Watch Casual’s perspective on Hieroglyphics’ innovative move to take their music online in 1995.
Casual spoke with Soren Baker of Unique Access Entertainment about what motivated Hieroglyphics to create a website in 1995.
Soren Baker: Back in the day, with the Del the Funky Homosapien album Future Development, that was the first time I remember hearing of rappers—or really anybody—going hard and selling stuff online back in the mid-to-late ’90s.
As that was happening, why did Hiero make that early push? What were your thoughts at the time about putting an album out exclusively on the internet?
Casual: That was really the precursor to all of this: us, back in the day, being up on technology and always wanting to push the envelope with new things. Being able to reach our fanbase in new ways.
Once we decided to become independent, we had to use all auxiliaries we could. So now, after 30 years of being technologically advanced in hip-hop, we still want to use new ways to help artists like ourselves.
It wasn’t even us who had the intuition to come up with our website and to sell things online in the way we did.
SB: Since it wasn’t necessarily Hiero’s idea to sell Future Development online or to go online, do you remember why you decided, “Hey, that sounds like a good idea!”? You could have just said, “Nah, we’re not doing that.”
Casual: We had a good fanbase that was feeding us with the type of information we liked, like, “Yo, check this out; this is the new!” You know that homie that always comes to you, talking about what’s the new and showing you things while you’re a few steps behind? Well, our fanbase, early on, were those people.
Actually, the guy who developed our initial website, hieroglyphics.com, back in the day was a fan named Stinke. He put us on to selling music through the internet.
After that, it was just like, “Yo, this is something that people ain’t doing; we’re at the forefront of it.”
We actually won an award early on for having one of the best websites—about 1997 or 1998. I don’t even know who would give awards like that now.
I think we were selling some stuff before the Future Development project, but that album was a big catalyst because there was nowhere else you could get this Del album except hand-to-hand or through the internet.
SB: Yea, it was crazy.
I also remember around this time you were getting really big into selling merch [online], so it wasn’t just the music, it was the whole thing.
Casual: We were like a football team in a huddle who was coming up with a weird play that nobody ever ran, but [Hiero’s manager] Domino was in there at quarterback and he was like, “I’m telling you, once our major record labels drop us from our contracts and we go independent, we can do this, and we’ll go on tour, and we’ll start selling merch,” like you mentioned. And, I mean, it worked.
SB: Clearly. Clearly it worked.
You can watch the entire video with Casual below, with a fascinating perspective into Hieroglyphics’ use of technology:
