Broken Language: Innanets Rappers

Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Craig. I’m a smart ass. Broken Language will be the place for me to vent my various snarky observations about the state of rap or whatever other genre of music that strikes my fancy. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you don’t. That’s what the comment section is for. Don’t be a stranger. Anyways, three things happened in the past few weeks that made me hate rappers: (hit the skip to continue)

1. I went to a certain Cali rapper’s website to get his free album. A third of the links I found there were dead. Another third were zShare links. Net aficionados know that zShare is like the Rhode Island of file sharing services. You only go there if you have to. Seriously, though, zShare doesn’t work for everyone for whatever reason. Rather than re-up his links, the artist suggested that “Datpiff should have it.” I eventually ended up having to pirate FREE albums. Think about that.
2. I had to personally retag a steaming shitload of mp3s because the artists did not do it correctly. This took about five minutes per album. Thankfully one of them actually came with a picture of the back cover. So I didn’t have to troll the net for track lists quite as much.
3. Lil Kim sold her Nicki Minaj-slandering Black Friday mixtape for $10. No digital copies. All snail mail everything. She also cooked sales numbers and YouTube page views by at least tenfold in interviews, not knowing that these are numbers that can be (and to her detriment, were) very easily researched.

For a sector that seems to conduct much of its business online, a lot of the hip hop industry is behind the times. The technology is available for starving artists to make some serious waves online. Plenty of rappers have parlayed their internet savvy into lucrative careers. Plenty of inquisitive people troll the net day in and day out looking for new music. But there’s a good group of rappers out there are not properly advancing their brands online. A lot of these cats aren’t where they should be because their net game is lacking. Here are some deadly obvious and totally avoidable pitfalls that ensnare up and coming rappers by the dozen.

Mp3 maintenance
After I download music, I should have zero work to do outside of dragging, dropping, and playing. Downloading music to find jacked up bitrates and janky tagging is a drag. I’ll be the first to admit that, yes, I have put off listening to and occasionally deleted music because I didn’t feel like fixing the tags. No, I am not the only person who has done this. No it does not make me some kind of snob. Deleting shit is just as free as downloading it. Everyone has better things to do with their time than fixing files. Make ease of access a priority.

Press releases
An artist’s press release will often contain the very first impression that a potential listener is to get of them. The more problematic the press release is, the less the artist will grab attention. Ignorant typo-filled, all-caps shoutfests are a bad look. “PEEP MY NEW JAWN!” is getting your email blast trashed. Conversely speaking, reaching, hyperbolic prose doesn’t help either. If a press release says a rapper sounds like a “Reasonable Doubt era Jay-Z,” and the shit ain’t got no “Can I Live?” on it, or at least a “Feelin’ It”, the album is an automatic disappointment. Setting the bar too high before we ever hear the music is setting us up to be more critical and negative about the listening experience. Keep the copy professional, clean, engaging, and above all things, honest. While I’m at it, you don’t need to go cataloging what all publications have posted your tracks. This isn’t a resume. Writers DESPISE when you do that.

Twitter accesibility
When it comes to Twitter, a lot of rappers abide by the philosophy that retweets equal love. For some people, that’s true. But for every person that you please by retweeting their statement of support or fandom, you stand to annoy hundreds, if not thousands. There is nothing worse than an RT machine. You are not a bot. I guaran-damn-tee you that fans care more about what you think and what goes on in your day-to-day life than they do that you endeavored to click the circular arrow button. Guaran-fucking -tee. Be aware that there is a magic number of times you can advertise your new project per hour where some of your audience will swear a blood oath never to listen to it because you annoyed them so much.

File sharing
If folks have to download your entire project before they can hear a track, realize that you’re turning off a large portion of your potential audience. If you’re on the come up, and people may not have heard you before, let them preview tracks. You don’t buy clothes sight unseen, and in this day and age, folks don’t download music sound unheard, even if it’s free. It seems silly that people should be so discerning about downloading especially if the project isn’t costing them any money or all that much hard drive space, but such is the way of the world in 2011. We need to know what we’re getting. Help us help you.

Availability of music
The most important aspect of maintaining a net presence as a rapper is surely the availability of the music. That’s what it’s all about in the first place. If folks can’t get to your music, you’re kaput. If you post music and don’t regularly check up on the life of the links, you’re a prizefighter with a fist tied behind your back. If you do keep up with your links, but you keep them up on wonky, outdated services like zShare, Sendspace, etc., you are shooting yourself in the foot. Dead or wacky links are the digital equivalent of out of print records. Keep your work in circulation.

Rappers, don’t shoot yourself in the foot before you get out of the gate. It’s hard enough to get your music heard as it is, what with the finicky tastes of the listening public and the hundreds of thousands of other people trying to make it MCing. Don’t impede your own progress by allowing elements outside of the music to hold you back.