Mashable Interviews Chamillionaire on the Digital Game

Mashable's Pete Cashmore interviews Chamillionaire and one can get a nice sense of Chamillionaire's strategic smarts.

Most of the interview is focused on the digital world and Chamillionaire says he studied that world as seriously as he studied mixtapes and the indie music scene.  Now he's studying stocks.

In describing his choice of social networks for marketing, Chamillionaire says he goes where the fans go:

"It's not even about me. I go to what they want."

Unfortunately Cashmore doesn't follow-up on Chamillionaire's statement that now folks are starting their own networks and moving away from the biggies like MySpace.  I'd love to hear Chamillionaire's thoughts on addressing that situation as a marketer.  I'm curious if he has some ideas beyond just following suit and starting your own.

Chamillionaire gets into a concern he has about how digital downloads are tracked and a Mashable writer describes it this way in the post:

"Chamillionaire also talks about how the music industry needs new metrics to determine what’s popular, since album sales are meaningless in the world of a la carte purchases via iTunes."

Actually Chamillionaire states that he's concerned that someone could download 9 of an album's 10 tracks individually from iTunes and it doesn't count as an album sale.  Well, they didn't buy the album and the iTunes downloads have already been included in all the relevant charts including the main singles charts.  So it's an interesting idea but determining what's popular in terms of downloads is well in hand and Chamillionaire certainly got chart credit for all those downloads.

But Chamillionaire's clearly puzzling out the details and thinking everything through in a serious manner that's impressing folks and makes him look quite solid going forward.

Via Nathan Driver.

Official Sites:
Chamillionaire
Chamillionaire @ MySpace

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