If you notice, there is a new trend in Hip-Hop. Big name acts, such as 50 Cent, Cam’ron and up and comer Papoose have all done low budget videos to showcase new songs or to promote new albums. This has more acts, including Consequence, thinking of doing the same.
As Jim Jones put it, this is nothing truly new for him, but it has added incentives.
“I would shoot low-budget videos and target local video outlets. I would go in the projects and shoot my own videos. This [new trend] is the same thing, but now you have a better way to watch it. You’re liable to see your favorite rapper on YouTube every week,” he told MTV.
Dipset‘s rival 50 Cent also took the low budget video route to diss Cam’ron on “The Funeral”.
“50 was like, ‘Fly out to my crib in L.A,’ “ Buck said of 50‘s video against Cam. “And the way he was excited, I thought he was gonna have a party. But when I got over there, this mutha—-a had cameras and sh– all in the house. He’s like, ‘We gonna shoot a video — it’s gonna be up next week.’ I’m like, ‘Next week? What the f—?’ But the minute we finished the video and he threw it up on YouTube, that sh– had, like, a million hits in two days. So that means a million people seen this damn video that didn’t cost too much money to put together and actually marketed my album also. Because if you notice at the end it says, ‘Buck the World, March 27.’ I was like, ‘Damn, this is one of the realest promotional things I ever seen.’ 50 did it again, honestly.”
This has other artists looking for a way to use this to boost record sales, but also to help fans see more of the artist’s work.
“I’m actually gonna repackage my album, hopefully, with videos for each song. It’s definitely about giving more to the consumer visually. When we move more into the digital age, people want to feel the experience. And the technology, by creating visual content, allows the artists to fully capture the audience’s imagination. I think you’re gonna see a lot more independent and low-budget videos that let fans understand the [artist’s] point of view when making records. With a lot of records, that kind of gets lost in translation.”
According to Pap, this is simply a way for the streets to get their point across.
“You can’t stop the streets from coming in, period,” Papoose said. “I think the industry needs to realize that. If you make it complicated, they’re gonna find another route, they gonna go to the Internet. At first, they was just pushing the music through the Internet, now they’re pushing videos!”
As this has been on-going, HipHopDX has made sure to update our video section with as many of these videos, along with the million dollar budget videos.
