Global Hip Hop Studies - It’s Where You’re @: Hip Hop and the Internet, Nov 2021

Through interviews and participant observation, this article examines the emotional and relational labour of emerging female rap musicians and video models who have significant social media followings and create sexually explicit content for the subscription platform OnlyFans. Findings indicate that respondents felt conflicted in potentially exacerbating stereotypes about women in hip hop music, but also as sexual performers they felt empowered by taking ownership of racial stereotypes, their safety during interactions with men and how their bodies were commodified for pay. Ultimately, this study introduces insights on the digital evolution of hip hop culture’s relationship with sex work and reveals newfound ideological tensions faced by Black women rappers who are using sexual dance economies to adopt new direct-to-consumer business models on the internet (particularly on social media) to self-promote, sustain and develop their careers.

This article examines how hip hop heads in marginalized, Black, low-income neighbourhoods in a town in South Africa make use of ‘grey’ pirate internet infrastructure from the Global South to create distribution platforms for their music. In this ethnographic study, hip hop heads from the town of Makhanda, who cannot afford the bandwidth to use graphic-intensive sites such as ReverbNation or SoundCloud, come up with innovative ways to hack and extend the limitations of their own low-bandwidth internet distribution infrastructure. To do so they not only move media offline onto various digital devices in innovative ways but also use online solutions from the Global South developed for less-connected users like themselves. This includes the file-drop platform DataFileHost, the ‘Wap’ platform Wapka and various forms of translocal pavement internet involving WhatsApp distribution. As digital pioneers in their communities, these hip hop heads showcase innovation from below by cobbling together translocal digital spaces that incorporate grey pirate platforms. Since they exist outside of the public, algorithmically monitored channels of the internet, these spaces remain outside of the mainstream centralized global media flows and exemplify ‘pirate modernity’ in the Global South. They point to the deep infrastructural inequalities between and inside countries and the need for building a more inclusive internet where no-one is exiled to the low-bandwidth, mostly off internet outposts of the less-connected. While pirate platforms form part of an interim innovative solution to help connect communities, their ephemeral nature means that the music archives created by these hip hop communities remain precarious and under constant threat of being lost forever.

As a large marketplace of royalty-free samples, the music platform Splice has worked to centralize and open up the process of hip hop production to over 4 million users, varying from beginning bedroom producers to established producers like Turbo (who has worked on tracks for artists including Young Thug, Gunna and Lil Baby). Founded by sound engineer Matt Aimonetti and GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci in 2013, Splice experienced extreme growth during the COVID-19 pandemic as more aspiring producers took up beat-making from home. Hip hop producers have long used the internet to exchange and sell samples for beat production through direct messaging, sample blogs and sample marketplaces. While these digital exchanges have enabled quicker collaboration and accessibility for producers, they have also set the groundwork for companies like Splice to have an unprecedented influence in musical interactions and activity. Online platforms geared towards hip hop production and beat-making are becoming increasingly critical to the music industry, offering an important opportunity to examine digital creative economies and the platformization of cultural production. Splice incorporates features such as curation and algorithmic recommendation of samples to aid creators in their production process. Through interviews with producers who use Splice and a critical analysis of the platform’s user experience, this article demonstrates that producers can feel the need to strike a balance when engaging with the platform, finding ways to use automated tools that make their work more efficient while simultaneously striving to maintain high standards of individual creativity and technical skills. This suggests that it is necessary to have a nuanced understanding of Splice’s impact on music production and how it differs from streaming platforms because of its particular logics and functionalities geared towards music creators as a primary userbase.