It seems that coinciding with the release of Gucci Mane’s the Burrrprint 2HD, Warner Brothers has gone around issuing a mass of Cease and Desists to the top Mixtape Websites and Blogs. First to report the action taken against them was Coast2CoastMixtapes.com, who ironically, IMHO isn’t that big of a player in the mixtape game. It’s sad because the artists have all embraced the concept of a mixtape as the ultimate promotional tool, and they want their mixtapes available for download and streaming delivery on as many websites as are interested in putting up their projects. Their content is syndicated on hundreds if not thousands of websites, all praising the top mixtapes, and promoting the associated retail releases the artists are pushing.

Smart up and coming artists in the web 2.0 era understand that if they only put out one project a year, they will get lost in the huge proliferation of content and artists flooding the streets and the internet with new songs, freestyles, mixtapes, videos, etc. So to stay current and stand a chance at actually selling records, Artists have found that the blueprint to success is to release mixtape after mixtape leading up to a retail success. They are in the studio every day, recording music, saving only their greatest treasures for the retail releases.

What Warner Brothers is doing is, to put it simply, retarded. Gucci Mane’s success has a lot to do with his popular mixtapes with the likes of Dj Drama, and other large Dj’s who have used thier fan base, in conjunction with the fan base of the artists to springboard the mixtapes into success.

Some would argue that the mixtape has destroyed rap, but I would argue that rap was already destroying itself with the growth of the internet and free downloading. The artists who have properly embraced the mixtape, such as Lil Wayne, can still sell a million records, even giving away 3-4 mixtapes between albums.

Most recently, rap artists top choice, and my favorite mixtape site, LiveMixTapes.com, was forced to comply by repeated threatening demands from Warner Brothers to remove all Gucci Mane mixtapes from the site or face legal repercussions. Gucci Mane is undoubtedly one of the most favored artists on LiveMixTapes.com, and the removal of all his content will hurt Gucci Mane in the short term, and the long run more than it affects Livemixtapes or any other mixtape site or blog. I could easily name 10 other big sites that had action taken against them to remove Gucci Mane content, but I’m most saddened by the exclusion of Gucci Mane from LiveMixTapes. If you are a Gucci Mane fan, i suggest you pick up a pen and pad and write Warner Brothers a letter expressing your discontent with their recent action.

The success that Gucci Mane had on all the mixtape sites, blogs, and other websites, has been erased.. All the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of appreciative comments from Gucci Mane fans, are now gone, almost as if those successes never existed. For Gucci Mane, especially being locked down in prison, this couldn’t be a worse look. He needed his content to be available over the next year during his incarceration more now than ever before, and I will be shocked if he is unaffected by the action taken on his behalf by Warner Brothers. The struggle for ownership of intellectual property continues, so far if you took a count, the music, movie and TV industry win their cases, but the proliferation and plethora of pirated material keeps growing and growing, in numbers they cant hope to compete with. They really need to come up with a solution to deliver the content on their own, for a price so affordable its convenient enough and cheap enough to not participate in piracy.