If you’ve been hearing a lot about Chance The Rapper’s brilliant mixtape ‘Acid Rap’ (maybe you read his NME Radar profile?) then you might reasonably have decided to see if you could buy it from Amazon, the internet’s favourite consumer-industrial complex.
A quick search will reveal that you can: on import, currently retailing at a hefty £17.33. But there’s something fishy going on. You see, ‘Acid Rap’ is a free mixtape. You can download it direct from Chance’s website chanceraps.com now. If you didn’t know this, or if you assumed that by handing over some money for it you were helping to support an exciting artist at the beginning of his career, you’d be sadly mistaken. The CDs being sold on Amazon are bootlegs burned from the free mixtape by a mysterious company called Mtc. Chance isn’t seeing a single penny of that £17.33.
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 