Young Noble Explains Record Industry Woes

In a recent interview for Yo! Raps Magazine, Young Noble of the Outlawz gets a little hyped up, and reveals his interpretation of the record industry, the hip-hop game in particular.

Yeah, it was just the most historical, most classical era [the early 90s] in hip-hop. It was a great time to be in the game. There was a lot of diversity. You had a lot of great artists making great music, from Pac to Snoop Dogg to The Dogg Pound to Ice Cube to Wu-Tang to Naughty by Nature to Mobb Deep to Nas to Biggie. There was an abundance of great talent being presented to the world. And all these guys were original. It wasn’t like Biggie was over there sounding like Snoop Dogg, or Tha Dogg Pound was over there sounding like Mobb Deep. Now, I live in Atlanta, and seven out of ten songs have the same tempo beat, talking about the same shit. Not to discredit anybody. I guess that’s just the nature of music today, but back then it was just a great era of music. I don’t know if there will ever be an era like that again. To me, the game’s getting worse. People claim that labels are going out of business, or you can blame it on the internet, bootlegging, downloading, but that’s really not the case. People are still buying records, yet record stores are about to go out of business because artists aren’t making the kind of records people would go and buy. I mean, hot club songs are hot for a minute, but what do you do in three months when it’s not hot anymore? A lot of these dudes never get heard again. You got the marketing guy, the A&R, they’re not even focused on music anymore, they’re focused on everything else, like your swag, the hairstyle you got, what kind of clothes you’re wearing. The A&Rs at these labels are looking at fads, instead of music that could be around for the next ten years. So they’re signing some guy out in Tennessee who’s got a hot record in the club, giving him $200,000, putting a single out, the shit does mediocre, and then they don’t get any money back from it, his album never comes out, and he’s shelved or kicked off the label. You might have Def Jam after a year or two, they may have signed twenty artists that you’ve never even heard about, and then two years go by and they’re cleaning house. They don’t want any of these artists anymore. They’re firing the people who signed them. It’s just crazy, man. People aren’t looking for real talent. They’re looking for the next fad. They’re looking for whoever comes out with the dumbest shit that might catch on, and get a million views on Youtube. They’ll sign him up, and the million views could have been an accident. They give him $400,000 and they’re not going to get any of that back. Labels are doing this consistently. One company goes under, so you got Def Jam ready to merge with Capitol.