Born In '88

The clock struck midnight and J. Cole’s blog, Dream Villain, went down. The influx of Cole fans has the website bandwidth acting up so there is no download in sight for Friday Night Lights. It is now 12:30 a.m., still no tape. Sound familiar?

An unofficial case study.

Fans, bloggers and journalists alike waited in anticipation of the self-proclaimed, and rightfully so, face of the #DMV to drop his mixtape, More About Nothing at noon Aug. 3. Considering the distribution and sales issues Wale experienced with the release of his album Attention Deficit, as he notes on the mixtape, he had a lot to prove. We shared his video teasers, downloaded his track leaks and used his hashtag profusely but on the day of the release, the tape was met with many delays and a few missed opportunities. Below is my top five:

1. It was late. When the clock struck 12, the tape was nowhere to be found. I can only imagine the amount of page views Rap Radar garnered as fans burned a hole through the refresh button.

• Quick Fix: Use Wordpress’ handy scheduling capabilities to have a completed post on Wale’s mixtape in queue. Test your link; work out the kinks in advance. While Rap Radar is not officially quantified by Quantcast, NahRight, a similar and more popular blog, is and despite its popularity, a majority of its visitors are categorized as “passers by.” You can expect a Wale and/or Rap Radar stan to hit refresh for 10 minutes, a casual listener or passer by, not so much.

2. The link broke. Wale made an agreement to release the mixtape via Elliott Wilson’s (former EIC of XXL) music blog, Rap Radar—presumably it had something to do with Wale’s scheduled performance at the Highline Ballroom yesterday, an event sponsored by the site. RR published a post on the mixtape with a link for download about 10 minutes past the hour but to Wilson’s chargin, the link was broken. It’s likely that the bandwidth of the mediafire download link was exceeded from too many fans and blogs trying to access it at once.

• Quick Fix: Bandcamp. Bloggers were going to repurpose the download link on zshare and mediafire anyway, might as well capture as many emails and zip codes from the early downloaders of the mixtape while you can. Bandcamp is made for indie music distribution and it’s likely that an arrangement could have been made to allow for extra bandwidth at the time of the release. Additionally, download analytics are more accurate and organized than those available from say a zshare. Alternatively, DatPiff and other digital mixtape distributors could suffice. Rap Radar could debut the link, and they could track the stats.

3. The link broke, again. But one link doesn’t stop the show. When mediafire and zshare proved unsuccessful, blog HipHop N More saved the day and provided an alternative link via lime linx. An hour after the advertised release, the mixtape was finally available but that didn’t stop everyone from taking to twitter confused and frustrated over the delays. Alternatively, it was those same tweets that helped fuel Rap Radar’s rise to trending topic fame. Our loss became RR’s gain.

• Quick Fix: Multiple links. This wasn’t the first mixtape to ever be distributed online. Most provide multiple links during the debut in anticipation of server overloads. If Wale or Rap Radar provided the alternate links, other blogs like Hip Hop N More wouldn’t have to and tracking the amount of downloads would be easier.

4. Rap Radar has no active twitter account. Naturally twitter users referenced RR via @RapRadar mentions, to date the account has been suspended. The official twitter account for Rap Radar appears to be @_RapRadar, it boasts over 550 followers and the account’s last tweet is dated Jan 22. Wilson has opted for tweeting Rap Radar updates via his personal account @ElliottWilson—think 17,000+ followers. On the blog his twitter feed has prime placement in the sidebar but the twitter handle or link to his twitter profile is nowhere in sight.

• Quick Fix: Step your twitter game up. An active RR twitter account at the time of Wale’s More About Nothing release could have meant a lot of followers come trending topic time and more unique visitors RR’s way long after #MoreAboutNothing’s hype as new posts hit the website. From the looks of the tweets mentioning @RapRadar or simply “RapRadar” many were unaware that RR author “YN” is actually @ElliottWIlson.

5. Rap Radar was robbed (or, Rap Radar is too real for social media). Despite Rap Radar’s highly sought after content and use of Wordpress as a content management system, there are no sharing buttons. While some music news blogs have opted out of including social bookmarking websites like Digg and Stumble Upon, most bloggers include the more popular facebook share/like and retweet buttons.

• Quick Fix: Use Wordpress plugins to install sharing capabilities. While RR can’t stop blogs and news sites from reposting the mixtape download link, they can stop readers from tweeting/facebook sharing direct links to the download as opposed to Rap Radar’s original post. In fact, sharing buttons could help Rap Radar hit trending topic status more often as it allows for more control to the keywords and hashtags that appear with the tweet/facebook update.

Due to the issues described, its hard to tell the real number of downloads Wale received, the limelinx link suggests he got at least 100,000. While web ads have yet to eclipse print or traditional ad revenue, there’s still money to be made online. The hip-hop generation has bred many digital early adopters in regards to twitter, Ustream, etc but when it comes to monetizing content or maximizing reach, we fall short.

One thing wrong with this post? I went out-of-town shortly after Wale’s mixtape release and must now pull a #latepass on this post. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

-@KD (proper twitter on the way @BornIn88)