Nobody just sells music anymore.  When vinyls were just a medium to get sounds into people’s living rooms and the only way you could listen to music and travel at the same time was with a car-radio or a Walkman, that may have been the case.  But in today’s atmosphere, especially that of hip-hop, what’s being sold is an image, a brand.  Gone are the days when you can just upload a few mp3′s onto a CD, release one of the easy-on-the-ears tracks for radio airplay, and put the record in the stores.  Everyone’s a musician, everyone’s a producer, and now, with the internet, there’s no stopping them.  How does one differentiate themselves?  How does a Nipsey Hussle, who can out-rap a solid 75% of the artists on the national mainstream circuit, get his popularity to the level of a Trinidad James? Who was offered a 2-million dollar deal from Def Jam and, well, this video clip tells it all.  With the near-absurd amount of music that’s been released in 2013, marketing campaigns have never been more important.  The need for unique strategies to help make an artist and an artist’s material prominent has never been more imperative, with independent rappers and artists working exclusively with independent labels (Macklemore, Chance The Rapper, Nipsey Hussle, Dom Kennedy, Danny Brown, etc), inserting themselves in the same ring with major label juggernauts (Jay Z, Kanye West, Drake).  Why pay $18.99 for a deluxe edition of an album when the same quality is being given away on the internet? The same question could be asked of the opposition: why bother with the internet up-starts when major labels are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring you a refined product?  While it all begins with the music, it all comes down to how well its marketed, and if you need some ideas, take a look at what these guys came up with.