At Howard University’s graduation ceremony, students got advice from a guest speaker unlike most given that honor: Sean Combs, or “P. Diddy,” a leading symbol of hip-hop artists turned businessmen.
Facing a sea of young people wearing blue gowns, the magnate of rap spoke on Saturday of the secret of his success.
“I decided to embrace the entrepreneur spirit of my dad, but in a honest way, in a legal way,” said Combs, whose father died in a drug deal gone wrong.
Sitting atop a personal fortune of US$700 million, “P. Diddy” is among a coterie of rapper businessmen who have gone from inner city streets to the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
The king of West Coast rap, Dr. Dre, could soon become hip-hop’s first billionaire, if a proposed sale of his headphone and music streaming company Beats to Apple goes through.
“It’s a great landmark. After all, it’s a deal with, by some measures, the greatest company in the world,” said Dan Charnas, author of the book The Big Payback. The History of the Business of Hip-Hop.
“But that would also make sense in the context of the rise of the hip-hop entrepreneurs,” Charnas added, referring to the long years hip-hop has spent knocking on the doors of US capitalism.
A deal reached nearly 30 years ago between the now legendary record label Def Jam and music giant Columbia paved the way.
However, it did not immediately erase the wariness of the establishment toward this African-American urban culture.
It took until the mid 2000s to see the kings of hip-hop sign lucrative deals turning their personal brands into very big money.
“Why would the mainstream understand rock’n’roll so easily, but then hip hop has to wait to have billion dollar deals” asked Steve Stoute, a former record label executive who founded the marketing company “Translation.”
In a sign of the changing times the magazine Forbes now publishes a wealth ranking specifically for the fortunes of hip-hop artists, which do not stem only from music.
The richest of all of them is P. Diddy, who founded his own record label, Bad Boy Records, but also established a line of clothing (Sean John), signed a partnership with the vodka brand Ciroc and launched a music channel, Revolt TV.
Following the success of his album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ rapper 50 Cent made a bundle by investing in Vitaminwater, which was bought out by Coca-Cola in 2007 for US$4.1 billion.
The seasoned businessman Jay-Z has also built an empire, including a clothing line and a stake in an NBA basketball team.
However, he says having an entrepreneurial spirit was more a necessity than a choice for hip-hop performers.
“We went to every single label and every label shut their door on us. The genius thing that we did was that we didn’t give up,” he said at an event with investment guru Warren Buffett in March last year.
Faced with plummeting revenues, the recording industry was no longer in a position to snub a commercial tidal wave.
“I think that the best thing that happened to hip-hop was teenagers having posters of these artists on their wall. They wanted to dress like these guys, singing the song in the house. It forced everybody to pay attention,” said Stoute, who produced an album for Eminem.
As a big money heavy weight, the business of hip-hop has set aside the angry social claims of pioneers like Public Enemy.
“Hip-hop long ago made peace with commercialism. In America, political hip-hop is nowhere,” Charnas said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion