Last week Aesop Rock's None Shall Pass was up five spots to #97, with a likely thanks to MTV for holding him down with "artist of the week" publicity. But it seemed that once the week was over, so was the buzz. Aesop dropped to #169 this week selling 4k (29k total).
WOW!
Shows how fucked up the game is...
Half the battle of moving units is getting people to know you exist. If MTV/BET had a diverse playlist more units would be sold.
Instead we get the same 10 terrible videos shoved down our throat. Same ten songs on the radio rotating. Record sales are down, because these outlets are only exposing the masses to bad cookie-cutter music. D4L blew up because of radio spins!
Capitalism thrives off of competition. Notice the golden era of Hip Hop coincided with a healthy dosage of smaller market labels. Loud, Rap-A-Lot etc, Death Row, Duck Down etc....
Since everything is under a few umbrellas.....Vivendi/def jam and Interscope are owned by the same parent company (Kanye vs. 50).... there's less competition and the quality of music is dwindling.
The cream of the crop can afford to be lazy. Under the current set up 50 cent, T.I. and Kanye are competing against the likes of Souljah Boy, Plies and Bow Wow, instead of Aesop Rock, Sean Price, Society of Invisibles, Royce Da 5'9", Brother Ali, Atmosphere or even Pharoahe Monch.
Imagine if Royce got spins like Plies...his worse record is a million times better than the anything Plies has ever imagined let alone recorded. Hell look at the career divergence of Royce and Eminem (essentially the same artist, yet one received airplay and the other didn't). It's been forgotten that MTV didn't want to play Eminems "My Name is Video" after only hearing an audio sample, until an intern at Interscope called them and told them he was white!
If you don't play a record or video for your audience how are they supposed to know it exists? In the case of Aesop, the audience was informed and they responded, imagined if MTV's plugging was sustained.
I'm sick of having to go to youtube to watch a Sean Price video. There's a reason why Jay-Z has been trying to sign dude for the longest.