Befuddled baby boomers make inmates out of innovators
CROSS-PROMOTIONAL campaigns, product placement , and "guerrilla advertising" have blurred the lines between art and commerce for some years now. But at the moment, those lines are taking the shape of jail bars, and four men facing them have become the victims of a culture in flux.
In Boston recently, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested over what has been inaccurately labeled a terrorism hoax -- but was actually a marketing campaign gone awry. Their case presents an unsettling parallel with another crackdown by authorities; the arrests in Atlanta last month of DJ Drama and Don Cannon , two of the foremost figures in the mixtape game today. In both cases, confusion among boomer-age officials about evolving forms of marketing has thrown enterprising young people into the criminal justice system.
The mixtape moguls, accused of violating racketeering laws, landed in their current predicament after a raid by local authorities assisted by the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's top trade group. Having staked its claim against file-sharing in recent years by suing 12-year-olds and deceased grandmothers, the association has set its sights on mixtapes, a medium the industry views as a source of revenue diversion.
Mixtapes (originally cassettes, now compact discs) are a medium essentially unique to the hip-hop genre. They are generally released with the blessings of the artists they feature, who recognize mixtapes' value as promotional tools -- and they've traditionally been ignored by those artists' record labels. The popularity of mixtapes stems from their price (as little as $10 for as many as three or four discs) as well as their content: tracks unavailable on regular albums, for example, or songs by one rapper over a beat made popular by another.
Since most mixtapes contain, at best, a smattering of singles and album tracks, they have a negligible effect on album sales. Like live concert bootlegs they can serve as a powerful promotional tool; fans of an artist will readily buy the legitimate album as well as the additional gray-market material.
The chart-topping rappers Juelz Santana, Lil' Flip, and 50 Cent, for example, owe their careers largely to early and continuing mixtape promotion, and DJ Drama and Don Cannon's "Gangsta Grillz " series in particular has been wildly popular; not only among hip-hop fans, but also with artists tapped for the honor of hosting their own Gangsta Grillz installment. In fact, far from being "bootlegged," having a mixtape with the prestige and distribution of a Gangsta Grillz under one's belt is an achievement toward which most independent and major-label rappers aspire, even if they might not share directly in its profits.
Furthermore, although the mixtape industry operates in the heart of the youth market, it manages to foster a pattern of behavior that is facing extinction: handing over hard cash to a vendor, and receiving in return an actual compact disc. And yet, despite these so-called racketeers' propagation of this endangered mode of transaction, the record industry association has cried foul anyway. This, after more than a decade of conveniently ignoring mixtapes' existence, while benefiting from the street-level promotion they provide (and the street-cred they provide labels' artists).
This isn't the first time the association or its members have let dollar signs cloud their vision. They initially resisted Apple's innovation of iTunes, an online store where consumers could willingly pay for files that were readily available elsewhere on the Web for free. But when the digital music store it had so vigorously opposed turned out to succeed beyond expectations, the association was ready, in late 2005, to rattle its saber and demand that Apple double the standard per-song rate. (Apple's Steve Jobs stood his ground, squashing the record industry's ill-advised beef. It's also worth mentioning that many of DJ Drama and Don Cannon's Gangsta Grillz mixtapes are currently still available in digital form on iTunes. How gray is this market, exactly?)
The mixtape kings have more in common with the perpetrators of Boston's non terror non hoax than many people realize. All four have been hassled by the Man for crimes of entertainment and promotion that the kids understand but the suits just don't dig. Rather than take DJ Drama and Don Cannon to court, the association should ask all four of these gentlemen to teach them a course on staying in business in a changing world. Andrew Graham is a Boston-based music writer. 
