Following a corporate shake-up last year, Epic Records dumped its “urban” music marketing department as a cost-cutting measure, only to find itself with two urban hits this summer–including the No. 1 single in the country, Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”–and no way to get the word out to stores, magazines, radio, video, etc.
So Epic just tapped Koch Records, the indie blob poised to swallow rap whole, to do the job for it. This tacit acknowledgement of Koch’s promo power is just another installment in a growing debate in hip-hop circles, often centering around Koch, about the financial perks of sticking with an indie label, despite the small-scale ambitions they’ve always connoted in the genre. In the future, sane investors, not just artists, might ask how a major label can just assume it will find some way to get by without a hip-hop marketing departiment in 2007.
No Rap Turf War Here [New York Post via Hypebot]
The subtext of this is that as huge as Kingston’s song is, Epic or Koch or whoever is doing a shitty job of marketing his album to people who like the single, if you compare the album’s first week sales figures (74 thousand) to the single’s first week sales figures (260 thousand).
@GovernmentNames: and the second single is #3 on itunes!
Does anyone else remember (2000-2001 or so) when Koch was the home for retread artists like the Nixons and Abra Moore? When did they turn into a rap label?
@maura: Wow, that’s kind of shocking. “Me Love” is horrible even in ways that “Beautiful Girls” isn’t.