The 50th Law - 50 Cent [61]
Once you have this system in place, you use it to cultivate relationships with your most reliable fiends. They supply you with valuable information about any kind of change in tastes that are happening. Talking to them you get all kinds of ideas for marketing schemes and new angles for hustling. You gain a feel for how they think. From this inside position, the whole game explodes into something creative and alive with possibility.
Curtis quickly incorporated this system and soon discovered that the drug fiends were not at all as he had imagined. They became erratic only when you were not consistent in your dealings with them. They valued convenience and fast transactions, wanted something new every now and then, and loved the thought of any kind of deal. With this growing body of knowledge he could play to their needs and manipulate their demand. He discovered something else—spending much of their time on the streets, they were a great source of information about what was going on with the police, or the weaknesses of rival hustlers. Knowing so much about the neighborhood gave him a feeling of great power. Later he would translate this same strategy to music and his mix-tape campaign on the streets of New York. Maintaining a close connection to the tastes of his fans, he would alter his music to their responses and create the kind of sound that had a visceral appeal, something they had never heard before.
After the remarkable success of his first two commercial albums, Curtis (now known as 50 Cent) stood on top of the music world, but his sense of connection, so vital on the streets, was fading in this new environment he now inhabited. He was surrounded by flatterers who wanted to be in his entourage, and managers and industry people who saw in him only dollar signs. His main interactions were with people in the corporate world or other stars. He could no longer hang out on the streets or get firsthand looks at the trends that were just starting up. All of this meant that he was flying blind with his music, not really sure if it would connect anymore with his audience. They were the source of his energy and spirit, but the distance separating them was growing. Other stars seemed to not mind this; in fact, they enjoyed living in this kind of celebrity bubble. They were afraid of coming back down to earth. Fifty felt the opposite, but there seemed to be no way out.
Then in early 2007, he decided to start up his own website. He thought of it as a way to market his music and merchandise directly to the public, without the screen of his record label, which was proving quite inept in adapting to the Internet age. Soon this website transformed itself into a social networking site, like Facebook for his fans, and the more he delved into it, the more he began to sense that this represented much more than a marketing gimmick—it was perhaps the ultimate tool for reconnecting with his audience.
First, he decided to experiment. As he prepared to launch a G-Unit record in the summer of 2008, he leaked one of the songs onto the website on a Friday night, then the next day he refreshed the Comments page every few minutes and tracked the members’ responses to it. After several hundred comments it was clear that the verdict was negative. The song was too soft, they judged; they wanted and expected something harder from a G-Unit record. Taking their criticisms to heart, he shelved the song and soon released another, creating the hard sound they had demanded. This time the response was overwhelmingly positive.
This called for more experiments.