Mixed Messages

Scoobs, an MC with the L.A. crew Custom Made, paints the 2007 mixtape situation clearly: “The music industry isn’t getting a cut of the profits. It’s like selling drugs. You sell drugs on the street, it’s all your money. It’s the same with the mixtape game. The music industry don’t like that.” Custom Made continues to release tapes, both independently and through labels like Babygrande, which can be found at www.custommade.com. The crew infuses its music with a decidedly East Coast, ’90s feel, a rare breed in the West Coast scene.

L.A. certainly isn’t the mixtape capital that New York is. “The majority of mixtapes are coming from the East,” says Fat Beats’ Juice. “By the time L.A. stores get them, they’re a week or two behind.” That is, when you can find them at brick-and-mortar retailers. The Drama bust scared them, and the effect on artists, producers, DJs and, perhaps most importantly, fans has been a marked decrease in access to mixtapes at physical stores. Amoeba Records no longer carries mixtapes. Hip-hop buyer Jon Liu says its policy has evolved over the past few years. “At this point, we’re just not taking unlicensed mix CDs,” he says. “There was always kind of a wariness, because of [their] shady character.”

And so we enter a brave new world for the mixtape, a medium that refuses to die despite the best efforts of the major labels and the RIAA. Though it declined to comment for this story, the organization’s Web site makes its position clear, defining piracy as “unauthorized duplication of sounds from one or more legitimate recordings . . . sometimes advertised as DJ or Dance mixes . . .”

Mike Nardone, host of KXLU’s long-running hip-hop show We Came From Beyond, has worked at labels such as Jive, Profile and Quannum Projects. He sees the industry’s crackdown as a futile response to decreasing record sales in an age of rampant downloading. “They’ve lost control and don’t know how to get it back . . . They’re reacting, and I don’t know that they know where to get that revenue stream they’ve lost.”

Instead of harnessing and perhaps co-opting what could be a huge (low-cost) unit shifter, the recording industry has tried, to no avail, to threaten the creators by accusing them of violating copyrights (and therefore dipping into profit streams). But it’s hard to sound the violins when Kanye West’s and 50 Cent’s new albums’ sales exceeded a million in their first week of release. It’s safe to say that Kanye’s Can’t Tell Me Nothing mixtape, released in May and featuring cuts off Graduation, helped more than hurt him. Even with the online resurgence, mixtapes have certainly taken a hit over the past year. “I would love to see the game get back to a point where mixtapes have the same potency that they had a year ago,” says Drama. “Being a fan as well as a player, it’s just a sad thing to see what mixtapes and the game has come to.”