Music & Marketing: URBANIZED!

CULVER CITY, Calif. – Dr. Dre and Timbaland went back to school Wednesday night.

The rapper-producers shocked students when they appeared at a Culver City High School graduation party. Dr. Dre introduced Timbaland, who performed the tunes “The Way I Are,” “Promiscuous Girl,” “Carry Out” and “Say Something” on a stage inside the school’s gymnasium. Students invited had no idea the hip-hop masterminds were the guests of honor.

“When we walked in, we were like, ‘Whoa. Is this a second prom?’” said 17-year-old junior Saul Salmeron.

The surprise performance was sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and Interscope Records, who have partnered with the aim of improving digital sound quality. The promotional event, which was recorded for an online documentary, also featured free food, photos and a raffle of HP gear. The company said it was donating $10,000 worth of computer equipment to the school.

“Y’all got a curfew?” Timbaland asked the audience at one point.

Students held up their camera phones and gathered around the stage to get a glimpse of Timbaland and Dr. Dre, who sneaked a peek of the crowd before he took the stage. Dr. Dre, who is currently working on his next album, did not perform with labelmate Timbaland, whom he’s never worked with before.

Is a possible first-time collaboration is in the works?

“We should be so lucky,” said Jimmy Iovine, chairman of Interscope, Geffen and A&M Records, who attended Wednesday’s event. “I can only get them so close. The rest is up to them.”

How do you measure the success of a blog? By the number of visitors it receives. Traffic is essential to the survival of a site. So, what are easy and efficient ways to get it?

from wagtiradio.com



1) Provide quality content
Quality over quantity is a motto that should be in every blogger's mind. As such, editing and proofreading are two prerequisites. Before you publish anything, make sure that your content is as typo-free as possible.

2) Provide useful content
A blog is like a product. If you want to sell, your articles must be unique and visitors must relate to them. At times, it may be difficult to come up with new ideas. To overcome this problem, you could:
- set up Google alerts to receive news in your inbox. When you find an interesting article, share an extract in your blog or write something on the topic.

- visit websites like AllTop or Mashable and subscribe to valuable blogs in your niche.

And if you are an entrepreneur, why not check out the questions asked by members of LinkedIn? Some will fuel your creativity.

3) Write great titles
Titles are the main attention grabbers. When written well, they will make visitors read the articles attached to them. For example, if you want to offer tips on book promotion, something like X [number] Great Tips to Promote Your Book would work. Remember that people love numbers and lists, so organize the post as such. Be clear and concise.

4) Blog often
A blog regularly updated will bring traffic. So, try to contribute to its growth at least twice a week.

5) Ask questions
Asking questions is the best way to engage readers and show them that you care. There are three proven ways to do it:

• Ask a question in the first paragraph of your post. This will draw their attention to the problem that you are trying to solve.


• Ask a question in your conclusion in order to open the discussion. Visitors will leave comments more easily.


• Invite people to suggest future topics. Why not conduct a survey?

6) Tag, Tag, Tag
Tags or keywords are specific words that describe an item. When blog articles are published, they will be indexed by search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) according to those specific words. Without them, search engines may overlook the posts and they will end up at the bottom of the pile. So, tag all your articles and pictures.

7) Share your posts
Share your posts on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and Stumble Upon. Search engines love them. Use Hootsuite and Ping.fm to update all your networks at once.

8) Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog
By using a tool like Feedburner, you give visitors the opportunity to stay connected with your blog by subscribing to it. Every time you publish a new article, subscribers receive a notice. It is a great way to build up a loyal audience.

9) Submit articles to directories
This is a very efficient way to get your name out there. EzineArticles and eHow are the best article submission directories right now and rank really high in search engines. Let me give you an example.

A while ago, I submitted one of my previous posts to EzineArticles. The article got accepted. Type 'rejection reviewers' in Google search and you will see 'Authors & Six Tips to Avoid Rejection from Reviewers' appear third on the first page of the search engine.

10) Answer comments & visit other blogs
Too often, bloggers do not follow up with readers comments or emails. They do not even take the time to visit others blogs or sites. Imagine a company that would not care about its customers. It would lose business very quickly. A blog works like a company. If you do not set aside some time to provide good customer service, you will get no traffic.

Should you really have no time to connect with those who contact you privately, just let them know that you will respond to their messages later. And make sure that you do!

11) Add a link to your blog in your signature
In this day and age, we all use emails. It takes a couple of seconds to add a link to your blog in your signature block. And it may bring a LOT of traffic.

12) Be patient
Solid and constant traffic does not happen overnight. So, continue working hard and do not lose heart. Good things happen to those who wait!

Now, are there other tips that I may have forgotten?

Now that the Jesus of the genre has been so kind as to drop his instant classic, Thank Me Later (the obvious, hands-down winner for album of the year) it is time for the rest of the industry to step it up or face some of those harsh realities that 50 Cent once warned us about. Hip-hop, as we knew it, may be in need of a funeral service. Nas, being the prophet that he is, called it in early in 2006, but the doctors are now giving up hope and sending for the coroner. Let me tell you how I know: There was a time (specifically 2006) when things were getting so bad that Nastradamus proclaimed that it was all over. The difference was that there was someone left to dissent. And that is what we have lost.

After a while, the voices of the people who wanted to see hip-hop survive got drowned out by those who didn’t really care about the music, the culture, the people, or really anything besides the damned money. What happened to us? We used to stand for something. But the entire rap genre has somehow transformed into a corporate liaison where albums are audio commercials for brand name clothing, jewelry, alcohol, and vehicles. Concerts have become the catwalk for these airheaded clowns to parade themselves and their crews around in the items that are available for sale. Have we really gotten to the point where the stuff you hear on the radio is actually what we’re all about? Do people really pay money to see Drake perform? Is it really possible that labels are bankrolling blogs? Something is rotten, word to Hamlet.

But this morning, it hit me. That isn’t death in the true sense. In reality, the inception of hip-hop was the beginning of a movement that represented a culture of lack. This thing that we love is the auditory representation of the people that it caters to. It was the music of the “have-nots” but we have seen it bent, stretched, morphed, and disfigured to encompass the many people who wanted the style without the struggle. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Hip-hop doesn’t have to always be grimy. It doesn’t always have to be about life in the street. But what it must be, by necessity, is representative. It must embody the state of its people.

When cruising the troubled blocks of Los Angeles’ city streets listening to 2pac, one can see and feel the culture. If you happen to be on the right block, the same is true of the New Boyz as youngsters in the Fairfax district “Jerk” to their heart’s content in acid-washed skinny denim . A few years ago, looking out onto Lake Michigan and rubbing shoulders with Chicagoans, I could genuinely feel that College Dropout was truly the music of people. Sadly, I can’t say the same about much of the music by many of the artists that attempt to live under the hip-hop banner today. I would argue that the inordinate number of drug kingpins who are allegedly trafficking kilograms of cocaine daily at wholesale rates according to self-aggrandizing mixtape lore (See: Trap or Die) represent a farce that relates to hip-hop but is so far from true that the hyperbole is laughable and embarrassing (Bawse). The same is true of the non-criminal braggadocio of the highest success stories of the urban music scene. Maybe one day, rapping about international flights that garner millions of dollars in purely legitimate profits will be generalizable to this culture of ours. But that day is not today; not in the America where an oil spill was the biggest thing to hit the trap since Katrina.

In truth, the music that most call Rap or Hip-hop today is actually Pop, Top 40, or Club/Dance music. And sadly, even within that genre, it is still less representative of its people than that of Lady Gaga, The Ting-Tings, Miley Cyrus, and David Guetta; all of whom actually sing about situations that could legitimately happen to a person (if they were a sophomore in High School) and don’t aspire to do anything more than make people dance.

But don’t stop reading just yet. There is a silver lining.

The fortunate side effect of rebranding fake rappers as pop artists is the same as blowing away chaff to reveal the wheat. Hip-hop, the remainder after we divide the fake from the authentic, is alive and well. If you believe KRS-One, we will be here forever (and ever) but if you need a little more assurance than that, I have a plan. Much like the blowback against Wal-Mart when people became informed of their business practices, I think that we will find that the way to combat being force-fed the empty falsehoods of the corporate, urban music landscape is to buy local. Imagine the impact on your favorite local artist if your region had decided to spend its 13 dollars on their project rather than squandering it on a pretty package of lies from across the country. I bet his next LP would be easier to find at Best Buy.

When importing a tick-based audio file to the Region List, Track List, or empty space in the Edit window from the Workspace, your prompted to either import the tempo from the file or use the default session tempo. This tutorial explains how to import samples to automatically match the master tempo of your Pro Tools 8 session.

NEW YORK – A free concert by pop band Hanson and up-and-coming Canadian rapper Drake was canceled Tuesday after twice as many people as anticipated showed up and many became unruly, police said.

The show started at about 6 p.m. with an opening act at Pier 17 on Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, a popular summer locale for concerts. Hanson, the Tulsa, Okla., brothers behind the 1997 hit “Mmmbop,” and headliner Drake, whose album “Thank Me Later” debuted Tuesday, were to appear on stage soon after.

Organizers were anticipating about 10,0000 people but nearly 20,000 showed up, police said. Many people climbed roofs and started throwing bottles, as concertgoers smashed together toward the stage, police said.

Witness Tamika Johnson told the Daily News newspaper: “People in the front started leaving because they were getting crushed.”

The concert organizers asked the New York Police Department for help dispersing the crowds around 7 p.m., police spokesman Paul Browne said. Two people were arrested on minor charges; six suffered minor injuries, police said.

The concert was part of the “Sounds Like Paper” series presented by Paper magazine, an independent magazine focusing on arts, culture and music. The magazine apologized on its website: “Wow, the crowd was much larger than we anticipated, and unfortunately the show was canceled. But we will make it up to you guys!”

The magazine posted several updates on Twitter during the night: “It’s a total madhouse — in a good way” and “get off the roof!”

Telephone calls by The Associated Press to representatives for Drake and Hanson weren’t immediately returned Tuesday night.

A spokesman for Drake, whose album features Kanye West and Alicia Keys and debuted to positive reviews, told the Daily News the rapper was disappointed the NYPD dispersed the crowds before he could perform.

Hanson’s “Mmmbop,” from the trio of brothers’ album “Middle of Nowhere,” was one of the biggest debut singles of all time.