Kendrick Lamar‘s manager, Dave Free, participated in an interview with PIN-UP magazine last month.
In his feature, Dave talked about how he believes Lil Wayne‘s iconic mixtape run changed the music industry forever and why he gives him credit for that.
You can read exactly what the pgLang co-creator had to say about Weezy F Baby breaking the rules when it came to releasing freestyles for free on the Internet below!
Emmanuel Olunkwa: How has the development of technology influenced how you approach business? Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city came out in 2012, and shortly after that artists started to have these direct channels to their audiences through social media.
Dave Free: I started working in music in 2004. [Laughs.] And, when the thing that you’ve made meets the right moment for it to be distributed correctly because there’s a system and strategy in place, I call it the arrival. Before social media you couldn’t just throw stuff at the wall — music distribution was more traditional and there were many rules. Everything changed with the mixtape era and Lil Wayne, who we have to give a lot of credit to. He was the pinnacle of the Internet age because he broke the rules. It started with the freestyles he did with Sqad Up, which they released themselves — it broke the traditional distribution format of radio and physical unit sales and changed how artists could get their music heard. We were obviously also motivated by Jay-Z and Nas.
Kendrick has also had many compliments for Tunechi in the past, which you can catch up on here, here, here, and here (plus the video below).
Photo credit: Cécile Boko.
