Where Did All The Mixtapes Go?

Living in Australia, we don’t hit the streets to pick up mixtapes; internet downloads or eBay are pretty much our only option. But if you lived in the States you may have noticed a fairly big drought in the availability of mixtapes in your city.

You’ll remember at the beginning of the year DJ Drama’s crib was raided and a whole lot of mixtapes, which he and Don Cannon produce and release, confiscated with the pair jailed. Since then things have been quite quiet on the mixtape front.

Brandon Soderberg at HipHopMusic.com reminisces over the days of picking up tapes at his local merchants and asks the question, Did the RIAA win this one?

First, it is hardly a “crackdown”; the absence of mixtapes comes out of a fear of government enforcement not actual government enforcement. Second, the “crackdown” has accomplished very little in the way of helping album sales and legal downloads, which is what mixtapes were supposedly affecting. Third, there is the phenomenon of mixtapes being fairly absent from small stores and street-corners but still, to some degree, available through many corporate stores and entities.

Via - [HipHopMusic]