Music Business 101 With The College of Hip Hop

Artists and ownership… ironically these two words are often heard together in a negative way when they really shouldn’t be. We’ve heard and seen it time and time again, artists getting the short end of the stick for not knowing anything about the industry that they want to be in.

Antoine and Santoine Jackson, better known as SJ and AJ, founded TheCollegeofHipHop.Org to help . TheCollegeofHipHop.Org is a premier online learning institution teaching the ins and outs of the entertainment industry. I had the pleasure of speaking with AJ and SJ about the power of ownership and their new book “10 Steps to Profit for Your Passion”. Check it out!

The Cool Mag: “What Prompted you guys to start TheCollegeofHipHop.org?”

TCOHH: We knew the business from reading but we would notice that nobody else around us, who said they wanted to be in the entertainment industry, cared enough to gain knowledge for themselves. They would ask us questions and we would look at each other like “why aren’t they reading?”, “why aren’t they taking it serious?”. That’s when we realized we had to do something to change that.

The Cool Mag: How did the idea for your book come about?

TCOHH: The book was to give people something tangible. TheCollegeOfHipHop.Org has some great content but it wasn’t connecting with people like we hoped it would. So this book is our initiative to further push the core principles of the site.

The Cool Mag: What’s on TheCollegeOfHipHop.Org?

TCOHH: When you go to the site, you will find content based on the business of entertainment. It’s not just Hip Hop, it’s entertainment education. We’re giving you seminars and webinars on how to be a business inside this business. When we were artists we owned EVERYTHING. We wrote our own music, we owned our logo, our trademark, our copyright, our publishing I mean EVERYTHING. And we couldn’t understand why other artists didn’t own their material but it’s because they didn’t know the power in ownership. When you learn the power of ownership you realize that you can do anything.

The Cool Mag: So your book is called “10 Steps to Profit from Your Passion”, do you guys think it’s hard for an artist to profit from their passion or do people think it’s harder than what it really is?

TCOHH: They think it’s harder than it is because they’re conditioned like that. They’re conditioned to think they need the help of a record label. Right now, the new thing is everybody wanting to say they’re “independent” but truthfully you’re always independent because even when you get a record deal, you have to take the steps to keep yourself hot outside of the label. Then they’ll give you a “Student Loan”, because that’s all a record deal is, a student loan that you’re going to have to pay back. So before taking any deal, you have to first think about what you gain to “profit” from it.

And when we talk about profit, we’re not only talking about money. We’ve been profiting off of entertainment since we started because we’ve built relationships. There’s people we can call that charge crazy prices but will tell us “don’t worry about it. I got ya’ll” because they know that we’ll do the same. It’s power when we’re in NY, or LA, or Cleveland we say we’re SJ and AJ of the ‘The College of Hip Hop’, and people are like “You work with such and such, right? Oh come in the door.” That’s profit because you can gain more with relationships than money sometimes. Someone can you give $1000 and you can go out and blow it today but if they sat you down and gave you $1000 worth of knowledge, you can apply that to your life and make $200,000 of that.

“10 Steps to Profit From Your Passion” is currently available on Amazon and can be sure purchased HERE.

Also, be sure to visit TheCollegeofHipHop.Org to check out webinars and informational content on the Entertainment Industry.