Diggin' In The Digits

For Episode 2 of "Diggin' In The Digits", we talk about music reviewing and music criticism. 

In a perfect world, the average music consumer and the professional music critic would always be on the same page and could even see each other's viewpoint clearly when both looking at a body of work. But obviously, that's a rare thing.

We dive into several angles for this one. Starting with Ben's statistics on average review scores for a handful of artists and the disparities between professional critics and the casual person that hops on Metacritic. 

We then get into biases, can professional critics be truly objective? Should they be 100% objective? Or should they make more effort in putting their own individual flavour on their reviews as YouTube music critics do? How has Hip-Hop music criticism changed since the days of the "5 Mic Reviews"? And how do we ourselves review music? Charlie presents his "10 Into 2's" system and Ben takes a trip down memory lane where he actually dabbled in being a professional critic.

We go down a lot of avenues in this one, so strap in for this 55 minutes deep dive into music criticism and the "dah-ta" surrounding it.

Thanks for listening. Below are the Social accounts for all parties involved. Be sure to let us know that you're supporting us!

Music - "Pizza And Video Games" by Bonus Points (Thanks to Chillhop Records for the right to use)

HHBTN (Twitter & IG) - @HipHopNumbers
5E (Twitter & IG) - @5thElement_UK
5E Community Discord
ChillHop (Twitter) - @Chillhopdotcom
Bonus Points (Twitter) - @BonusPoints92

Other Podcasts Under The 5EPN:
"What's Good?" W/ Charlie Taylor
In Search of Sauce
Black Women Watch...
5EPN Radio
The Beauty Of Independence

For the first episode of DITD, we wanted to take a deep dive into the numbers for Nipsey Hussle, who was recently taken from us.

Ben delivers three sets of statistics to highlight how great Nipsey was, not from a music standpoint, but from a marketing and a business standpoint. 

Topics in the episode include Nipsey's selling practices early in his career, the percentage of conscious bars he laid down on his debut Studio Album "Victory Lap" and also how many motivational bars he dropped on the same album.

We also link the statistics to other notable albums that are hailed for their conscious message, categorising "flexing" and how hard it is to have the grassroots business practices that Nipsey has now popularised in his untimely passing.

CORRECTION: In the section about Nipsey's "Crenshaw" mixtape making $100k in 1 day, it was said an artist would need to sell 95k albums first week, the equivalent of 144 million streams, to make $100k. These numbers are under the assumption an artist makes about 10% of each album sale under a label contract. If an artist is independent and earns every dollar from an album sale, they would need 9.5k sales in 1 day, equivalent to 14.2 million streams.

Thanks for listening. Below are the Social accounts for all parties involved. Be sure to let us know that you're supporting us!

Music - "Pizza And Video Games" by Bonus Points (Thanks to Chillhop Records for the right to use)

HHBTN (Twitter & IG) - @HipHopNumbers
5E (Twitter & IG) - @5thElement_UK
5E Community Discord
ChillHop (Twitter) - @Chillhopdotcom
Bonus Points (Twitter) - @BonusPoints92

Other Podcasts Under The 5EPN:
"What's Good?" W/ Charlie Taylor
In Search of Sauce
Black Women Watch...
5EPN Radio
The Beauty Of Independence