March 2009 - FREE PRODUCERS Getting Great Bass - Pg. 8 FEATURES Kas Da God Pg. 2 Flauce Pg. 2 Truth Speaks Pg. 4 Front Page Entertainment Pg. 4 Brought to you by Makin’ It Magazine - www.MakinItMag.com
CHARITY CASE ARTISTS Artists Corner Written by J. Johnson They’re practically everywhere. Your Myspace page gets tons of messages and friend requests from them. Facebook has an unconceivable amount of groups created by them. Who am I talking about? Artists that market themselves like charities. I know you, just as I, get friend requests with messages like this: “This ya boy so-and-so. Come support me and check out my music. Leave a comment and tell me what you think.” Charities and non-profit organizations are the only businesses that I can think of offhand that are successful in marketing themselves in this manner. Continue to market your music like this and you’ll soon be
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a non-profit business for sure. On the other hand, music marketing doesn’t work that way- well, not the successful marketing plans, anyway. Promoting your music like the aforementioned example is a mistake for several reasons. Let’s discuss why that is so. First, the very word “support” shouldn’t be associated with you or your music. Asking people to support creates the perception that they’re doing you a favor if they agree. If your music is as good as you say it is, listening to it shouldn’t be a favor- it should be a privilege. The best way to receive is to first
give. With everyone and their pet goldfish claiming to be a rapper nowadays, why would anyone give you their time by listening to your music? What incentive can you offer to make it worth their while? In reality, the supply and demand of music is favors the supply end so much that even making your music available for free doesn’t work as well anymore. Why? There’s so much garbage music out there that people aren’t willing to waste the finger strength needed to click on your link just to risk getting a garbage track. Continued on Page 6
HOW G.D.S. IS DESTROYING RAP Written by The Honorable DJ Judgemental
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m going through a stack of nearly 100 CDs handed to me at an industry networking event. After listening to about 20 of them, I’m angry about the amount of crap I’ve been handed. Besides the fact that that of 20 songs from 20 different artists all had the same subject matter (money, cars, hoes, drugs), my biggest upset was the quality of the recordings. Behind me is a wall of records from various artists ranging from the 70’s to early 2000. Of those records, I guarantee that none of them sound acoustically as bad as any of the ones that I am subjected to listening to today. What do I mean by acoustically
bad? At some point the records behind me were (a) recorded in a studio with quality equipment, (b) mixed by someone with mixing experiences, (c) tweaked by an engineer, and (d) mastered by a professional. The songs that I am critiquing now sound as if they were recorded on the cheapest microphones with no signs of an audio professional assisting with the mix down, engineering, or mastering. Yet somehow, these artists have created music, pressed it and are distributing it to the masses. While technology has done much for the music industry, I’m disappointed that nobody has told artists that it’s not a good Idea to record and distribute music to
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the masses without anyone else’s opinion. Sure you can debate me with a “YouTube/Soulja Boy” story, but even then there was no commercial success until someone stepped in to make the song sound better than it did when he recorded it himself (believe me, I heard the distorted original.) Then again maybe these CDs are just DEMOs? A demo being the best possible recording that a struggling artist could produce in order to give to a label executive that might possibly sign them. If this is the case then I won’t complain about the crappy recording but don’t expect major label treat Continued on Page 6 The Atlanta Grind - March 2009 | Pg. 1