To the Department of Justice, et al:

During the past few days you have shut down three prominent hip-hop sites: OnSmash.com, DaJaz1.com and RapGodfathers.com. I expect that by the time this letter is finished there will be more domains seized. Why are you shutting down our hip-hop sites? As a principle to an internationally distributed record label, I’m curious as to why we have been stripped of the power to enforce our own copyrights.

The users that frequent these sites are vital to the existence of hip-hop music. The communities that are formed within these sites listen to the music we distribute, leave feedback and debate with one another about the quality of our products. These sites effectively serve as the customer service department to the record industry. If I put out a bad record, I want to know how to improve the sound. If the reception is overwhelmingly positive, then I’m encouraged to put more money behind the record to increase its exposure.

With your efforts to curb piracy, you are costing us money by tampering with the ecosystem in which we aggregate our content to the masses. These sites do not operate under the radar. We are all aware of their existence and the placement of content on these sites is an integral part of our marketing campaigns. By cutting off our online communities you are not by any means heightening our expectations for sales. If we thought these sites were detrimental to our financial well being, we would have filed complaints against them a long time ago.

After reviewing the list of sites your organizations recently targeted, I noticed that these hip-hop sites were grouped in with sites that were selling counterfeit goods. I fail to see the correlation between a knock-off pair of Timberland boots and a sound recording that has been created and financed by an artist or label. A common phrase I hear in the music business is “Piracy equals theft.” Sure it does. But first you must truly define piracy. When the creators and owners of original content are encouraging these sites to post their media, who is guilty of piracy?

These moves are especially detrimental to independent musicians. With these actions you are cutting off the avenues to success for thousands of musicians in order for you to satisfy the wishes of four companies (Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner). The fact that these four companies have this much power over a government agency is the root of the problem in the first place. They limit competition by monopolizing radio airwaves and are now trying to do the same thing with the Internet. These hip-hop sites level the playing field for independent artists by giving them a high-traffic platform to gain exposure for their work.

Needless to say these four companies have tried to do this before and it didn’t work. To paraphrase a scene from the movie, The Social Network, the record labels may have succeeded in shutting down Napster, but after the smoke cleared nobody was itching to invest in a Tower Records franchise. The Napster shut down did not curtail file-sharing. It just made users scatter to other locations in order to discover and share new music. We will see the same effect if this current trend continues and this will be incredibly detrimental to the promotional efforts of artists in the hip-hop community.

Your recent actions do more harm than good. I am asking that you take a moment to listen to those of us who actually earn a living by working in the hip-hop industry before taking further drastic measures. As I wrote in an article nearly two years ago (see The Hip-Hop Stimulus Plan Part II), I believe the people operating these hip-hop sites are an invaluable resource to our industry and we should be paying them for their work rather than tyrannizing them.

We are in the process of rebuilding a struggling industry and the unwanted intrusion of the Justice Department into our online channels will only make our industry suffer longer. For the music industry to rebound we must embrace technology and learn how to remain profitable as innovation continues. Government intrusion creates a divide between providers of content and those who operate the sites distributing it, and it breeds distrust between the labels and site owners. This government action will inadvertently increase piracy as record labels become the enemy to site owners. The Department of Justice has crossed the line with this attack on the hip-hop community and this is unacceptable. It is not the job of a government agency to enforce copyrights owned by private entities and these actions interfere with the operation of our businesses. Do not strip us of our rights by bullying people that are vital to our prosperity. We are capable of handling copyright infringement claims through the proper legal channels and will certainly do so when we deem it necessary.

Sincerely,

Stu Pflaum
Element 9 Muzik LLC

One of my favorite sites to browse on Bloglines is called Passive Aggressive Notes. People send in various notes, which have usually been posted by co-workers, janitors or really anyone who actually believes putting up a list of instructions for people will be effective in solving their grievances. Obviously, these notes seem to provide more entertainment than produce actual results.

Today, I was fortunate to receive my own passive aggressive note from my new neighbor, who decided to skip the formal introductions and get right to complaining (of course when I wasn’t home to catch him putting the thing on my door).

The text may be hard to read because of my limited display space on the blog, so I’ll go ahead and provide dictation for my loyal reader(s).

Hey neighbor, this is the dude that lives below you in XXXX. Can you do me a favor and try not to walk so heavy/loud on the floors?

The ceilings are really thin, and whenever you walk into your kitchen, it literally shakes everything in my kitchen cabinets. I guess, if you tried to not walk on your heals (sic) so much, most people don’t even realize they’re doing it, but it carries right through the floors.

Especially at early morning <9AM or late night 10PM-2AM it’s really crucial.

Thanks.

-Danny

This request is absolutely hilarious to me. As someone working in the music business and living in an apartment complex, I generally expect to piss off my neighbors, but usually because of the noise constantly coming from the unhealthy amount of speakers I keep around.

Walking too loud? I don’t even know how to reply. I’m thinking about sending a note back asking for a demonstration on softening my step (which would be video taped and posted here on Xplosive World), as Danny is obviously an expert. Maybe I’ll just nip this in the bud now and just let him know that I’ve only been in the new place for 4 days and simply state: Things are going to get much worse and suggest he look into relocating.

Whatever happens, I promise it will be extremely entertaining for everyone (except poor Danny with the thin ceilings).

Dear Mr.Griffin,

In December, I learned about the efforts of your company, Choruss, to offer blanket licenses to colleges and universities as part of an experimental program involving a surcharge on users who share files. This surcharge would be monitored and paid by the users’ internet service provider (ISP). After reviewing your company’s strategy and reading about how you plan to launch this file sharing program, I concluded that your scheme is more an attempt to pick the pockets of America’s college students than a viable solution to the inherent compensation problem that it seeks to alleviate (see Record Labels Hungry for Students’ Tutition Dollars).

Press coverage of your company’s license program cooled down for a while, that is until you recently addressed the Digital Music Forum East to answer some of the questions that had been raised about your ISP experiment. You started your address by describing the grim reality of the current music industry. I noticed you referred to the current industry as “a tip jar,” a cliche at this point, but you needed to get your point across. You needed to demonstrate how low the music industry has gone. You needed to get people worried.

I can definitely relate to your message and have recently written a series of articles that are intended to stir public interest in the problems facing the music industry. The difference between you and me, however, lies in our motivations. I want the public to encourage the record labels to embrace technology and change their business models. You, on the other hand, want to create panic that will stress a sense of urgency to your proposed partners. You want these partners to stress this same sense of urgency to those who will take part in your experiment. To that end, you have found in the administrators of colleges and universities partners who are apparently just as morally bankrupt and predatory as the record industry you represent.

During your address you responded directly to a criticism from Billboard that read: “To understand what’s wrong with this model, use your imagination”, your response was:

Let’s be clear at the outset: Choruss is a learning experiment, a test. The universities with whom we are working have two motivations: They want to do the right thing, and they are interested in research in this area. Research into incentives, behavior, network analysis, music marketing and more. We are working with professors and chancellors and provosts, university attorneys, IT departments and their public policy advocates.

We are learning about network music fee approaches, and so we will seek to implement different approaches at different campus networks. We do not pretend to know the answers, but we are certain that now is the time for experimentation and learning cannot come fast enough. The colleges have been asking to do this for years, and some, like Penn State, have been doing something similar for years, so it’s time we met them halfway.

Now allow me to quote from my original criticism of the Chrouss plan:

It should not be the responsibility of students to keep record labels afloat while they tinker with different ideas to make them profitable again.

Mr.Griffin, it seems apparent that you are not in a position to make the claim that by implementing this experimental program on any college campus it would do anything more than steal money from America’s college students, who are in no position to fund such a poor experiment. Furthermore, a system that establishes colleges and universities as collection agencies for record labels is not only a flawed business model for the music industry, but also raises serious questions about the priorities of the people running our institutions of higher learning.

Rather than continue to attack your business plan, I’m drawing a line in the sand. If you and your associates continue to push the Choruss service on campus, I will use the power of my blog to organize students to oppose your service at each and every school that you are able to bamboozle. I will educate student groups about why your plan will fail and will help them organize efforts to openly oppose Choruss on their campuses.

I’m not far removed from college myself and if there’s one thing I know has not changed it is this: college students love to fight for a cause. I think the idea of Choruss pillaging their tuition dollars will be a cause many would love to fight. Students will boycott all major labels that stand to profit from Chrouss, starting with your employer, Warner Music Group (lucky break for Universal for not supporting Chorrus). Your “experiment” will potentially suck more money out of the record industry than it will ever gain, particularly if litigation arises.

Somebody has to take a stand on the predatory nature of your plan to stick college students with the bill for a failed industry. Since I have a stake in the future of the music business, I am willing to take this on. This may seem like a David and Goliath fight, but this is the age of the internet where one voice properly directed can have an enormous reach. And while your intention, Mr. Griffin, is to diminish the role of the internet, I, on the other hand, understand there are no limits to the how the internet can be used. My best work is in online marketing campaigns and I will run one of my best to stop your pillaging of students.

I would like to invite you to review some of my writings on the music industry or even contact me directly if you truly intend to help correct the industry problems that you have outlined. My writings look at other potential business models for fixing a broken music industry, models that actually might work. I can assist you or I can oppose you, but I can’t allow you to use college students as lab rats in your senseless experiment.

Sincerely,

DJ Xplosive

Re-post the image below anywhere voters will find it!!!

My buddy and A&R extraordinaire, Corey (CPR), just launched a hot new site called BeatsAndBombs, that’s quickly generating buzz because of their honest commentary and unique features.  Personally, I’m proud to see an A&R really get active with anything online (besides dating).

This week the BeatsAndBombs crew put together a list of the 9 Crimes White People Have Committed Against Hip-Hop which pretty much speaks for itself and definitely places them as front-runners to be the curators of the Caucasian Rap Hall of Fame, should someone ever decide to build one.

It wouldn’t be right to talk about white people and hip-hop without mention of one of VH1′s (many) efforts to bring hip-hop culture to an all-time low when they introduced the White Rapper Show last year.

The show did deliver 15 minutes of fame to one white rapper, John Brown, who became the butt of many jokes within the hip-hop community due to his creative, but not in a hip-hop sort of way, vocabulary.

Since the show ended, things have been mostly quiet in John Brown’s neck of whatever suburb he claimed and thus far, he has been unable to channel his gimmicky style into a viable career in hip-hop.

Thanks to BeatsAndBombs, we now know what the King of the Burbs is doing to keep busy these days. John Brown is policing blog sites in order to preserve the esteemed value of the John Brown brand and making sure everyone knows he’s just as dangerous with a keyboard, as he is with a mic in his hand. The rapper had a message for “passive aggressive blog-snobs” and made it clear he’s ready to “holler at your father” in an angry response emailed, then published on BeatsAndBombs (link to full letter).

Just because I love e-thuggin’, online beefs and other instances of internet drama, I wanted to have a hypothetical conversation with John Brown about his displeasure with his inclusion on the 9 Crimes list. So here’s how the conversation would have played out, had Da Burb King reached out to Xplosive World:

John Brown: What’s pimpulatin lil homie??

Xplosive World: Hold on. *Googles the word pimpulatin to no avail* Um, what isn’t pimpulatin? Homie?

JB: So you’re another one of these passive aggressive blog-snobs who feels all uncomfortable and tingly inside when you see some revivalists letting their nuts hang, huh?

XW: Yes. I’m very uncomfortable with revivalists letting their nuts hang around me.

JB: Poor guy.

XW: I suppose…

JB: You’re one of those repressed “real hip-hop heads” that play the wall at a show then talk shit on your corny “online community”.

XW: Are we talking about your shows? No. I didn’t watch you on TV. Do you actually do live shows?

JB: Fuckin geek.

XW: Okay. Enough small talk. What’s pimpulatin?

JB: I’m hitting you up because I wanted to thank you for posting our glorious “PIMP MODE” video!

XW: Pimp Mode? Really? Please, go on.

JB: It broke 800,000 views awhile back on worldstarhiphop.com.

XW: Impressive. How was the feedback? Just kidding- I can do the math;

You + Pimp + Mode=

JB: But, to your credit, you caught up and posted it, giving us another 5,000 hits!!

XW: Wow! You should definitely rest assured your Soundscan numbers will mirror the success of the Pimp Mode video.

JB: Oh man, I love the hate!!

XW: That’s a little weird.

JB: So next time you see me, holler at your father.

XW: Who are the people that actually encourage the use of a saying like holler at your father? I think I speak for a majority of the human race when I say; when we read something like that- it triggers some strange reflex with an uncontrollable urge to shake our head accompanied by an “are you fucking serious?” expression on our faces.  I’m not a violent guy, but if I were ever in the presence of someone who, in even mild seriousness, used the expression “holler at your father”, I’d have no choice but to do whatever had to be done to ensure those words were never spoken again.

JB: I won’t smack you, I promise.

XW: Why was I going to holler at my father again? Forget it. We should probably wrap things up- this conversation can’t possibly get worse.

JB: Stay revived!

XW: You are good. Wow, you are good.