Welcome to overrated/underrated folks, where each week I will rant on one overrated thing and one underrated thing. This is pretty straight forward, no pretense here. So let’s just get right into it, beginning with this week’s topic, mixtapes versus albums.
OVERRATED: MIXTAPES
I love free music. Wait, let me correct that. I love free anything, and free music is especially nice. The best thing to come out of the Internet besides Google, free music, folks. But with all this free music consumers (or should we call them leechers instead?) have been consuming over the past year, an awkward dynamic between an artist and their fans has reared its ugly head. Today we are living in the age of the event mixtape.
Jay-Z once said to somebody (I can’t remember who, I think it was Angie Martinez) that what hip-hop needs is event records; the albums every year and the hype surrounding those albums because it was not only good for the culture, it was good for the music industry. This was said sometime around the time Kanye West and 50 Cent were having their record sale feud. And I understood exactly what Jay was talking about.
But now we see artists giving that same kind of energy and trying to build the same kind of hype around a project that is especially free. They leak to the Internet blogs, a couple of gems, some album cover art, the tracklisting, and nowadays, even a YouTube trailer. All the while it seems none of these artists realize if they’re giving away the project for free, we really don’t need all the bells and whistles of a marketing campaign. I mean, it is free isn’t it? Yeah? Well then that’s all you have to tell me.
NEXT PAGE: MORE OVERRATED AND THE UNDERRATED RESPONSE
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Remember rappers (and R&B singers who are also getting in on the mixtape action) all that promotional work I just mentioned is usually reserved for artists who are trying to convince consumers to actually spend money on an album. All an artist trying to push a mixtape needs to do is tell us it’s free and provide a streamable player so we can listen for ourselves and determine if it’s worth handing over our hard drive space, but outside of that, there is no need to push that which is free.
And to that point, there is no need to put blood, sweat, and tears into a project no one has to buy anyway. Especially if you’re an artist who is signed. For unsigned artists, a free mixtape is a demo, so I understand if the artists who is still establishing themselves wants to make their presence felt and prove themselves worthy of the listeners attention. But artists who are already signed, why so serious about the mixtape? Shouldn’t you be saving that for what has become an underrated thing in the music industry…the album…
UNDERRATED: THE ALBUM
No disrespect to the artist whose album cover is pictured above. I personally think Thank Me Later is a dope album and I was impressed it at least came close to the very free mixtape he released months earlier, So Far Gone. But Drake’s consistency is a rare thing we see in the music industry.
The Internet, not the record labels, are the new machine controlling all this music we’re getting nowadays, which is why mixtapes have flooded the market to the extent that they have. But if the music industry would like maintain its relevancy, they’ll learn to control how much their artists expose themselves throughout the world wide web. Lock these artists in a studio where there’s no wi-fi and te
