Drake's Beef With Universal: Another Skirmish In A Constant Struggle

posted in: Music News • Pop • Urban

It’s a familiar story: An artist wants to be unhindered in terms of their artistic license but encounters problems with a label that obstructs the creative process. It’s always interesting to read about major stars coming to blows with their record label. Canadian rapper/R&B performer Drake has been slowly gearing up for the release of his sophomore release Take Care by releasing tracks. Now, it’s fairly typical in this day and age for artists to give away their songs for free. Drake’s releases are less teasers and more gifts to his online fanbase. Put out on Drake’s label imprint October’s Very Own blog, each song is just “another piece of the story”. So, imagine Drake’s surprise when Universal removed the links Drake had on his site.

Sigh. It’s a tale as old as the music industry, a push-pull that will never go away since both sides have a legitimate argument for their positions. It’s easy to root for Drake but Universal’s actions aren’t indefensible. After all, the labels are still hurting so they will try to tap into any revenue stream that they can, as any business entity should. An A-list bankable star like Drake releasing single-worthy tracks through his blog must have set off some serious alarms down at Universal for them to pull the songs like they did. And it hasn’t stopped him from hyping the songs either”Drake just released a full length clip for his most recently released track “Marvin’s Room” which you can watch below.

Drake ~ Marvins Room (Official Video) from OctobersVeryOwn on Vimeo.

Universal has every right to be concerned about lost record sales. After all, if an artist is putting their music out for free how is the label going to make any money off the tracks? And Drake isn’t some small indie sensation”Take Care is arguably one of the most hotly anticipated albums of the year. While it’s easy to attack the major labels, Drake still has a contractual agreement with them. What the terms of that agreement might be is anyone’s guess but it doesn’t look like there’s a provision in there to let Drake release his material for free.

It’s a shame though that Universal’s reaction has to be so old school. Major labels now work within a new order that the world wide web imposed on the music industry landscape. Universal themselves have been aggressive in their campaigns against what they view as illegal filesharing. GroupM, a global media investment firm which works as a media buyer with Universal, recently unveiled a new aggressive, corporate strategy to combat music piracy. The practice will prevent advertisers from placing content onto sites that GroupM has identified as featuring or hosting illegal content and the company has already identified over 2,000 “offenders” all over the net. While the document, which can be viewed here, contains a number of obvious offenders”all of the major filehosting sites like mediafire, rapishare and megaupload along with sketchily-named domains from far off lands like India and Russia”the number of legitimate sites is troubling as well. Plenty of respectable blogs like Earmilk, Nah Right, 2dopeboyz and other online music destinations like mixtape-hosting hub Datpiff and blog aggregator The Hype Machine are all included on this list which means that all of these sites are going to be withheld advertising dollars as a result. Perhaps the most damning inclusion on the list is Thisis50.com, the personal entertainment site of Interscope rapper 50 Cent, linked to by the rapper in his official Facebook page and in the banner on his own official Web site. Obviously Universal is not out to stifle the careers of their artists but these examples show how combating online piracy has unintended collateral damage.

And that’s why this is such a problem for Drake. He’s an artist whose career was built on the waves of blog buzz. After all, his fanbase was initially built through MySpace, and his breakthrough single “Best I Ever Had” was featured on the beloved-by-blogs free mixtape So Far Gone. There has been talk that the tracks Drake released in the past few weeks were originally slated for a mixtape release themselves but it appears that whatever release these tracks may have originated from has been scrapped. So, the logical next step for a blog built artist? Give his fanbase a taste to whet their appetite. But it looks like those snacks may have left a number of people with an upset stomach.

This is not the end of this fight by a long shot. Just another salvo, another conflict between the creative class and the corporate world. Not that one could work without the other.