Jon and F.A.B.

Yesterday, I got a chance to see MC Hammer, Chamillionaire, and Mistah F.A.B. talk about internet music entrepreneurship at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford. The panel, moderated by Quincy D. Jones, III, was an opportunity to get advice and pick the brain of successful rappers who have used the Internet to build musical networks. Here are some tidbits from the session:

Own your content
Chamillionaire, whose success on the Internet came as a result of mixtapes and ringtones, explained that when he negotiated his first contract, he wouldn’t even talk to a major label unless he had ownership over all of his cyber-entities. Had he backed down, he would have lost big on his record-breaking ringtone sales of “Ridin’ Dirty”. But even with this autonomy, Universal has required him to remove his songs from Myspace. Strange request when you consider Myspace is where his young fans go first to visit him online. Cham pointed out that die-hard fans are starved for content and prolific artists who put out tons of mixtapes (such as Lil Wayne) are well-rewarded when their actual albums hit the stores (1 Million copies of The Carter III in the first week).

Make friends with a true geek
Mistah F.A.B. spoke of the need for any entrepreneurial MC to make sure that they have an “MC CPU”, or a geeky buddy with a laptop on his chain who can pimp out your myspace (or Facebook page for the “grown and sexy” people). “Fabby Davis Junior” pointed to the interaction with the fans as the most important piece to Internet success, citing the Ghost Riding Grannie fan video that has gone “totally viral” on Youtube. F.A.B. claimed that you could find anything on Youtube, from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to some footage of him in bed sleeping while he had “the dream”. In other words, F.A.B. was one hilarious panelist.

Never give up
MC Hammer, whose well-documented financial woes might make him seem an unlikely digital entrepreneur, got interested in web video after he was unable to find any of his old music videos on Youtube. Despite his past monetary transgressions, Hammer is the first person from the hip-hop community to go straight to a silicon valley venture capitalist to start his company. His latest venture, Dancejam, seeks to be the Youtube of dance videos.

The discussion went long and they cut the Q&A session, so I was never able to ask my Debbie Downer questions like: Why is there such a paucity of politics in your lyrics? Would you be willing to post a few songs under a Creative Commons license? Which of you dudes showed up in the streched hummer out front?