The Raparatus Will Power Collaborative Hip-Hop with an App

Last August, Justus Eapen founded Exit 77. Initially a blog about the Maryland hip-hop scene aimed at connecting local hip-hop artists, as well promoting and disseminating their message, Exit 77 quickly expanded, taking on a partner and moving into social media.

Exit 77's latest project is The Raparatus, which they bill as "the first multi-platform collaboration and ecommerce experience for rappers and producers." The idea is to let rappers find great beats and instrumentals on The Raparatus mobile (or desktop) app, purchase or lease them, spit out some verse via their smartphone, and upload it to the site.

I had a chance to speak with Justus via Skype, where we discussed the genesis of the project, the site's streaming service plan, where Exit 77 is in the process of launching, and why it is important to create an online community for hip-hop artists. We also spoke about The Raparatus's Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, which will allow them to finalize the back-end coding and bring the mobile and desktop apps to market.

Motherboard: What was the impetus behind creating The Raparatus platform?

Justus Eapen: As rappers we've always had this problem where if you wanted to freestyle you have to go to YouTube and play the beat, and you wouldn't really get what you were looking for. No platform existed for artists who want to record their rhymes and review their freestyles and collaborate with other artists. So we started coming up with this user experience where artists would be able to take beats upload by producers, and record over them from their browser or mobile device. I'm a designer, so I'm designing the end user interface with a few others. My partner, Cole B., has been assisting me with network, getting feedback, and speaking with artists and producers to get them onboard. The other part of this we want to develop is the e-commerce platform for producers who want to sell and lease their beats to the rappers.

Is the Raparatus influenced by any other sites or applications?

There are definitely hip-hop co-op websites focusing on collaboration and promoting music. You see Live Mix Tapes and Dope Tracks, for instance. Dope Tracks is the closestto what we're doing because of the feature that allows rappers to record over beats. But we're adding in this producer-focused side of the business, where producers can promote their beats, and try to sell and lease them. The problem with the hip-hop market at the moment is that producers go to a web store and sell their beats there, and this site may or may not be good at marketing the beats. Or, the producers sell beats on their own website. That model doesn't really work because you don't have one place you can go to find everything except YouTube. And the problem with YouTube is that it is not specifically for hip-hop artists.

Is the emphasis going to be more on mobile, or do you want a synthesis between mobile and desktop/laptop web browsers.

From talking to our market a little bit, as well as our friends who are rappers and producers, we know that the rappers definitely want to be able to record lyrics and share via their phones. The producers, on the other hand, who have their business in mind, want more creative control through a desktop application. So, we're thinking the best option is a Chrome application, but that hasn't been set in stone yet—we've been doing Flash on the website.

So, if a rapper finds a beat they like, will they only hear, say, 30 seconds of the track and then be prompted to purchase or lease the beat?

We want to give the producers a lot of control over how they market their music. So, we don't want to say, "You have to cut this down to a 30-second clip," but we're also not saying, "You don't have to put in a watermark." We're allowing the producers to upload whatever they want, and we'll put some security measures in so that people don't blatantly rip producers off. At the moment, the producers who we've talked to are more interested in promoting their work, and finding a platform to sell to the artist directly and not have to go through either a middle man or set up their website, and then worry about design and search engine optimization. The Raparatus is sort of like Dope Tracks meets eBay.

Let's dive into the mobile and web browser technology. What's that going to look like?

We have a prototype design for web browsers on Flash, but we don't want to stay with that technology much longer. We're looking at Chrome Extensions as the best way to facilitate the technological end of it. We actually have a team of seven guys who have generously put in a lot of up-front work in getting a prototype on the web end. They're also proficient with Android. But, because we want to reach a large market early on, we're going to bring someone on who is comfortable with iOS. We're obviously focusing on mobile, but we want to do iPhone first, which is the trend.

Are you guys building a streaming service like Soundcloud or Bandcamp from the ground up, where the beats and freestyle tracks will live?

Yeah, initially we are building it from the ground up. It's sort of this project we have in the pipeline that is connected to The Raparatus but not part of the initial iteration. We want to be able to take YouTube beats and instrumentals directly off the phone and record over them. Now, we've been having some problems accomplishing this for legal reasons, so that's further down the line. But, we do want to build the streaming service from the ground up, kind of the way Soundcloud does it. They've actually been sort of our inspiration because of their simplicity and ease of use. They have a really good mobile application, and we've been inspired by the quality which they've made an industry standard. But, we're not piggy-backing off of anyone. We are allowing users to share material they create through our site with other sites like YouTube, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Where are you guys in the process of launching?

I'd say that we're about 80 percent finished with the user interfaces and mobile applications. There are just a few things to deal with. The thing is, we can't proceed beyond the front end until we have some capital to fund the back-end coding and everything, which is why we started this IndieGoGo campaign. We have the web prototype, so we just have to put it all together. Upon conclusion of the crowdfunding campaign, I think we can have it to market in three months.

We really want to take hip-hop webspace into the next decade of collaboration and technology. I think it's a shame that this artform is not connected at the grassroots level with the Internet and what's going on. A big part of what we've been trying to do is reach out to the hip-hop community and see if rappers and producers want this. The general consensus is that they do. As soon as rappers hear that they can record a verse from their phone, they think it's amazing; but, it's already been done, just not to the quality that we envision. We hear a lot of complaints about other services, and we want to solve those problems. But, the producers are more difficult to get onboard because they're in high demand since they have a business. It's like breaking into a whole different subculture.

You're based in Maryland, but the idea is much bigger than local. Are you guys aiming to break in America first and then go global, or do you want to make it immediately possible for some rapper from Alabama to collaborate with a producer from Thailand, for instance?

That is exactly what we want to do. It actually sums it up in a great way. We got into this because the hip-hop community really doesn't have a community. There really is a sort of anti-community sentiment among the artists. They're really competitive. Rappers, producers, and hip-hop artists need to take collaboration as seriously as the tech and business communities do. I think that if we just provide them with the tools, we'll empower the artists in a way that they will take advantage of them and make beautiful music. That's why we're doing this.

The anti-collaborative hip-hop vibe is interesting because the form was created early on as an artistic, social, and political movement. It was the punk rock of its time. Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation featured politically and socially aware b-boys and graffiti artists. Then you have Public Enemy, which was an even bigger and more aggressive socio-political voice. Not to sound too cynical, but it seems like powerful cultural forces saw the social and political potential of early hip-hop, and neutered it by throwing money at hip-hop artists. It was turned into an industry, which happens to some subcultures. 

I think it's interesting that you have a position like that, because I think a lot of hip-hop artists share that position. That Killer Mike song "Reagan" is all about that perspective. But, when I say there is not a community, I don't mean that there aren't online communities, because there are. In fact, doing The Raparatus, I've really been exposed to that. You would never guess it, but IGN has a huge hip-hop community on their forum, and that is amazing to me.

I think what it is is that hip-hop is a culture that has roots in poverty and negativity, so you get a lot of negative attitudes from not only fans but the artists. So, it's hard to mobilize these people. Also, it's a dog-eat-dog culture. You don't normally get a hip-hop artist asking for help, and that's different from the rest of the music industry. I've noticed that indie bands are really comfortable starting a crowdfunding campaign and asking for help, but with hip-hop artists it's not really like that. If you're asking for help it's kind of like a sign of weakness, which we're trying to counteract as well.