A few years back, Jay-Z made a statement establishing his supremacy over the new breed of artist’s in the industry when he proclaimed:

Men Lie, Women Lie, Numbers Don’t.

At the time, it made sense for an artist in Jay’s position to use this axiom, as record sales were declining and being an artist with multi-platinum plaques on the wall- he was well aware that it would take his hip-hop peers a while to be able to flaunt their own numbers.

Fast forward to the present and there aren’t many people that want to boast about their record sales period. Even the artists that are consistently putting up above-average numbers typically aren’t moving the units they used to and have seen a decline in sales (with an occasional anomaly named Lil Wayne defying the odds).

As the hip-hop industry becomes more of a DIY business and less reliant upon major label financing, artist’s are still obsessed with numbers that will separate them from the pack. From digital stats to mixtapes sold, artists at all levels of the industry are competing for titles with no meaning, as there are generally very few ways of validating any of these numbers.

I’ll use a recent interview Juelz Santana did with SOHH as an example of how this can be problematic. In the interview, Santana claimed that the recent mixtape from his Skull Gang crew, The Takeover, had racked up over 750K downloads during it’s first week of release.

I really don’t want to blatantly call Juelz a liar, but my guess is that number was pulled out of thin air. For all I know he may have had 2 million downloads. The problem I have with the claim is that he doesn’t know.

The way hip-hop music moves on the internet is a brilliant entropy where re-postings and conversions are the name of the game and each site owner has their own method for distribution. Keeping a tally on total downloads basically becomes impossible, as zShare links go up as quickly as they come down and some file sharing sites don’t publicly disclose download stats.

This fabrication of numbers leads to an industry overwhelmed with fake hype and artificial buzz.

You wind up with 10,000 rappers who all bought the same MySpace play booster software and are trying to market themselves with bullshit numbers that mathematically don’t even make sense. If you’ve got 20 million song plays and only 1 million page views, that means on average, each page visitor is listening to those 4 tracks you’ve got posted- 20 times during a single visit. There’s no “well, maybe…” sort of thought going on when examining these numbers, just a quick “no way” and the artist instantly loses all credibility.

What most artists don’t understand is that the only people that care about these numbers are other artists. While I’ve made plenty of presentations using web statistics gathered for artists, it’s a very careful science that requires using sources with verifiable stats and avoiding the urge to hype anything that can’t be backed up through legitimate tracking.

Recently, I’ve put a lot of stock into Imeem, as they offer comprehensive media tracking along with the ability to install Google Analytic tracking on an artist’s profile. Imeem splits their ad revenue with the artist based on song streams, so it’s a pretty safe bet to assume their numbers won’t be inflated and with the addition of Google analytic tracking, one is able to prove they are legitimately getting song plays from users that actually exist.

For hip-hop artists these days trying to break in with a major label is a much simpler process then most make it. While I’m sure each label will be happy to hear about your 100K MySpace Friends and the 500K mixtapes you’ve moved “out the trunk”, you’d be better off just showing the execs your last ATM statement. The label’s aren’t concerned about how many mixtapes you claim to have moved, they’re worried about how much money you’ve made from the sales. Basically, the less you need the label- the more they’re going to want you.