Has the rise of the mixtape negatively impacted the quality of hip-hop albums?

now more than ever, we need EPs.

Quite right. There are lots of interesting relics around but that's all they'll be.

(xpost are you serious? most mixtapes are stuffed to the 75-minute brim even more than the average rap album now, and a lot of them are frontloaded and otherwise sequenced completely chaotically. granted, that's part of the appeal, but u still nuts)

are they really shorter? they're usually like 23 tracks long and i end up skipping through half of them.

and yeah al, i know it's kind of what we "do" (trying to boost local artists), but i always feel a weird twinge of sadness when these guys are so amped for getting signed and then it's like, "you do know you're gonna be in development hell for two years and your album has a very good chance of never, ever coming out, right?"

i've already unloaded most of my jewel cases! even my non-cd-r's are basically in case logics at this point.

Why do you think I've been selling off my collection bit by bit over the years? Anybody pack-ratting these days is nuts, and even the occasional indulgence at things like the Tower sale is just and only that, occasional and (luckily) paid for itself.

Haha okay that probably is what it is. The $2 CDs from Tower I got all sound much better to me than their $13-14 brethren.

There's this thing called 'downloading.'

actually I wish I knew a good all-purpose mixtape spot around here, I probably would buy the big name DJ Drama type stuff a lot more but I'm loathe to log onto mixunit or whatever and pay for shipping.

Me = nuts.

I hate case logics and I never sell anything back these days.

?!?! Okay, anything you haven't listened to in, say, two years or so? Why is it sitting around and if you're not going to miss it all that much, why not sell it back?

al check cdepot

Because I'm fickle haha.

(which cdepot? I go to the one on Loch Raven Blvd. all the time and they have a pretty wide selection of rap/go-go/club but I haven't noticed a whole lot of current mixtapes)

tru dat.

i guess i didn't mean for this to turn into yet another THE CD IS DEAD discussion, altho the points are well taken

i'm more interested in how the mixtape is affecting hip hop though...one thing that i think has made the mixtape more exciting for me than albums lately is the sort of "casual" vibe of it allows people to be okay with just saying "hey, man, that beat is awesome, i'm going to rhyme over that" and not be concerned with having an original beat..

in way, this might be like a super "old school" thing, like back to the old days when everyone rapped over the same bongo rock and billy squier beats and it didn't MATTER, that's kinda cool for me...

also, the "grey area" of legality in which mixtapes exist gives people the freedom to act like it's in the old days of sampling or just jacking a beat (pre biz markie lawsuit), which is cool

haha well a local club music DJ of some renown just dumped his entire collection of about 7,000+ LPs and 12"s at a local store, so there you go.

Isn't that the big reason behind the mixtape phenomenon to begin with? That record labels put people in limbo for years while they pretended to be finding just the right slot for them, just as soon as they finish promoting Jadakiss etc?

i don't really dig trolling blogs and stuff for MP3s. although last fm and pandora are handy.

As mentioned, though, Slocki, it paid for itself. I spent about $800 or so on it all, I think, and I made all that back through reviewing in a month. And it *very* much was the kind of obsessive record-store trawling I stopped doing years back -- I limit it now to the occasional trip to Amoeba and on visits elsewhere, like Seattle or SF, and almost always aim at spending as little as possible via store credit or flipping through clearance. What few CDs I purchase full price are almost always limited edition runs through something like, say, Time-Lag. I'm not saying I'm a perfect role model or anything, but I made a goal some time back to constantly reduce my collection, and even after all those purchases, it's still been shrinking as I go.

I don't really buy vinyl (I still haven't plugged in my turntable since I moved over a year ago) but I keep stumbling onto good finds anyway, like freebies from my friend who used to work in radio and getting a couple crates of old club and hip hop 12"s that another friend found in the basement of a house he bought on 28th St. I can't turn that shit down! that's a compulsion I'm actually kind of ashamed of as opposed to being unapologetic for my CD habit. so thanks for the tip. and maybe e-mail me who the actual DJ is who dumped all those records.

cdepot loch raven has drama mixtapes, don't know about others. maybe something around lexington market, inner city records or dimensions in music. plus there's that big flea market just south of the city on weekends

" On January 16 Police raided the downtown Atlanta offices of the Aphilliates Music Group, and arrested Tyree Simmons aka "DJ Drama" and Donald Cannon, also known as DJ Don Cannon. Police left the offices with 50,000 supposedly illegal CDs and took the 17 employees into custody for more questions."

http://www.hiphopgalaxy.com/DJ-Drama-accused-of-selling-illegal-CDs-hip-hop-4779.html

I still buy lots of albums, regret how they diminish my condo space, and am still wary of mp3's. Then again, I'm a Luddite who's bit by bit eliminating the number of albums he owns anyway.

http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/

This is an excerpt (he mentioned the RIAA earlier and their quest to protect what they consider their money)

"The RIAA had to move on someone making mixtape money. DJ Drama has become the first casualty of the new hip-hop distribution game.

It will be interesting to see in the coming months how the major labels try to move on:

1) the big mixtape distributors to either shut them down or cut a deal, and
2) their own artists to enforce the exclusivity and copyright clauses in their contracts...

Mixtapes won't die. But 2007 may be the year that the mixtape begins to really be absorbed into the machine, which may be a kind of a slower death."

-- acid waffle house (wt...), January 17th, 2007 4:44 PM.
i think its main reason to exist was to give a snapshot of what benzino was doing at the time.

same way xxl gives a snapshot of what aftermath is doing at the time

Also, I agree w/ A-ron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixtapes

Thread should be "Has the rise of blogger nerds and indie-rock fans finally listening to mixtapes after 30 years negatively impacted the quality of hip-hop albums?"

Answer: LOL

K. Sanneh weighs in on the DJ Drama arrest in the NY Times today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/arts/music/18dram.html?ref=arts

I'm just saying that in the mid 90s I already remember mixtapes being a pretty big deal among hip-hop heads - they were already a way for a new artist to gather steam and cred in the "street" before breaking big. I guess the difference is just that now the mixtapes can immediately and directly reach the mass audience that was only supposed to hear about the artist after the cred was gathered.

For example, Joe Budden is a bum. His first album was more or less garbage and if Def Jam ever release his second effort that'll end up mostly horrible/being butchered by him not being able to clear a bunch of songs but his two "mood musik" mixtapes are excellent, especially the 2nd.

i have all sorts of old clue mixtapes and shit. i had just pulled out an old DJ Absolute with some wierd old cam and chi-ali shit before he went to jail.

but back then they weren't overshadowing actual proper CDs like they do now...I mean arguably like Dedication 2 and We Got it 4 Cheap were "bigger deals" than the real CDs...that's a new thing.

I guess what I was trying to bring out is that back then it was sort of casual, like do the mixtape but save your "A game" for the record, now it almost feels like the better verses come out on the mixtapes instead BEFORE the record.

But i guess it makes sense since they prolly make a lot more per unit sold on the mixtape than the real album.

Has the rise of Belle And Sebastian fans putting Dedication 2 on their year end list negatively impacted the quality of hip-hop albums?

Plus, the artist makes NOTHING from a mixtape. The dude with the carpet on Canal Street makes money from a mixtape

?¿?

I'm not even sure this is true.

Not all that much more than it was 4 or 5 years ago. I think I'm just having a negative reaction to this thread because it's the second time I've heard the phrase "rise of the mixtape" about 2006 and really I just don't see it.

you're right about the Clipse but the Lil Wayne mixtape was very muhc considered the biggest thing to hit the mixtape community in the past year, on the internet and in whatever definition of "the streets" still exists that has nothing to do with the internet

i'd agree w/4 or 5 yrs, i didn't say in 2006, i was bringing up Nas in the orig. post, i think a lot's changed since back then...

(tho i like it too)

I'm not even sure this is true.

I mean maybe mixunit sends a couple bucks back, but when the chain of command goes:

Artist and DJ -> Bootlegger

How is that money going to get back to anyone?

I mean even the DJs who make them use them as "promo" items. DJ X makes mixtape with Artist Y. They give them to bootleggers and make nothing off them, but Artist Y gets street appeal and a record deal and DJ X gets asked to DJ the X-Games for $40,000

Indie rock bands should figure out how to do this before the internet destroys them all.

Posted by Brother on Thursday, January 18, 2007 at 10:28 AM

UH
wonder what this dude thinks of dj dramas ma then