Hashim Warren followed up on my niche markets and the music industry post with some hip hop specific observations. I think a lot more could be said about niche markets and rap music, especially in the case of mixtapes, a focus for networking and street buzz creation on local and regional levels that preceded the rise of the Internet.

Hashim also posts about a new blog focused on product placement in hip hop videos called Strictly Business by someone known as Urbonics Media who currently profiles as a male in marketing based in Hyattsville, MD. Perhaps the lack of further identifying information is similar to the case of PROMOCOPY, who doesn’t reveal his or her identity because s/he works in the industry s/he’s covering. But Urbonics Media is a great name and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see the author open an independent shop using that name at some future date. If it was me and I had the cash, I’d service mark that sucker right away.

Wild speculation aside, in an initial post, Strictly Business is described as the “first blog dedicated to analyzing product placement in the world of hip hop videos” and that’s not hard to believe, given the specificity of the topic. SB name checks (without linking, shame on you!) Agenda Inc’s American Brandstand, a project that has tracked product placement in the lyrics of the Billboard Top 20 singles chart for 2003 and 2004. I’ll be checking out Agenda Inc.’s work quite a bit more in the near future. Although they aren’t tracking hip hop singles per se, hip hop’s dominance of the singles charts, plus the fact that hip hop artists and management are the kingly sluts of product placement, makes hip hop singles the de facto focus of their study.

Urbonics Media states that Strictly Business will fill a “diagnostic void by documenting and charting brand positioning in hip hop videos, in addition to providing comprehensive commentary and forecasts.” I look forward to future posts at this very new blog. I see from Hashim’s coverage that Urbonics Media is also Lazarus of Street Dreams whose social commentary is less than stellar, but that will not necessarily undermine his work at Strictly Business. I also see that Hashim is interpreting Strictly Business’ lists of products identified in videos as a claim that these are paid placements. Based on the evidence provided, these products simply appear in the video. It would be nice to see the actual deals tracked or insider information shared, but I imagine that would be quite a feat, since I doubt they’re being trumpeted as deals.

While we’re on the topic of Hashim it seems like a good time to discuss SOHH Blogs. I may have been the first to write about their existence during a stealth launch phase that I was simply lucky to discover, I mean, that my awesome search and discovery skills led me to uncover. In any case, I thought they’d officially go public by now but there are still no links from the SOHH homepage and no official announcements that I’ve seen. Testing time is over, y’all. It’s time to go public and reap the pr benefits before someone else beats you to the punch.

I’d ask Hashim about this but he was initially under some kind of media blackout about the project. If I hadn’t recognized his byline, I wouldn’t have much to go on at all, because the supposedly multiple writers aren’t identified in any official way and there are no email addresses posted that I can find. However, you can hover over the writers’ names when they make comments and figure out more about who they are, for example, hovering over Hashim gives you his main blog Hip Hop Blogs.

One of the main things that makes blogging a powerful social phenomenon is the emphasis on conversational networking. Bloggers talk about each other, they link to each other and they build each other through those conversations. By remaining in weak ass stealth mode, not posting any information and not linking to other blogs, SOHH basically forfeits that strength. This would lead me into a, possibly unfair, stupidity or incompetence rant but you can probably imagine where that would go.

But check this out, soon after the stealth launch, Hashim was apparently the first hip hop blogger on tv! Anybody with any sense would have taken that as the moment to officially go live and get multiple angles out of a story that includes the first group of hip hop bloggers at a major hip hop website and the first hip hop blogger on television. Not only is that hip hop news but it’s also blogging news at a time when major media is eating this stuff up. That incredible blunder on the part of SOHH management earns them the current ProHipHop WTF?!? award. Get it together, guys. Your moment is passing and your writers deserve better.

Worst case prediction: SOHH Blogs fail to meet management’s expectation and are cancelled due to lack of management support. For a supposedly “net-savvy” crew covered by Wired way back in 1997, SOHH seems to be handling this one like a major label who doesn’t know how to promote their new roster of recently independent artists.

Update: Please check out my followup on SOHH Blogs based on an interview with SOHH cofounder Felicia Palmer regarding their stealth approach to blogging. It actually makes much more sense than I ever would have imagined and I’m somewhat amazed she talked to me given the above comments.