Hip-hop on tour

I love tooling around on the Internet for what other blogs are writing about the music industry and such, and today I found a fascinating story from the Detroit Free Press on the history of hip-hop tours. Here are the first few lines:

Hip-hop had a problem.

By the early 1990s, the style born in the Bronx had become a bona fide national phenomenon, a cultural force with the hits to match.

But the mammoth success enjoyed by rap music in record stores and on the airwaves wasn’t being equaled in the nation’s concert venues. For the most part, successful live hip-hop was a no-show.

Click here to read the rest, which goes into the current Jay-Z/Mary J. Blige tour and its significance for the hip-hop touring industry.