Public Enemy emcee Chuck D may hail from the ‘80s era of Hip Hop, but the rapper is one of few artists from that decade who have gone on to both accept and embrace the digital music movement. During an interview with TheRealHip-Hop.com, Chuck D went on to speak on SPITdigital, the digital distribution company he created years ago.
“SPITdigital is where the plan is to create artists to have a DIY plan to be their own label,” Chuck D revealed. “I started out at the top of the century in the digital movement helping aggregators form and develop such as the Orchard in 2004 and TuneCore in 2007…But we had to actually get clearances with the number one digital distributor of music in the world, iTunes, which is 93% of the market place. So we kept delivering SPITdigital for two years and it had certain glitches in the system. We finally got accepted in April of 2012 after many go-overs and redesigns.”
Among the projects released through SPITdigital was Public Enemy’s last two projects, Most Of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear On No Stamp and The Evil Empire Of Everything. Both albums were released within months of one another and according to Chuck D, the short gap between the release of projects was primarily done to make a statement with SPITdigital.
“To make a statement with what we are with SPITdigital. To say that it was an impossibility to do something like that in the analog days and it was an impossibility to do it even as of two years ago. We wanted to make this digital distribution statement,” said the rapper. “For the longest time the biggest thing that they used to talk about was having our own distribution—it became this thing. When we finally got our distribution and we were unable to recognize it as such this is what I called my wake up call like look, you screamed for your own distribution for so long become your own label and get with a digital distributor where you can go directly into the fold. It’s a slow argument because people are still stuck in some of the last century.”
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Chuck D will soon tour the country with other Hip Hop icons including LL Cool J and Ice Cube as part of the “Kings Of The Mic” tour.
Read the full, two-part TheRealHip-Hop.com Chuck D interview.
RELATED:LL Cool J Explains Creating “Kings Of The Mic Tour” With Public Enemy, Ice Cube & De La Soul
