Drew “Dru Ha” Friedman’s curiosity for hip-hop runs deep. Because the cofounder and chief govt officer of Duck Down Music and the Chief Government Officer of 3D Consulting and Circulation, Dru Ha has really been set within the society for over three a long time. On this episode of XXL’s Inside Monitor podcast, the White Plains, N.Y. indigenous opinions his very early days of taking good care of Smif-N-Wessun with Buckshot, precisely how that brought about working an efficient unbiased doc tag, coping with MCs like Youthful M.A and Joey Bada$$, presently taking good care of comedian Druski and much more.
After maturing DJing celebrations and meddling breakdancing, Dru Ha burglarized enterprise utilizing an educating fellowship below the late promoting skilled Rob Rock at SBK Information/EMI Posting whereas collaborating in Syracuse School. There, Dru collaborated with very early Nineties imitates Jailed Development and Vanilla Ice. He after that landed a job directing the rap division at Nervous Information. At the exact same time, he was taking good care of Brooklyn rap artist Buckshot and his Black Moon group together with Smif-N-Wessun. After the success of Black Moon’s 1993 observe “Who Got Da Props,” Buckshot and Dru Ha cofounded the unbiased doc tag Duck Down Songs in 1995.
From there, Friedman started getting in contact with for Jonny Shipes’ Movement Image Songs Group whereas working at Basis Promoting as a songs supervisor and an middleman for securing down model identify presents.
In 2024, being an unbiased musician is standard. In quite a lot of circumstances, the diploma of management an indie rap artist has greater than their job is interesting as an alternative of being approved to a big tag. Nonetheless, Dru Ha assesses a time when being unbiased implied that musicians and tags wanted to be revolutionary with a purpose to monetarily full in a hip-hop panorama managed by the majors.
” Licensing and finding varied different strategies of earnings have been necessary for indie musicians since we weren’t mosting prone to defeat the majors to the strike at radio,” Dru Ha clarifies within the video clip listed under. “We weren’t mosting prone to defeat them to the strike at MTV or wager, these areas acquired on lockdown. So, we wanted to find varied different means to acquire the songs out. In the event that they weren’t specializing in licensing, after that, hi there, presumably we’d name 2K up or ESPN or no matter and acquire our songs in proper right here. For a while, we appeared like there have been varied areas that we’d go that the majors presumably weren’t inserting all their time proper into.”
Whereas Duck Down Songs stays as a well-known heritage model identify within the hip-hop space, Dru Ha is moreover the chief govt officer of 3D Consulting and Circulation. By way of his reference to Jonny Shipes, he started taking good care of the job of famend comedian Druski in 2019, which is a foolproof indicator that Drew “Dru Ha” Friedman stays to press the society forward.
XXL is again with an extra episode of Inside Monitor, a twice month-to-month podcast that hangs out with a number of of hip-hop’s most outstanding market execs, enterprise homeowners and much more. Held by XXL Editor-in-Chief Vanessa Satten and songs exec Courtney “Courtney CL” Lowery, every episode will definitely stay to take a look at hip-hop through the eyes of people which have really lived and brought a breath the society.
Watch or take note of the episode of XXL‘s Inside Monitor podcast listed under. The podcast might be positioned on xxlmag.com, XXL‘s YouTube internet web page and on the vast majority of podcast programs: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Songs and XXL Reside.
