ATG sizes it all up.
You could feel it coming, really. These days there's hardly a record industry meme more played than "NO MORE RECORD INDUSTRY!!!" The music biz as a whole is in crisis like the rest of us, hanging on by a thread and trying to remake itself even as its million quivering components are pushed and pulled through a million tubes. Yet despite a widely-expected imminent death for music purveyors, most of the major players have kept on kicking.
In terms of ushering in the new age, traditional Slayers of the Old Guard, i.e. Radiohead and Steve Jobs, have offered little more than premature experimentation, feigning attempts to break the dominance of label-backed CDs (In Rainbows and the MacBook Air respectively) before giving into the lure of old-fashioned shiny discs.
Hip-hop is different, though. When it comes to trends, industry-related and not, the genre has always been a leading indicator. And now, in 2009, hip-hop has found itself as the canary in the mine shaft - the first sector of the industry to fully succumb to the brave new era. Excluding freaks of nature like Lil Wayne, Kanye West and Jay-Z, it's safe to say that 90 percent of hip-hop albums released today are teetering on the brink of zero value, worth neither the plastic on which they're printed nor the gas, time and energy required to procure them. The final nail in the proverbial coffin, it seems, has come from none other than the album's lighter, more nimble, more immediately gratifying cousin. Blame it on the mixtape...
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