Hip Hop Logic: Business & Culture

Dilla's Best Breaks (Audio)

Download Here

via Different Kitchen

Glassnote Records' Daniel Glass on 'Fantastic' Spotify, Monetizing the Stream

Excerpt:

From a label perspective, what's your take is on Spotify so far?

I enjoy, appreciate and embrace anything that gets people to discover music. So I would say in the last 12 months, from the United States perspective, Spotify has been one of the most exciting places to discover music.

The traffic and the amount of action on Spotify is just fantastic. That's clear. The amount of people sharing music through their Facebook application on Spotify is great. The people who run Spotify -- Steve Savoca, Daniel Ek and Sean Parker -- were very sensitive to the North Americans, because they flushed out so many issues in Europe and the U.K. before it got to America. So, it's been really good what Spotify has done.

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Audio: D'angelo Live Mixtape

A 15-track compilation of high-quality live recordings from a recent D’Angelo concert in Sweden

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Audio: A Tribe Called Dilla

"My intentions with A Tribe Called Dilla were to focus strictly on the signature sound style of the Ummah era, which spanned throughout the second half of the nineties."

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Shit French Montana Says (Video)

via @joncaramanica

Article: Why Don Cornelius Matters

Excerpt: 

"The significance of Don Cornelius to American culture — and to the American culture business — is told nowhere more eloquently than in one brief exchange between Cornelius and singer James Brown, a story that Cornelius himself recalls in VH-1′s excellent 2010 documentary Soul Train: The Hippest Trip in America."

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Article: 7 Ways to Build Energy in a Song’s Chorus



"If you were to trace a line that represents the energy you perceive from a song as it progresses, you’d notice that the line would generally go in a mostly-upward direction. That’s a basic songwriting principle: the energy of the end of a song should equal or exceed that of the beginning. It’s that sense of intensifying energy and forward motion that keeps listeners listening. In particular, the chorus needs to take whatever the energy level is in the verse and pump it up a bit.

When you think about “energy”, you might tend to think about things getting faster, but that rarely happens in music. Especially in pop music genres, tempos are set at the beginning, and they stay pretty much constant.

So what are the things you can do in your song to ensure that the energy your listeners get from your chorus is more than what they get from the verse? Here are 7 ideas."

Full Article

 

Video: N!%#@s In Paris by Kanye West & Jay-Z

Free Brainfeeder Compilation

 

LA's Brainfeeder Collective releases a free compilation featuring music from Thundercat, Martyn, Samiyam, and  Lapalux. Download here

via XLR8R

Bits & Bites (Video Edition)



Vanilla Ice: On Being Stalked By A Satanist  via @perpetua

D'angelo Live in 2012

Lianne La Havas "No Room For Doubt" 

"H I - 8" by Thaddeus Clark