http://33jones.com 33jones blog -- Beats, Rhymes and Life en-us Copyright 2018 Thirty Three Jones. All Rights Reserved. Thu, 30 Apr 26 15:51:28 GMT
I was watching a truck commercial the other day, one of those "this vehicle will restore your pride in America" joints that could just as easily be advertising a mass-produced beer while something that sounds vaguely like hip hop plays underneath, and I found myself trying to identify the track. Not because I liked it. Because I couldn't tell if it was made by a person, a marketing team, or AI. It's a question that doesn't just apply to commercial hip hop jingles, it's something that could be asked of virtually every type of media these days, but we gotta lock in and stay focused here.

What Is Sync Music, and Why Does It Pay

Sync licensing is the business of pairing music with moving images: TV shows, films, commercials, trailers, video games, social media campaigns, and the loading screens of apps you use twice and forget to delete. The "sync" in the name refers to the synchronization license that grants the right to match a piece of music to a specific visual. Pair that with a master use license (to use the actual recording), and you've got the legal paperwork that puts a song in a Chase Bank ad.

The money is real. A placement in a major car commercial or network TV show can generate anywhere from $15,000 to $500,000 in upfront sync fees alone. That's before performance royalties that come from things like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC every time the content airs. A song that lands in a documentary picked up by Netflix, or an ESPN highlight reel that runs for two years straight, can throw off five-figure royalty checks long after the artist has moved on to their next project. The global sync licensing market is somewhere north of two billion dollars annually, and unlike streams, where you need approximately the population of a small country to listen to your song before you can pay rent, a single sync placement can change an independent artist's financial situation overnight.

This is why there are entire agencies, libraries, and careers built around making music specifically for this purpose. Not music that gets synced. Music that is designed to be synced.

The Hip Hop Angle

For obvious reasons - energy, rhythm, cultural cachet, the fact that the word "hip hop" now functions as shorthand for "modern" in every brand guideline ever written - hip hop has become a dominant force in the sync world. Go to any sports broadcast, any fitness app, any startup pitch deck with a video attached to it, and you will hear something that has the shape of hip hop. Drums that knock. A chopped loop. An 808. Maybe a hook that sounds vaguely motivational without saying anything you could actually quote back.


If you're looking to hear some examples of this, Vo Williams is near the top of the sync music industry and has built an entire career in this lane. His tracks have appeared in NFL Films, ESPN montages, movie trailers, and the kind of content where someone is running up a mountain and achieving something. The production is clean, cinematic, emotionally manipulative in exactly the way a picture editor needs, and entirely instrumental or lyrically vague enough to not step on whatever message the client is trying to deliver. It's a shrewd business-over-art decision, and he's certainly executed well on it.

If you want a deeper look at how this ecosystem works - the relationships between artists, supervisors, and the brands that pay the bills - this recent episode of Vox's Today Explained is worth 30 minutes of your time: The Secret Soundtrack to Your Life.

Enter the Slop

But things in the sync world started to get disrupted over the past 18 months or so. Everything I just described about sync-designed hip hop - the functional emotion, the purposeful vagueness, the interchangeable energy - is also an accurate description of what AI music generation tools are producing right now. Platforms like Suno and Udio can generate a "cinematic hip hop beat with motivational energy" (a prompt I give you permission to use, go for it) in twelve seconds. No publishing split, no master rights, no artist to pay. Just a prompt and a download.

The sync market noticed. Subscription libraries like Epidemic Sound and Artlist which were already pushing the "unlimited royalty-free music" model that undercut traditional sync fees for lower-budget placements are now integrating AI generation tools into their platforms. Which means the next wave of influencers/youtubers/content creators don't need someone like Vo Williams, they just need a text box and an entry level understanding of English. The decision for content creators isn't whether to choose AI music vs. good music. It's "AI music vs. music that was never created for the sake of art anyway." Sync-designed hip hop was always operating as a product rather than art, purposefully stripped of the context, politics, and community that give the genre its actual meaning. AI just completes that process by removing the human .

But Let's Be Honest About How We Got Here

If you're waiting for the part where I tell you hip hop sold its soul to sync licensing, I'm going to have to disappoint you. That ship has been sailing since Run-DMC put on a pair of Adidas without laces and turned a product endorsement into a cultural statement (and then their label turned around and made sure they got paid for it, not Run-DMC). The corporate co-optation of hip hop is not a recent development. Jermaine Dupri wrote jingles. Diddy was building brands (and doing a lot of other stuff as well, as it turns out). Even the Clipse took a break from coke rap to help with Arby's branding. This is a genre that has been fighting for its soul against commerce since before most of the people now worried about AI were born. What's different now is the scale and the speed at which it can be commodified.

Jay-Z, Graffiti, and the Shrinking Definition

Which brings me to something that's been sitting with me since Jay-Z's recent interview where he waved graffiti off as a part of the culture.

Hip hop has five elements: DJing, MCing, Breaking, Graffiti, Knowledge. That's not an opinion; that's the framework that Afrika Bambaataa (RIP) articulated as a way to give young people in the Bronx a structure that wasn't crime or drugs. Graffiti is the one element on that list that is categorically impossible to monetize through a label deal, a sync license, or a streaming payout. You can't put it on Spotify. You can't put it in a car commercial. It exists in public space, without permission, and belongs to the people who made it.

So when one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the history of hip hop suggests on a major platform that maybe graffiti isn't really part of the thing, what he's actually doing is redrawing the map around the money. He's not wrong that hip hop is bigger than any one of its elements. But the choice of which element to minimize is telling. You don't accidentally forget the one that doesn't have a revenue model.

It's not an entirely surprising take from a man that has done more for the business of hip hop than almost anyone alive. He is a "business, man!" let's not forget. But the business and the culture are not the same thing, and the merger of those two definitions - which sync music quietly accelerates, and which AI slop will eventually complete - is worth calling out.

Hip hop was born in a specific place, out of a specific set of material conditions, by people who had been systematically excluded from the economic structures that are now paying very good money to license its aesthetic. The soul didn't leave the music when it started making money. But it gets a little harder to find that soul every time someone opens a prompt box and types "motivational hip hop, 120 BPM, no lyrics" and drops it into the background of some mindless slop video or commercial.

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1488 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Wed, 22 Apr 26 09:20:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1488#comments

I'm still here, just hibernating in the underground for a bit.

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1487 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Fri, 19 Aug 22 09:18:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1487#comments
In lieu of an image of an NFT to kick this post off, I thought a Bobby Digital album made as much sense.

In 2017, as part of a 24-hour engineering contest, I developed a cryptocurrency token for StockX, an online market and reseller of sneakers among other things (and a company that has some music industry connections, with investment money coming in from Eminem, Scooter Braun, Steve Aoki, and Marky Mark Wahlberg). The coin in this case was tied to a physical good (a pair of verified sneakers), and allowed users to track the chain of ownership from when it was sold, to its verification by StockX, to its receipt by the purchaser. The purpose of this was to help eliminate the market for bogus resellers who were making duplicates of the StockX verification tag and selling fake sneakers to StockX users. This past week, StockX announced they were offering NFTs with a very similar setup that I'd like to think I inspired.

I mention all of that because, hey, maybe you're looking for a guy who can write a blog post once every 3 months at the same time as architecting whatever blockchain project you've been dreaming up in your head. Or, more importantly in the context of this post, maybe you're an artist that is trying to understand whether "the blockchain" is something that can help your career and my resume might be enough to convince you that I have some idea of what I'm talking about.

So the purpose of this post is not to turn you into an expert on all things crypto, my goal is really just to provide a basic description of some of the key pieces of the crypto world and hopefully make a case for why you, the independent artist, should consider looking into it further. And I appreciate that learning a technology that has baffled many people who have a career in I.T. may be a daunting request for a musician, but I'd also point out that the music industry has had to adapt to a major technology change every 5-10 years at least since the 80's, and the artists that are the quickest to adapt to it are often the artists that find the most success. Just going back a couple of decades, think about these milestones:

• Late 90's - The conversion to digital music and mp3s (Duran Duran was the first to sell an mp3
• Early 2000s - Marketing on Social Media (Arctic Monkeys defined their career by releasing their first single on MySpace)
• Early 2010s - Streaming (Drake made over $50million this past year on straeming sales)
• 2020s - Meme Music (TikTok has helped break new artists, and helped spark sales in the music catalogs of bands that haven't released new music in decades)

The music industry already seems to be taking its first steps into adapting cryptocurrency and specifically NFTs. Though it didn't go as smoothly as he would have liked, Nas sold the royalty rights to two of his new songs. And if you spend any time at all on Instagram, you've likely seen numerous musicians pitch the NFT "artwork" that they're either selling or buying (Jay-Z, for example, uses his NFT as his profile pic). As with any new technology, there's a lot of opportunity for scammers and grifters to make some money off of the ignorance of others, but there are also some legitimate use cases for it. To me, the biggest opportunity is tying royalty rights and ownership of a song through the secure contracts that NFTs allow for.

I am in the early stages of a new project trying to leverage NFTs exactly for that reason, and I could write pages more on the topic. For today though, I just want to define a few key terms with the hopes that might give you enough info to go out and start learning on your own:

• NFT - Non-Fungible Token, a cryptocurrency-based token whose chain of ownership is tracked through the blockchain. In plain english, it is a unique identifier tied to a digital or physical item that cannot be stolen or copied but can be transferred or sold to others by the owner.
• Fungible Token - an item or currency that can be exchanged for similar items without losing value. The primary example is cash (ex. I can give you a one dollar bill in exchange for 4 quarters from you, and we both still walk away with the same amount of money even if the overall value of one u.s. dollar changes)
• Blockchain - Digital ledgers that track crypto currency coins and tokens. The blockchain is used to identify the current owner of any given crypto currency token, and when that token is sold or transferred it is recorded on the blockchain. Due to the way that the blockchain is built, you can be fully confident that no one can steal or duplicate the token.
• Gas - Gas is what it costs to complete a transaction on a blockchain. This is important because while you may price an item for $X, the buyer will also have to pay the gas cost on top of that like they would a sales tax. Depending on the crypto currency involved - ethereum in most cases for NFTs at this point - this could be tens or hundreds of dollars.
• Metaverse - An online world that you can participate in with a digital avatar (a digital representation of yourself). There are a handful of metaverses currently, with Facebook's upcoming meta universe likely to be the largest once it launches. Metaverses are expected to be the primary location to display any art/music/etc NFTs that one owns.
• Avatar - A digital representation of yourself in the metaverse. Essentially it's your character that you move around in, the way you might control a character in a video game.
• Verchandise - Virtual Merchandise, a branded digital item tied to an NFT, which a musician or artist sells to their fanbase. As an example, the the metaverse platform Decentraland, you might sell a virtual tshirt with your logo on it to one of your fans, who would then have their digital avatar wear the shirt in the metaverse.
• Bitcoin - A crypto currency whose primary purpose is to track ownership. Meaning a bitcoin itself does not do anything other than identify its owner.
• Ethereum - A crypto currency that not only can track ownership but also can have an action or "contract" tied to it. For any coin you create using Ethereum (or many of the other new forms of crypto currency), you can have it run code that you write any time a certain action happens, like when you transfer it to a new person. So as an example, I could create an Ethereum-based coin that pays out a royalty to the original creator of the coin every time it is transferred to a new owner. A real-world application of this might be to say every time an nft tied to an mp3 is resold, some percentage of that coin is transferred back to the original creator.

As you may have seen, the crypto market is currently in a bit of a crash (along with the stock market). I won't take the time in this post to talk through the financial pros and cons of trying to invest in it right now, but it is worth mentioning some of the potential forces driving the NFT market in particular since I am here pitching the idea that NFTs are worth pursuing. It is something of a joke at the moment that a random picture of a cartoon ape can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. There are a few possible reasons why the prices on NFTs are astronomically high at the moment:

• People truly believe the artwork they're buying is worth the money they're paying for. Seems unlikely, but barring evidence otherwise it can't be discounted.
• Investors who have a lot of money tied up in cryptocurrency don't have an easy way to use it. Bitcoin, as an example, has made some folks multi millionaires on paper, but it is not easy to convert large chunks of bitcoin into currency that's usable for purchasing real world items. It is not too difficult, however, to move those bitcoins into other crypto coins that can then be used pretty easily to purchase NFTs. For some, diversifying within cryptocurrency is a slightly safer approach than keeping all of your money in bitcoin.
• It's a way to launder money. Let's say you've made a million dollars from some sort of criminal activity - it's hard to put that money to use without drawing some attention from the IRS. I'll spare you the full breakdown on how to launder money, but creating an NFT and then selling it to yourself for some absurd amount of money would be one way to do it and due to the nature of cryptocurrency it wouldn't be obvious that you were both the seller and the buyer.

I don't know if any of the above adequately explain the amount of money Quavo has allegedly made off of his NFTs, but the uncertainty around what is driving the NFT market suggests there is a pretty limited amount of time that they'll be worth as much as they are today. So if you want to act quickly you might still be able to use NFTs as an avenue for a quick shot at becoming a millionaire, but I think the longer term play here is to leverage NFTs for a way of ensuring you are able to keep and track the ownership of the digital music you are creating.

That's my sales pitch for today, if anyone is interested in moving forward on a project like this please hit me up!

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1486 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Sun, 23 Jan 22 09:02:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1486#comments Alpha and Omega (Feat. Love, Ulysses) by Alex Ludovico & Jason Griff

Booster shot got me feeling like I caught everything from the Alpha to the Omicron Omega variants all at once, but my ears are still working enough to appreciate how good this one is. Hot off the digital presses from Ludo, Ulysses and Griff, this synchs quite nicely with the Pfizer-enhanced fever dreams I'm currently navigating through. Time to crawl back into my own personal Station Eleven until the new year, see y'all in 2022.

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1485 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Fri, 31 Dec 21 09:01:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1485#comments

Career Crooks (aka Small Pro and Zilla Rocca) have a new album out. It's dope. Benicio Del Toro is not only the standout track of the album, it's one of my favorite songs to come out at least since the clocks turned back.

Go buy the album, cop a corduroy hat for your undercover underground rap head Dad, and a cassette or two as Christmas gifts.

And since Zilla quoted it in the song, here's the original source of, "I don't even rhyme no more, I explain [the rules of the game]:"



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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1484 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Sun, 5 Dec 21 09:01:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1484#comments

If you aren't up on NORE's Drink Champs show, you should really get familiar with it. I'm sure he's breaking a whole lot of journalism protocols with his approach to interviewing, but he has a knack for getting some great stories out of his guests. One of the best episodes is a recent one with MC Serch, a guy who refers to himself as the Forrest Gump of hip hop and makes a pretty strong case for the title. The episode covers a ton of ground - from dropping the science on the infamous "Serchlight Publishing" line on Takeover to talking through the importance of owning your own publishing - but what caught my attention was the names he called out as new rappers that he's most interested in. This is a guy who has had a hand in signing some of the greatest emcees of all time, Nas being at the top of the list, so he's got a proven track record. So I pulled up a couple songs from the rappers that he name dropped:


First up is S.U.R.F., a 21 year old out of Atlanta. I've never been a huge fan of auto-tuned choruses, but his actual rapping is legit and has me bookmarking his bandcamp page for future releases.


SURF is still very much under the radar, but Serch's second pick OT The Real has a bit higher profile in part thanks to his 2020 song God's House getting the attention of Shaq. You can check for all of the Philly-based rappers music over at his IG page.

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1483 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Sun, 12 Sep 21 09:00:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1483#comments
If you're still checking for this site, you're likely aware of the "origin story" of 33jones. While not literally true if you go by the domain registration date, in many ways today is the 20th anniversary of the site. My brother and I regrouped at our parents' house a few days after 9/11 and had this idea that we could build this site into something profitable enough to keep us from having to work in Manhattan ever again. Mission not quite accomplished, and on a less somber day I'll take some time to talk through the highs and the lows of the past two decades of this site. In the meantime if you really want to revisit the past, here's the last time I wrote about it on the 5th anniversary.

For today, I wanted to do two things: take a minute to remember the great folks that we lost that day, and, in keeping with the theme of this site, do something music related. The latter is easier, so let's tackle that first. There were a ton of songs that came out in the post-911 environment, from cash grabs to truly heartfelt efforts, but Petey Pablo's Raise Up is the one song that I always associate with it. The song had come out just a couple of weeks before 9/11, and despite it being from the south the song was getting constant play on Hot 97 at the time in between Aaliyah tributes. Pablo eventually tried to cash in on the moment by doing a "patriotic" remix of the song, but this is the version that, for better or worse, brings me back to that specific moment in 2001. I vividly remember it playing in my car as I raced over to my mom's house to find out if my dad had gone into work that day (thankfully he was travelling for work that day rather than going to his office at WTC).

More importantly, as I try to do every time this year I want to shout out the friends I lost on 9/11. I wish I could've seen you all in your forties, I'm sure you would be doing amazing things. Peace to Bryan, Kevin, Al, Welles, Kevin, and Amy. Miss you all a lot.

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1482 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Sat, 11 Sep 21 07:30:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1482#comments
The Elohim - The Sharpening Stone

Since we last broke bread during the Pox-eclipse of the Vandals and Visigoths, several of you have bravely crossed into Tomorrow Morrow Land, guided by messenger RNA and other magic, and begun living your best lives, reviving the indoor dining industry, and breathing that Perri-air like it's all good once again. Me, I stay locked down in my cave, banging on this keyboard like an infinite monkey in an attempt to find the next great brick-and-mortar game store and become a Robinhood trillionaire (plug time: go check out my half finished project stoxxer.com, tell a friend!).

So yeah, I've been busy. You have too, I bet. But there are a couple of great new projects that have forced me to risk contamination and emerge from my protective bubble just long enough to ramble on a bit and broadcast some links, and I assure you they are worth finding time in your own busy schedule to listen to.

First up is an instrumental album from The Elohim, a production crew of Biblical proportions made up of 33jones fam Bless1 and newcomer Castro. You would never guess after listening to it that this very polished 7 track release called Sharp Metal Objects is the first thing Castro has ever put out. The album would work incredibly well as the score to a high budget crime flick, but is also a great one to load up into your headphones and help you feel like a badass right before you jump into your daily standup Zoom call and tell us all what TPS reports you plan to get done today. The lead track off of the album is The Sharpening Stone, linked up at the top of this post, but every track on here is strong enough to stand on its own.

For all of the many ways you can consume this album, go to The Elohim's link page over here: The Elohim Stream links

In equally important news, the day one homie Zilla Rocca has teamed up with the day one-and-a-half homie Alex Ludovico to release a brand new album, Cocaine & Therapy as a joint release under Insubordinate Records and Three Dollar Pistol. This is hot off the presses - I've had time to listen to it all of once - but just on the strength of everything they've put out over the past decade combined with the 60 or so minutes I've taken to digest the album, I am more than confident enough to recommend you go stop whatever it is you're doing (I mean, what you're doing is reading this so maybe don't stop until you finish up here. yaddadimean and all that.) and go check it out. The first single from the album is Hitters On Deck:



Zilla and the Insubordinate crew have become really good at creating merchandise, and this album release is no exception. There are hats, shirts, hell Ludo might even offer up some actual Cocaine-based therapy if you buy enough copies and can make your way down to Nashville. It all looks legit, so if you have a few bucks to spare go cop some of that too:

Physical copies of the album and Cocaine & Therapy t-shirts can be had at Insubordinate Records.

If digital is more your thing, you can buy a virtual copy of the album (which comes with a free copy of the classic Weak Stomach EP) and a pretty slick shirt over at Three Dollar Pistol.

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1481 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Fri, 2 Apr 21 19:30:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1481#comments
Flee Lord featuring Eto and Billy V - Mac in the Engine

I took the words home and thought them through. I even wrote a book report on it. But it's safe to say that I've reached a point in my life that, barring a Book of Job level change in fortune, I'm unlikely to become a victim of the war going on outside that no man is safe from. And yet, even in my advanced age fully settled into the suburbs, there are still times when hearing some dude rap through the various ways he is going to commit acts of violence in a heavy New York accent hits my ears in a way that nothing else can.

There are only so many times I can listen to Infamous in a day, though, so hearing that Prodigy's one-time mentee Flee Lord had put out a tribute to him ("In the Name of Prodigy") featuring beats from Havoc was about as good a Christmas gift as I could have asked for. It's got features from Raekwon, Busta, Prodigy's daughter, and a handful of other rappers that should be familiar to anyone who is still keeping up with that ol' NY sound. It's a quick ten tracks, all of them are easy listening, and well worth your time if you at all a fan of Mobb Deep. You can check out the full thing on Spotify.

And while I'm still in a NY State of Mind today, here's an older clip from one of Flee Lord's affiliates Eto:


Lil Eto and V Done - Live Today

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1480 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Sun, 27 Dec 20 19:30:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1480#comments The Mecca - Nas, Dave East, Styles P, Remy Ma, Ghostface, Radha Blank

So maybe this is due to the fact that I am just not checking for hip hop blogs these days (no shots, y'all are great, it's just that the five minutes during the day that I get between work and preventing a one year old child from deliberately concussing himself are spent reclaiming the remnants of my sanity), but I completely missed one of the best rap-related movies of recent memory and I'm surprised I haven't heard more about it. Hell, the fact that the soundtrack includes a song with Ghost, Nas and Styles P on it would have been enough to bring down Wordpress' servers back in the day. And while I'm sure that someone can point me to dozens of articles about Radha Blank's The Forty Year Old Version, my only exposure to it prior to sitting down and watching it was the Netflix blurb that didn't really do the movie justice.

If Netflix had described The Forty Year Old Version as a movie about a Brooklynite from the "Golden Age" generation trying to start a music career, they'd have gotten my view from day one. That likely would have turned off some of its targeted audience, but hey, you gotta make some sacrifices to catch my attention. Rather than try to write some sort of review of the movie, I'll just throw up the trailer to it:

The Forty Year Old Version - Trailer

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]]> http://33jones.com/blogentry.asp?EID=1479 mrjones@33jones.com (Fresh) Sat, 19 Dec 20 19:30:00 GMT http://33jones.com/blogentrymobile.asp?EID=1479#comments