Hip Hop Blogs

Hip-hop on Google News

Google News now allows users to customize the front page based on their interests. Best of all, you can share the link to your customized page. A perfect tool for us news loving bloggers.

I made a page collecting hip-hop business, music, sports, and UK news. Use it for yourself, or remix it and send it to someone else.

And for all those G-unit fans who can't get enough news about their favorite crew, I created a page that tracks 50 Cent, Game, Lloyd Banks, Young Buck, and G-Unit businesses.

Hacking Napster-to-Go

I told ya'll back in December about Napster's new subscription model, where you can grab all the music you want for 15 bucks a month. For all the reasons why this service won't work I think my prediction that hackers would find a way to beat the system within a week is the best.

Well, I was wrong. It didn't take them a week- it took one day. Peep this hack for stealing downloading all of Napster's music, using Winamp and the Output Stacker plug-in.

Napster's Subscription Service

Just what I've been waiting for. Napster offers a download subscription service, so you can grab all the music you want for 10 bucks a month instead of $1 per song, like on iTunes. It costs 5 extra dollars per month to be able to copy the songs to other places, like an MP3 player.

Peter Rojas breaks it down like this:

"Have a 40GB MP3 player that can hold 10,000 songs? It’d cost $10,000 to fill it with music from the various online music stores (not that anyone would actually do that), but for $180 a year you can fill it—and refill it—with as much music as you want (and you’d basically be paying $0.0015 per song per month)"

I spend twice that much on cd's every year, with only 600 songs to show for it (and only a third of them being any good). With unlimited service I can get just the songs I want, and experiment with artists I haven't listened to yet! I can't wait for the service to go live next year.

Mistakes Rapper's Sites Make

I have been trying to write about this for months now. Good thing there are people out there much smarter than me to break it down. Peep the 43 Folders list of mistakes band and label sites make.

Here's a summary:

1. Don't overdue the Flash
2. Add MP3 meta-data (like titles)
3. Don't make it too fancy
4. Include a search funtion
5. Make it easy for users to respond back

Or just get a blog.

A good example of a music site that does all of these things well is MTV. That's why many artist searches turns up the band's profile page on MTV instead of the official one.

Searching for hip-hop, hiphop, and hip hop on the web

On the web, the music culture we all love is spelled three ways- hiphop, hip-hop, and hip hop. Even on this site we use all three. This makes searching for hip-hop difficult because you don't know which way the site writes the word.

For instance, searching hiphop magazine in Google gives you Rapsheet.com, while searching hip-hop magazine finds Vibe.com.

To end all the confusion, use the ~ sign to find all acronyms to hiphop. So that same magazine search would be ~hiphop magazine and every spelling will be included. Try it and see the difference. Then read Google's official tip sheet.

You're welcome.

Get Paid for File Sharing

I heard about the Weed filesharing system a while ago but didn't move to post about it. Now that everyone is talking about it, I'll amplify what I think is a great idea on the web.

Basically, the guys who created Weed understand that filesharing fans are valuable to artists and deserve to be rewarded for their promotion, not punished. So with their system, any fan who shares a Weed file (which is playable in any Windows media device) gets a 20% cut  of the money from anyone paying for the file. The artist gets 50%, and the rest is split between Weed and whoever else shared the file along the way. To protect the artist and encourage sales, the file can only be played 3 times by one user before it prompts you to buy.

It sounds good, but feels complicated. I expect only indie artists to really hop on this. Chuck D has his music on there, but he seems to love giving away music nowadays just to prove a point.

(Wouldn't it be great if all those mp3 blogs out there adopted this system? Hmmm....)

Anyway, I hope the format succeeds. Weed could be the new MP3.com.

TiVo for Radio

When I spoke to Jay at the Nas concert I told him how much I enjoyed his radio show the week Masta Ace and Wordsworth were on. I never get to listen to the show because I'm always hanging out on a Saturday night. We both wished out loud that there was a Tivo-like device for radio, so we wouldn't miss our favorite on-air programs.

Well, that wish has come true. Peep "Radio YourWay" It saves up to 4 hours of radio as an mp3 and can be programmed to record at a any certain time. And of course it uploads to a PC, boy-boy.

I would love to use this to catch Green Lantern and Kay Slay on Hot 97 late nights during the week when I should be asleep.

iPhone- Apple's Digital Music Player/Mobile Phone

It's just speculation and wishful reasoning, but wouldn't it be great if Apple made a mobile phone that played digital audio? That deal with Motorola is close, but not good enough.

How To Start an Audioblog, Oliver Wang Style

O-dub recently schooled the kids on how to start an audioblog. I also like what METALFACE has been doing on his site using the Radio.Blog tool.

We need to get something like that going, asap.

Q-Bert's turntable

Being that I'm in the running for "world's wackest DJ," I have no idea if this product is actually any good or not, but all I know is that it looks all futuristic and ish:

Vestax's QFO Turntable, designed by the mighty DJ Q-Bert.

It's a single turntable with an integrated two-channel mixer. Looking down on the deck, the fader is below the platter and the levels are on either side. The unit debuts in August.

Does this sort of product really have a market? Probably, and with Q-Bert's name on it (and since he had a hand in designing it), it'll probably sell pretty well. Whether or not it's going to live up to its Buck Rogers appearance will remain to be seen. I'll leave that judgement to the real DJs.