With the Internet advancing faster than ever, many Hip-Hop acts have adapted a new marketing plan when it comes to their music; give it away for free. A chosen few have been able to flip this scheme, and their fan bases into viable recording careers, others have failed miserably.
Day after day, week after week and month after month, hit up your favorite Hip-Hop website and you’ll see an abundance of free mixtapes courtesy of the Mac Book generation. Some are worthy of taking up space on your hard drive, while most just are not. The trick is to give away plethora of material to the listeners, in hopes that those same fans will buy your official studio album—that comes with a barcode on and is purchasable via iTunes, record stores, or the artist’s personal website—once it’s released.
There are those that have ridden the mixtape-to-studio album wave to great success, i.e. Mac Miller, Kid Cudi, and Kendrick Lamar, just to name a few. But there are a lot more that seem terrified to take the commercial plunge and see who’s out there willing to pay $8.99 for their record. Stuck in the Mixtape Matrix, here are 15 rappers that will never drop an album.
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