her email about the latter seems like a polite way of telling “George” that she won’t sell editorial:

“This is going through my booking agency, Agency Twelve, so technically it doesn’t have anything to do with Ozone, but we could probably at least post the record on the Ozonemag.com site when it’s done.”

saying she could ‘probably’ post the record on the Ozonemag site is basically just a polite ‘no’. if somebody believes in an artist enough to spend 30K on promoting a record, odds are that it’ll be worth posting if only for the Boosie verse; the ‘probably’ is covering her ass in case it’s embarrassingly bad and she doesn’t want it to be seen on her site. so really, she’s rebuffing George’s attempt to curry favor with Ozone.

I like reading your hip hop stuff. Its all that I have left.
Sad bear.

It’s a great point about the state of print media but one I thought was out of this post’s scope. But you’re right I should have probably at least alluded to it.

Maybe there’s no realistic way to expect magazines to adhere to the old standards because the dollars don’t support that model. To my knowledge Ozone does claim to operate independently though. I’m not aware of any official alliances with pr or marketing agencies. Correct me if I’m wrong.

And touche at your last paragraph. It might even be the case that my own effort in writing this would be better spent on more meaningful topics!

Awesome. However you missed a whole other point here,
which is tension for print and digital magazines to exist as an end of itself OR a marketing tool for an advertising company.

After Vibe died in June, Jeff Changs did a Roundtable titled
on the Death of Vibe and the Future of Magazines, which really got at this issue.
http://bit.ly/BhRuC

I also wrote a response to Jeff’s piece and about how “many magazines now have in house marketing, record labels and publishing companies, and that the magazines are just business cards for many companies.”
http://bit.ly/1wH6Ri

So Julia in many ways is doing what many folks have done, albeit a bit more sloppy.

All the above actions with regard to Julia, her lawyer
remind me of my Crack and Hip Hop Politically Under Developed Young people post. Meaning, while reading yours I thought, what would happen in the hood if as much effort that was put into selling beats, posting post, getting people to take down post was put put into getting city council members elected, keeping Black boys from being railroaded into special ed in first grade, teaching young people about sexual education. All the shit that makes a neighborhood go round.

~Renina