Hip-Hop Marketing: An Interview with Nah Right’s Eskay

DZ: A lot of rap artists are getting involved in Twitter and doing very well with stuff like trending hashtags. Does social media actually sell records?

Eskay: I think social media contributes to the public’s awareness about an artist and that awareness then (hopefully) turns into album or single sales. Social media in the context of any recording artist is a marketing tool, and like any marketing tool can backfire on you and end up hurting you if you don’t put enough thought into it.

DZ: Beyond record and ticket sales what are Hip-Hop marketers measuring? What should they be measuring, what’s the most important metric? Followers, fans, mix tape downloads, etc?

Eskay: I think that online, it’s an artist’s overall digital footprint. How many pageviews does their website get? How many Twitter followers? How many retweets, how many Facebook friends/fans, number of mixtape downloads and Youtube views, all of that stuff can give you a picture of what kind of noise a particular act is making. At the same time though, I think you have to take those numbers with a grain of salt. On the “rap Internet”, numbers are often fabricated by dishonest artists and sites, and even legitimate numbers can fail to give you an (more…)

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