Media Wonk

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Weekend reading - December 15, 2007

The New York Times has an interesting piece in Saturday's Arts section about the major record companies uneasy embrace of the mixtapes, the largely underground, mash-up phenomenon that has provided crucial early exposure for now platinum selling hip hop acts like 50 Cent and Lil Wayne. The piece focuses on DJ Drama, one of the most popular mix-masters working today, who, while awaiting trial on racketeering charges related to his mixtape activity, produced Gangsta Grillz: The Album for Universal Music which has sold over 49,000 copies and cracked the top 40 on Billboard's charts.

GG: The Album is unusual in the world of hip-hop mixtapes (which are rarely tapes anymore) in that all of the music used in the compilation was licensed. In most cases, mixtapes consist of snippets or partial tracks taken from other copyright works, bits of unreleased tracks and original rhymes provided by the DJ. They're sold on the street, over the Internet, via download and as podcasts, usually for somewhere in the range of $5 to $9.

Other major-label efforts at licensed mixtapes have not fared as well as Gangsta Grillz. Universal released a three-CD series under the brand Lethal Squad, featuring lesser-known DJs without Drama's following, which bombed, selling a combined 20,000 units, according to the Times.

Since DJ Drama's arrest, however, even the unlicensed mixtape business has gone into decline. The Times quotes Clinton Sparks, the DJ behind the popular mixtape Web site, mixunit.com, saying he and others have shifted their focus away from the compilations toward more t-shirts and other merchandise out of fear that the record companies will come after them as well. "We don't want them to now look at us as we're stealing from the them," Sparks said, noting that many top artists nonetheless solicit popular DJs to include their new material on mixtapes because it helps to build buzz.

As a result, DJ Drama claims, sales of rap music CDs have suffered an even deeper plunge in the past year than the rest of the industry, 20% compared to 15% industry wide. "Ain't no coincidence," he told the Times. "Look at the last four or five years of hip-hop , and those who've really built names for themselves in the game, the majority of it comes from mixtapes, period."

Interestingly enough, the record companies' apparent efforts to crack down on the unlicensed mixtape business and claim it for themselves comes just as Congress has taken up consideration of a far-reaching new intellectual property bill. One of the more notable provisions in the bill--not part of the original drafters' design but which the record companies managed to get inserted at the last minute--would greatly increase the penalties for infringing compilations. Instead of treating a compilation CD as a single infringing item, the bill would treat each track on the CD as an individually infringed work, subject to an independent assessment of damages in a trial.

Instead of a single act of infringement, carrying a maximum fine of $150,000, a mixtape featuring samples from 10 tracks could be subject to $1.5 million in fines.

Perhaps it's a stretch to suggest that the record companies' two strategies are related: a coordinated effort to bolster their legal arsenal for going after freelancing DJs selling mixtapes to clear the field for their own compilations. But it's not much of a stretch to suggest they could (once again) end up blasting themselves in the foot by shutting down one of their most effective promotional outlets simply because it happens to be unlicensed.

There's also, of course, the public policy question of whether we shouldn't want to encourage the sort of vibrant, participatory cultural activity represented by mixtapes, but that's a subject for another post.

The Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal reports that Intel has given up on Viiv, its two-year old attempt to establish a brand around living-room connectivity that nobody outside the company could understand (and I wonder about those inside). The Viiv label will now only be used for entertainment PCs that use Intel's dual-core chips, which will be labeled "Intel Core 2 with Viiv technology." Whatever that means.

Intel's next big branding effort: MIDs, which stands for mobile Internet devices, a new class of portable device Intel is hoping to create that would be bigger than a cell phone and offer a wireless broadband experience comparable to what you get with a desktop PC. The roll out will begin at CES in January.




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