Impact of digitalization on hip-hop

Hip-hop has grown into one of the most popular genres of music over the last decade. It is now being acknowledged as a mainstream genre of music, instead of the underground movement it once was. Hip-hop is not just a musical genre but also a cultural art form, that is used to express the experiences of marginalization and inequality by African-Americans and other minorities. Although hip-hop always has been popular among the youth, it seems to have increased significant popularity among millennials. This growth partly came from the rise of streaming platforms, which is a consequence of the digitalization of the music industry. Digitalization is the adoption of digital technology by industries, organizations, and countries. This phenomenon seems to has various implications for the music industry, as it appears to affect its distribution, consumption, business model, profitability, and more. The effect of digitalization on the music industry has been frequently researched over the years, but is limitedly been studied for hip-hop. As the growing popularity of hip-hop has led to its commercialization, critique started to arise regarding its lyrical content and musical production. As the commercialization of hip-hop partly arose from the digitalization of the music industry, there seems to be a link between the impact digitalization has on the music industry and the changing character of hip-hop. Based on this, the research question of this study was: ‘How do industry professionals in hip-hop understand the consequences of digitalization of the music industry for the genre of hip-hop? ’ Due to the explorative nature of this study, a qualitative content analysis was conducted on interviews from various talk shows and podcasts, which featured high-profile industry professionals of the hip-hop community. The interviews were analyzed by using thematic analysis, which showed that the digitalization of the music industry had an impact on the business dynamics, artistic choices, and social relevance of hip-hop. For the business dynamics, digitalization seemed to have led to the necessity of having multiple revenue streams as independent/sub-tier artists or producers, since the income from streaming is perceived to be insufficient to stay profitable. Additionally, the 360 deal seems to have encouraged the bundling of album sales with merchandise and tour tickets, as labels seem to struggle with generating significant income from streaming as well. In terms of the artistic choices in hip-hop, digitalization seems to have changed the art and use of sampling, as there has been a decrease in songs that are consisting of samples, along with the opportunity to dig for samples online instead of record stores. Additionally, there seem to be contradicting views regarding the effect of digitalization on the length of an album and a trend of artists being more-single driven than album-driven. At last, the impact digitalization has on the social relevance of hip-hop, was observed by the lower valuation and use of lyricism among the younger generation of rap artists. Furthermore, digitalization has led to hip-hop being consumed without its cultural context and a change in its image.