Trap Flix: Making Hood Movies For The Hood
At SXSW this year Snoop Dogg introduced Trap Flix. According to tweets in Twitter hashtag (#Trapflix), Trap Flix is a “new movie app better than Netflix”. I was instantly invested in Snoop’s investment. What does it mean for self-made urban movies to be distributed online for a subscriber base? I DO NOT KNOW BUT I WANT TO KNOW! And thus my obsession with Trap Flix begins.
Actually, my obsession with Trap Flix’s business model begins a bit earlier in the beauty salon. To understand one it probably helps to understand the other. This isn’t a primer on black culture, black barbershops and beauty salons or the multi-billion dollar black beauty business. You should read books about that. But, if you do not know it helps to know 1) how important the beauty business is to black economic activity and 2) how that market is made. With that context, when I first heard about Trap Flix I thought about the coast-to-coast distribution system for black culture that happens when we’re getting our hair did. And, I wondered what this might mean for some of the cultural touchstones that I grew up with: bootleg movies, underground economy entrepreneurs, and remixing.
The African American beauty business — from salons and barbershops to hair care manufacturing — has been a juggernaut at least since it made Madame CJ Walker the first self-made black female millionaire in the early 1900s. It’s a market share created by racism. Hair is one of the phenotypical differences with the cultural and political power to stand in for “one drop” of black blood. Every institution has a vested interest in disciplining black hair: from employers that fire black women for having the wrong hair to TSA patting down hair that is worn as it grows naturally from one’s head. For many reasons black hair is just hair like everybody’s hair but not at all like the hair everybody else talks about. Taming, framing and naming black hair is big business and until fairly recently it was a business non-blacks did not really want to compete for. But from Korean dominance in the extensions market to majority white brands buying black hair care lines, times they are a changing.
Times are also changing in black hair care’s ground zero, i.e. the beauty salon and the barbershop, i.e. “shops”. Shops are businesses but they are also cultural centers. Public health researchers mine shops to understand how vulnerable populations manage chronic diseases. Sociologists mine shops for how group formation works. And, some social scientists have mined shops for their central role in what some people call the underground economy. The underground economy is when the Hustleman or woman arrives on a busy Saturday in the shop to sell mixtapes, fish plates, incense, t-shirts, and bootleg movies. The bootleg movies are especially common and seem to be good business. At least, the Hustleman always seems to have a nice ride. And the ride is where you stash the bins of jewel cases featuring pristine copies of Madea’s latest exploits or Denzel Washington’s single tear in Glory or anything that has some black people in it. You comb through the cases as the Hustleman sizes you up — youngish black woman, a little bourgie, wants Love Jones — and gives you what you want.
And what black audiences have wanted for a long time is high production cinema where black lives are normal. We want casting decisions that put fictive brown family members together who look like they actually come from the same gene pool. We want good lighting and good wigs and comedy and drama that transports and reflects who we think we are. These kinds of movies are in short supply so getting them all in one place, on-demand, is a special kind of distribution model. Like Twitter aggregates black cultural discourse, the Shop was an on-demand retail point of sale to rival Amazon. When black twitter says Trap Flix is better than Netflix I suspect they mean, that like Amazon as compared with the Hustleman, you don’t have to sort through thousands of white flicks to find one Larenz Tate performance. That’s a type of service.
That type of service used to be a specialty of the network of black-owned beauty and barber shops across the nation. Ask Tyler Perry what his first distribution network was for videos of his plays. Salons sold tickets to his plays and copies of the DVDs of his plays. The Hustleman was an important point of distribution. It is hard to underestimate these networks or accurately estimate them at all; you get it when you’re in them. But it is a bit easier to notice how they are changing. Better funded non-black investors are increasingly competing in spaces where black shops have had a near lock on the market. And other socio-economic realities are changing demand for regular shop visits, e.g. persistently horrible economy for black workers means less disposable income for haircare. And, bureaucracies have become increasingly hostile to black owned businesses, with licensing and zoning changings making it harder to own a shop. All of this has to be bad news for the Hustleman distribution model. And that’s where I come back to Trap Flix. Not only can hood auteurs tap into a market but they can create their own cultural product. The technology has gotten cheaper and better. Like double-deck tape recorders in the early 1980s, personal technology can change the distribution game for black cultural production. The writers, directors, producers, and actors making hood movies for the hood are mashing up mix tape culture and the Hustleman cinema distribution model. Trap Flix offers a direct production line, from inception to delivery. The question becomes, are the streets ready?
Technologically they may be. African Americans have adopted mobile at disproportionately high rates. And we seem to have a preference for Android phones. As it happens, Android based smartphones have paid more attention to screen size, resolution and design features. Trap Flix seem tailor made for watching on a big face Android with some Beats on. These are flicks like Hype Williams’ “Belly”, which merged hip-hop video aesthetics (e.g. cut-aways and rapid pan sequences over banging soundtracks). You might want to watch the lastest Marvel installment (yes, please) in Dolby surround in the theater. But, JT The Bigga Figga’s “Insta-stalker” is begging for a more intimate viewing experience.
The only thing the Hustleman might have on Trap Flix at the moment is price…and payment methods. Hustleman takes cash. Trap Flix takes paypal. I don’t have any hard data but my sense is the Trap Flix market may have adopted mobile faster than it is adopting mobile forms of payment. For one thing, credit markets are not kind to groups historically disadvantaged in wealth accumulation. Despite having strong savings patterns (when adjusted for household income) Black folks are less likely to have access to credit markets. As a result, many black consumers have weaker ties with institutional banking norms. But, alternative credit providers like Russell Simmons “Rush Card” could be a way forward with card systems. But those type of cards for the unbanked too often come with high fees and are hard to manage. A better solution for the unbanked or underbanked who need their trap movie fix is the ability to charge memberships to cellphone bills like Red Cross donations.
And, Trap Flix is going to have to give away a bit more of the store for that steep $49.99 start up membership fee. Presently, you can’t view the catalog without first signing-up. As my colleague, Jessamyn West, pointed out: that’s not Internet pricing. Unless Snoop is planning a price model similar to direct-to-consumer pornography sites the Trap Flix membership fee makes no sense. Granted, Snoop has some experience making adult movies. He may have something else in mind for Trap Flix’s market niche. If that ends up being the case, I reserve the right to revisit my analysis.
High price aside, Trap Flix’s promotion game ain’t nothing to play with. Instagram (another favored platform for the Trap Flix market) is well suited for showing film clips/trailers and sharing them across networks. You already see that happening on Twitter. Also on Twitter is a semi-official looking announcement that Trap Flix already has 25,000 subscribers. Somebody warn the Hustleman.
