Throughout hip-hop’s history, the term “mixtape” has changed nearly as much as hip-hop itself. What was once used to describe bootleg recordings of live DJ sets – often accompanied by rapping – at hip-hop parties eventually came to connote DJ-curated compilations featuring an array of exclusive tracks, rarities and freestyles from a who’s who of rappers, only to later refer to unsanctioned “street albums” by artists looking to build a buzz that could translate to record deals and album sales.
Mixtapes migrated from cassette and CD-R to the internet in the mid-2000s, made available for free on websites such as DatPiff and LiveMixtapes. Once online, artists used the format as an opportunity to step outside their milieu, often appealing to a potential national audience by retrofitting beats from other regions and eras to suit their artistic vision. As the 2000s drew to a close, more and more mixtapes featured all-original production, resembling traditional albums in all but their price point.
Meanwhile, the music industry has increasingly come to rely upon online streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal offset the decline in actual music sales. Streaming saw its market share double from 2015 to 2016, and is now responsible for nearly half of all revenue throughout the industry. By and large, this change has not favored artists – recent estimates indicate that musicians see only a fraction of a penny per stream, meaning that only those with the ability to appeal to economies of scale can expect to see a meaningful paycheck from their music.
The latest projects from both the rapper Drake and producer Mike Will Made-It draw upon various aspects of the mixtape tradition to make the most of the streaming economy. Drake’s More Life was debuted as a “playlist” on the artist’s Beats1 radio show with the express intent of driving listeners to then stream the record again on Apple Music, in essence replicating the earliest mixtape model (and later, that of grime sets on pirate radio). The strategy worked – a spokesperson for Drake’s label estimated to the Verge that More Life had been streamed 600m times in its first week of availability.
While producer-driven projects are certainly not new in hip-hop, it’s rare that they feel like “events” in the way that Mike Will Made-It’s Ransom 2 does. One of Mike Will’s greatest skills as a beatmaker is the ability to forge a distinct sonic signature – he favors plinky pianos, throbbing drones and lithe textures – while tailoring his sound to highlight the skills of his collaborators. He combines the producer-as-auteur mentality with the sensibility of a DJ Clue tape from the 90s, which mixed exclusives from New York’s hottest rappers with freestyles, remixes and tracks from underground luminaries. Ransom 2 standout Perfect Pint features verses from Rae Sremmurd as well as efforts from Gucci Mane and Kendrick Lamar – whose inclusion on the track is as unexpected and monumental as Raekwon and Ghostface’s remix of Jodeci’s Freak’n You, first debuted on Clue’s Dedication to My People tape in 1995.
In addition to possessing a Rolodex thick enough to solicit guest verses from the likes of Rihanna, Pharrell and Lil Wayne, his cultural capital allows him to provide a platform to emerging talents, such as Station Wagon P, Fortune, Hoodybaby and Earz. Though a fan of, say, Lil Yachty might not have bought a physical copy of Ransom 2 just to listen to the rapper’s turn on the rambunctious Hasselhoff, the record’s ready availability on Spotify and Apple Music gives that same fan the opportunity to stream the track for free, as well as listen to the rest of the record to see how their favorite stacks up against the rest of the star-studded cast. Apply this principle to fans of every notable collaborator featured on Ransom 2, and one hits upon a formula for some serious streaming numbers.
Though Mike Will lacks the institutional support that Drake enjoys in his Beats1 show, he engaged in a homespun version of Drake’s stream-driving efforts on Twitter, spending much of Friday retweeting posts from media outlets who had either embedded the Spotify stream of the record or linked to its Apple Music page, as well as screencaps of fans streaming the record. The strategy seems to have paid off: on Saturday, the artist tweeted, “Spotify is the shhhhhh.”
