How Wendy Day Broke Barriers And Launched Careers Of World Renowned Rappers, Hip-Hop Artists
Cheryl Robinson Contributor, April 21, 2021, www.forbes.com
Before rap became commercially visible with The Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 release of Rapper’s Delight, it was best known that emcees would speak or rhyme over beats during neighborhood barbeques. The genre quickly gained traction after Kurtis Blow’s 1980 The Breaks became a Top 5 hit that eventually went gold. For over 40 years, rap and hip-hop have influenced society by even normalizing words like twerk and crunk. Statista reported that in 2018, hip-hop and rap music accounted for 21.7% of total music consumption in the United States, more than double the percentage of R&B music sales.
Wendy Day, founder of Rap Coalition, has helped shape the industry to what it is today by launching the careers of some of the most famous rappers in the world, including Master P and Eminem.
Rap Coalition is a not-for-profit artists advocacy organization to educate, inform and unify rap artists, producers and DJs. “In March 1992,” Day said, “I started Rap Coalition. For the first couple of years, I was introducing rappers to lawyers that could pull them out of bad deals. I shortly realized that just pulling somebody out of that deal wasn’t enough; I needed to be able to help them get into a good deal.”
Day’s interest in rap and hip-hop occurred while attending a college event with an opening performance by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. A few years later, her love of the genre would turn into a business opportunity.
After graduating college, she began working in Montreal as the vice president of marketing at a liquor company. When the company sold to a larger organization, Day received a buyout package that enabled financial freedom. She decided to return to the U.S and eventually enrolled in a pop-music course at the New School taught by a gentleman who was an accountant to celebrities. The biggest takeaway: Artists were being exploited or shelved by the record labels with no one helping them.
“That bothered me,” Day shared. “I decided to start Rap Coalition sitting in that classroom because I wanted to help artists when they had no place else to turn.” ...
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