It has been a good few minutes since Doc Brown was last on the UK Hip Hop scene. In that time he has been ripping up clubs not with his rhymes but with his wit.
I caught up with him to see why he left us all out on the cold and what happened to his elusive album but in the corse of our conversation he hada few things to say about the music industry and the state of Hip Hop to.
"The internet has changed the music industry. Every type of music and every type of musician is suffering to a different extent. You know, a couple of years ago a Robbie Williams album came out, I think it was called Rude Box, on EMI and they sold so few that they actually had to destroy a load of pre-orders. I think it was one million pre-orders had to be destroyed before they were even delivered. They were made in Beijing and they stayed in Beijing and they crushed them and used them to form the basis of roads in the provinces of Beijing.
When I read that story in the newspaper I did start thinking, ‘Jesus if Robbie Williams can’t sell records then how the hell are we going to do it?’ I realised that the internet had really changed the way people were experiencing and enjoying music. A lot of artists get really angry about it, and sometimes it makes me angry but at the same time I can understand. You know no-one’s got a lot of money, so why would you risk forking out some money on a rapper [where] you don’t really know if the album's all going to be good. You might just pick your favourite song and roll it from there, if you don’t want pay 79p on iTunes for it then you can probably find a way to copy it from somebody else. It doesn’t seem like a crime that would affect anyone but we are the victims, obviously. Rappers are the victims.
It’s so natural now that people don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Even now I get people emailing me, emailing my website, asking how they can download my stuff for free. Even on my videos on YouTube all the comments are talking about how to get my songs on LimeWire or how to rip them off youtube, as if I wouldn’t notice or mind. But the fact is that it’s happening to everybody and I think it’s increasingly hard for people to sell records.
To me the music industry has shifted to its original way of reaching the public when popular music came out in the fifties, which is the live circuit. So live music is massive again now because music as it was has become faceless. What I mean by that is everything is a downloadable MP3 or is copied from someone else on a blank CD there’s no liner notes there’s no artwork. People are enjoying our music for free but they’re not getting to know the artist anymore, so ultimately they can enjoy their pirated music for a while but if they really enjoy it at some stage they want to connect with that artist on a deeper level.
If you look at the upper echelon or artists like at contemporary stuff, not the Bruce Springsteins of this world, but the Lily Allens. They are making a living now not through selling records but through the live circuit. It’s real and actual. You have to gig like 300 days of each year to really make your money back. It’s gigs and merchandise now which is massive.
In the UK rap game, which kicked off from vinyl and then moved on to CD and briefly had a resurgence of income through legal downloads, now it’s tough because rap gigs have never really been a big deal. Rap gigs are coming back in the States now but even like ten years ago in the States rap gigs weren’t that big because promoters didn’t want to risk it. They felt there would always be some sort of street element attached to a rap gig and we’ve always had that problem here and so rappers can’t even get paid gigs."
Read the rest of the interview and find out why the Doc left Hip Hop.
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