How has the music program been a game changer for the brand? We’d like to do something in music but with a partner, with a Universal or with an Epic or something like that, where we could work with them on doing it because we’re not experts in publishing and distribution of content in music and so forth. We have people coming to us all the time. We have plans to do some things like a business model around the music because we get fed a lot of younger artists because of the older artists that we work with. We’re currently building a music studio in our office building. I think we have like 11 million streams on our last RGB mixtape. If it’s paid for, then it violates the agreements that the artists have with the record labels. So we’ll do some strategic partners to get the music out because it can’t be paid for. Like last year, Complex got Meek Mill’s song a day early. Then we have partners that we give special releases with. We promote and release the music on our site and on SoundCloud. That’s us predicting, “Hey, these are the guys in the future that are going to be big.” Then, The Prophesy, we’re going to do one of those a year. Those colors together are more powerful than individually, so that was a concept. The first one’s the RGB and that’s just the concept of red, green, blue, like an additive color. So we thought, “Let’s go and create a mixtape that’s just the young, new guys and put that out” - we’ll have a rookie mixtape and then we’ll have a veteran kind of mixtape. They’ll create music, put it up and start to get a following through HotNewHipHop or Lyrical Lemonade, and all of the sudden they’ve got like 20 million views on their video. Then this last mixtape was all about us going out and finding all these new young artists that are making a name for themselves on YouTube. Then we’ve got some guys that have been maybe a little bit older but are still a little bit relevant, like Chevy Woods or Kid Ink or Casey Veggies or what not. We’ve had Lil Skies, who’s an up-and-comer, just been pretty hot this last year or so.
We’ve had Kodak Black, which is more of an up-and-comer. We’ve had Meek Mill to Lil Wayne to 2 Chainz. How do you select the artists you want to participate in the mixtapes? So we didn’t even have to ask some of the guys they wanted to be on it because they wanted just the brand alignment and the exposure.
Lil Wayne, for instance, wasn’t on the first one but he wanted to be on the second one. So when the next project came up, it was easy. All the artists got gifts and we flew them out. We did a party, we did a look book, we printed out catalogs. Once we did the first one, then everything - our second RGB and then The Prophesy that we just did - was easy because we did a lot of promotion around the first one. We put out the RGB mixtape two years ago. How do you get acts to create original songs for the brand? We had a lot of ambassadors that were musicians but we thought, “Let’s take it a step further and put out a mixtape.”Įthika on Creating Mixtape (And Underwear) With Meek Mill, Kid Ink, Ace Hood, More: Exclusive So the connection to different genres of people and athletes and musicians and so forth was the driving factor. I thought if we could get a music program going that aligned with the brand, in the way that the hip-hop culture does - it’s a little more edgy and it’s more fashionable - we would have the potential to appeal to a huge group of people. Music was the concept that was the connection for people. I felt like underwear was a category that could be applicable to everyone - it didn’t matter if you’re a surfer, a basketball player or you played the piano, you still wore underwear. At that time, they were just selling product to athletes. What was the idea behind the music strategy? “I’m super stoked with the way they came out! Crazy to see how many people have taken eye to ‘The Beach Boy’ and it’s dope I got to bless the fans with an exclusive record, ‘Sunset,’ on the Ethika mixtape that was released with the new underwear.”īillboard caught up with Cook to hear more about Ethika’s music strategy and where the company is headed next.
“Never thought I would be designing a pair of my own underwear,” says Yung Pinch, who contributed a track to The Prophesy. With the recent release of The Prophesy, Ethika is planning to drop two mixtapes a year moving forward with another RGB installment planned for this summer.
That was followed by RGB 2 last May, which clocked more than 10 million streams with tracks by Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, Lil Skies and 2 Chainz. Ethika’s first RGB mixtape was released in 2017, featuring Meek Mill, Lil Durk, Kid Ink and more.
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