Q-Tip in Newsweek on the Music Industry

Seth Colter Walls gets some nice quotes from Q-Tip regarding the music industry, album sales and quality music:

"Their model for getting numbers is broken...They realize it, but they don't have any solutions. They all seem shook...A&R departments need people who really know music. That way, they can make records that last a long time, because eventually it's going to be about the whole catalog selling again. Especially in these hard times, people want to make sure that their dollar is going to something that's worth something."

Though such thinking may not work for big labels, it helps indicate why Q-Tip's brand remains quite strong.

On the other hand, though I'm happy to see MSM coverage of Q-Tip, the unfortunate desire of journalists to produce literature leads to an attempt at tying Q-Tip to Orson Welles cause they both had industry problems and both can be discussed as pop culture that could also be considered high art.  Which leads to a misleading headline, probably written by somebody else based on the opening paragraph, and informs the problematic conclusion regarding Q-Tip's planned release of Kamaal the Abstract:

"If hip-hop fans pay for a record that's been a near legend as a bootleg for more than seven years, then Q-Tip will not only have served as a past and present innovator, but also changed pop's future business model in the new century, too."

That doesn't even make any sense and I'll leave it at that but whoever wrote the headline, "Rap Music's Orson Welles", get this week's ProHipHop WTF!?! Award.