Digital Ink Los Angeles

Canadian-born rapper Drake sold 600,000 downloads in the month of June, making him the most downloaded music from three pop charts at one time for this summer of 2009.

His current hit, “Da Best I Ever Had” is approaching #1 on many charts and is a certified summer crack bomb. With his current album release, his stock is rising quickly, but the most impressive thing about Drake is the deal he struck with Universal Music to distribute his tunes.

According to the LA Times:

“”They have given me one of the greatest situations in hip-hop,” Drake, 22, said of his team.

Under the unusually lucrative agreement he struck with Aspire/Young Money/Cash Money Records distributed through Universal, Drake received a $2-million advance. He retains the publishing rights to his songs and cedes only around 25% of his music sales revenues to the label as a “distribution fee,” his managers said. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of new artists sign financially restrictive “360 deals” that sap their touring and merchandise income and offer much more restrictive profit-sharing.

A dissection of how the rapper was able to drive such a hard bargain underscores an evolution in the music industry. At a time when CD sales have declined by 15% over last summer’s numbers and major labels remain more fixated on scoring hit singles than sustaining artist rosters, managers such as those working with Drake have stepped into the void to become king-makers in urban music.’

Read the rest of the LA Times article here.

Facebook is an interesting phenomena because it calls into question the dilemma of “Who was I then? Who am I now? Are they the same people?“

What would someone like Dick Cheney present to a potential Facebook buddy from years gone by? “Hey there! Long time no speak. Wanna go quail hunting sometime?”

Or, how about the ever-so-humbling experience of requesting a “friend” on Facebook, only to have them “ignore” your cordial advances. How could they? Don’t they know who I am? The horror and humility…

Or the Facebook gurus who seem to somehow track your every movement through posts and photos — the all-encompassing “Mobile Uploads” feature of Facebook, which allows the user to share every digitally captured moment with their Facebook “friends.”

Then, there’s a notion that Facebook is a manner of self-expression, a way of assessing one’s self-identity and letting the world know who you really are — safely ensconced in your home or apartment, bent over a keyboard, squinting at a computer screen, clicking on things like, “What Wild Animal Are You?“

Oh, the wonders of the Digital Age. We live. We learn. We Facebook. Wanna be my friend?

(cartoon by Dave Walker)