In his blog on the Huffington Post- the Hip Hop producer voices support for Jay-Z's decision not to sell his latest album on iTunes because iTunes allows you to purchase the music by the track.
Fair enough.
Every artist can sell their art any way they want. Jay-Z contends, much like Ruiner Severhead, that his album is a concept album - designed to be listened to all the way through - not in pieces.
But in his defense of Jay-Z and subsequent slamming of iTunes for allowing "by the track" sales - Jermaine reveals the TRUE problem he has with "by the track" sales -
Back in the day when people were excited about a record coming out we'd put out a single to get the ball going and if we sold a lot of singles that was an indication we'd sell a lot of albums. But we'd cut the single off a few weeks before the album came out to get people to wait and let the excitement build. When I put out Kris Kross we did that. We sold two million singles, then we stopped. Eventually we sold eight million albums!
Way to keep it about the "art" Jermaine. Geeze.
So let's parse this a bit. "People were excited about a record coming out."
Sure - because with the million dollar promo budget you could hype the thing all over hell based on 1 or 2 songs and then charge $15.99 for the "album" that no one had even heard.
So classic. No wonder people feel justified in "stealing" music. The entire music cartel was engaged in this kind of manipulation. It seemed normal because everyone was doing it and there was no choice.
If you wanted to own the 1 or 2 new songs being hyped - you had to pony up $15.99 for the whole album. Most of the time - the rest of the album blew wicked hangin massive wang bags. But you didn't learn that unitl AFTER you gave Jermaine Dupri $15.99!
No wonder drug dealers like 50 Cent stopped dealing and started rapping. Business is good!
With "by the track sales" where listeners can determine what's worth paying for - they're only buying the songs they like. So now the "album" that used to bring in $15.99 is only tossing off about 2 bucks in singles sales.
Jermain laments -
Soulja Boy sold almost 4 million singles and only 300,000 albums!
That's because people are able to sample the rest of the tracks on the album and found most of them sucked, so they didn't buy the album.
To which Jermaine astonishingly replies -
We let the consumer have too much of what they want, too soon, and we hurt ourselves.
HA! Yes Jermaine - it would have been great had you been able to continue hurting consumers by making them pay $15.99 for albums when they really only wanted 1 or 2 songs. Perhaps you could try writing better songs? Or did you not want to "waste" hit songs by putting too many on a single album.
BTW - Jermaine, you didn't LET the consumer have too much. They took it the minute they were liberated from your coercive control.
mp3 liberated the music from little plastic discs and Napster/ high speed internet liberated music aquisition from the retail space.
The subsequent behavior illustrated people's TRUE desired relationship to music. They didn't really listen to entire albums - they had only been buying them because they HAD to.
In the end - it appears that unlike the mighty Ruiner Severhead, Jermaine Dupri isn't really concerned about "art" or the loss of the "concept" album - he just wants to get back to the business that made him rich - selling singles packaged as albums for $15.99 each.
