Trends: Hip Hop and Marijuana

Adapting to a trend to stay relevant is what some hip-hop artist does now days.  To find something that works for you is key.   This can sometimes cause a lot of tension between fans and an artist.  Especially when a certain audience is use to a certain style and sound from an artist.  For instance, hip-hop artist Lil Wayne tells his reasoning on why he decided to switch trends while also being able to keep some of his dedicated fan base.

Piracy

Piracy is one thing that managers of artists are really concerned about.  Most of this happens over the internet; the medium that helps build a fan base, but also helps break the pockets of management teams and record labels. “Music piracy has become an important issue since the turn of the century.  As the Internet has grown, sales of counterfeit CDs through online auctions, web sites, spam, and other channels have increased significantly (Bocij, 2006, p. 5).”  The Mp3 format plays a big role in this being that the format can distribute files easily because it’s compressed.  This allows songs, and even whole albums to be downloaded all in a matter of a few minutes.  Being that the Internet has grown tremendously, software can be pirated in more and easier ways. 

            “Music must be set at a level that will recover the initial cost development, fund further development, and allow research into new products.  Once the company’s investment has been recovered, the price can be lowered a little (Bocij, 2006, p. 148).”  But because of piracy, the artist, the management, and the label the artist may be under loses money from sells of the music.  “This jeopardizes any further development of the program and obstructs the introduction of new products (Bocij, 2006, p. 148).”  With piracy going on, it produces a cycle that drives the prices of the music up, in some cases.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that since the price of the project has been driven that the artist and his/her employees get to see that money.  It’s an even bigger risk to take, banking on new generated sells from the project, and the decrease of piracy.

            Dealing with management – artist relationship and piracy, is a big deal.  If the artist makes no money then the manager makes no money.  Michael “Blue” Williams said it best in his interview with vibe.com “there’s people out there writing checks, and there’s people out there finding checks, and I’m the one who finds them (Williams, 2006).”  With the field of artist management, finding money is a huge task, especially if piracy affects album sales.   

Licensing

There are thousands of quotes lingering around created by great inventors, theorist and even ordinary people that mention the love of money. Taking the time out to intensively look for a quote that would best represent money and the music/entertainment industry was very easy, although not one suited the issue of royalties very well. Artists share many things in common amongst one another the greatest of these is money, some who have earned more than others.