You have to admit Fifty with the tear drop is the funniest thing that’s ever happened in hip hop. Point blank period. I think it’s right up there with Jigga plastering ballerina P all over the summer jam screen years back. See what people are afraid to admit is Fifty knows how to market. He is the greatest promoter rap has ever seen. How else can you explain how he got everyone in G-Unit platinum plaques (except Yayo, who for the record isn’t that bad)?

The B*tches F*ck with Me cause I’m a Paperchaser

I know a lot of you knuckle heads don’t want to give Fifty his due, cause homie is mad arrogant, but who wouldn’t be with over a hundred mill in the bank? My boy was arguing with me the other day saying no one he knows listens to Fifty, except me. His argument was that if no one but me listens to Fifty than he must not be hot. Now I’m not saying Fifty is the hottest right now, I’d probably say the hottest rapper right now at this moment is Lil Wayne, but any head who has listened to the “Bodysnatchers” tape knows this is the only decent chance eastcoasters have to listen to some “car music”. But anyway, it doesn’t matter if I’m the only person that listens to Fifty, because there’s one of me in every “group” and if there’s a million groups, that’s a lot of fans. And more importantly, the right kind of fans.

That Marketing Plan was Me

I really think the problem with Fifty getting his just due, is that people don’t understand marketing. The hip hop fan’s IQ seems to have fallen a few units over the last few years cause I can keenly remember whenever young Hov made headlines for some beef or something he said, the real heads just smiled because we knew it was brilliant marketing. See most people don’t know how to promote. They think promoting is standing in front of a huge crowd with a megaphone screaming, “Look at me, look at me, buy my product, buy my cd, buy my whatever”. This is nothing but NOISE and is not marketing.

The Cool

Marketing has always been about reaching the tastemakers (“the right fans”), the cool people or the “early adopters” in marketing speak, who will simply make a product cool enough so that the geeks, most of you reading this, want that product so bad you’ll pay three times the price of it to get it on ebay. 50 Cent made rap beefs cool in the early 2000s, but Jay-Z and Nas made it even cooler (remember every NY rapper was beefing with each other back then just to get attention?). Fifty’s brand gets attention for being funny, Jigga’s brand gets attention for being the coolest (word to Lupe). The similarity between both their brands is they both get attention and a lot of it. So does Lil Wayne.

The Elephant in the Brand

Fat Joe’s brand on the other hand is not as big as it really seems (no pun intended, haha no pun intended), because his album sales are horrible for the amount of “so-called” hit records he makes. It’s like all his marketing efforts are on par, or even with this last album, better than his peers, but he just can’t seem to convince the album buyers to convert -which means to buy albums. If I were Fat Joe, I would focus on my core audience instead of trying to dilute your brand by going from a southern bounce to a primo beat. But that begs the question who is Fat Joe’s core audience? The faithful Digging in the Crates heads left Joe along time ago, and the Latinos only like Reggaetone and have horrible taste in hip hop to be taken as a serious buying group. What that leaves Fat Joe with is the same fickle crowd that caused Fifty’s album sales to fall a whopping 9000%. Isn’t this why Fat Joe was dropped from the majors? Great way to paint yourself in a corner Joe, the funeral may be near.