You probably haven't heard of A1 MoufPiece. But if you're not careful, you might accidentally listen to his music.
Born in Northern California under the name Aaron Richardson, the 32-year-old rapper is a digital pioneer, of sorts. Since 2008, he's been using a brazen, gutsy, and transparently sneaky way of fooling people into finding his songs. He exploits the crappy search functions inside iTunes and Spotify.
In other words, he's a musician who has staked his career on search-engine optimization. And he's not the only one doing it.
"[M]arketing purposes adapting with current times," is how A1--who has a new album out this week, called I'm My Own Movement--described his strategy during a long Facebook chat with me. "[N]ever bothered me," he added, saying he had "NO REASON TO FEEL uncomfortable" [sic].
The process is simple. A1 will record a song about something--how much swag he has, how great he is at sex, or what have you--and then post it to iTunes and Spotify. But here's the catch: About half of the time, he'll give that song or its accompanying album a title that's just a popular musical search term. The song will have absolutely nothing to do with that term--it's just there to make him accidentally show up in a search.
For example, he has a song called "Kreayshawn" and one called "N****s in Paris." He has an EP called S.K.R.I.L.L.E.X.. He has a track called "Lil Wayne," as well as one called "Fuck Lil Wayne."
Regarding the latter, A1 has this to say: "LIL wayne is 1 of the best rappers alive. ---like i said b4 song titles are named for marketing purposes only."
Read the full story on Motherboard.