value beyond just advertising revenue. I think it’s also important to think about your long-term operation and how you will give back to your community once you’re in a position to do so.  Building up a real public television platform for education and communication seems like a valuable step to me, at least.

Now, I’m not trying to convince you that it’s time to get your money up and start doing a Ted Turner.  Don’t worry about all that noise.  The opportunity exists and thousands of men and women who really are as crazy as Ted are already getting to work right now.  Not all of these people are likable or honest, but all of them will need content to fill their stations with.

Normally, I’d close off by asking you folks what’s on your minds, but that’s too much noise for this project.  I’ve got 5 Big Questions I’ve been meaning to ask for a long time, and I’m curious what people have to say.  Let a mammal know.