Mixtape Monday's Best of 2007 & Mixtape Analysis

The Mixtape Monday crew present their Best of 2007 and look at this year's changes in the mixtape game:

On January 16, the underground industry's biggest star, DJ Drama, was arrested along with his partner, Don Cannon, after the Feds raided their Atlanta office in conjunction with the Recording Industry Association of America...It's hard to believe that almost a year later, Drama hasn't even been indicted on the charges...

In the aftermath of Drama's bust, DJs and artists embraced technology more than ever by transmitting their music directly to their fans via MySpace and their personal Web sites. As a result, record labels, bootleggers and distributors were left out of the equation, and the relationship between artists and fans was never purer...No MC benefited more from this new, streamlined process than Lil Wayne...Weezy delivered to the Net a flood even Moses would have had a hard time navigating. Every week (at times, it seemed, every day) the Cash Money star had a new, buzzworthy mixtape being pumped out of computer speakers.

That Wayne was from New Orleans only cemented (once again) the South's takeover of hip-hop. The usual New York mainstays have been missing from our Mixtape Monday list...But with independent albums selling as many units as major-label projects, while Internet-only videos are making it into MTV rotation, the mixtape world is as fluid as ever. Who could have predicted at this time last year that Soulja Boy would be nominated for a Grammy Award?

Did Soulja Boy even exist this time last year?

I thought he was vat bred by YouTube.