Presto Vivace's Journal: How the Internet changed hip hop promotion

Up Set the Set Up has an interesting post on how hip hop artists have been able to get around the lack of of major-market media exposure and how they have taken advantage of the Internet to spread their music:

The internet and personal technology fundamentally changed the game during the 2000s. Artist and labels could now produce infinite quantities of promotional MP3s and send them out to the college radio and mixtape DJs themselves. Meanwhile, the promotional 'entrepreneurs' were still willing to to sell access to their contacts and manufactured chart listings - but as the decade progressed this model of promotion dwindled. With an infinite supply of promos, artists and labels could now give out their music to the masses and not just limit themselves to a few hundred underground 'taste-makers' scattered in low-power FM studios on college campuses.

I see a similar process with open source software developers. The phenomenon has implications for every variety of marketing communications.