i grew up watching entrepreneurs like Earl Stevens (aka E-40), Todd Shaw aka Too $hort, and Percy Miller aka Master P do whatever they could to sell product. they all sold out of their trunks… but by trunks, it absolutely meant they were selling products out of their car trunks but it also just meant that they were selling hand-to-hand. I guess nowadays you wouldn’t say hand-to-hand… you wouldn’t say out the trunk either right? idk… now they call it direct to consumer aka DTC and D2C. so put it this way… Too $hort taught me how to sell hand-to-hand, direct to consumer, out the side, on wax, on video, and anywhere else you could sell a product.… too short was the most successful hustler i knew in 1992.
i was a 90’s bay area rap fan… i loved the experimentation of groups like Digital Underground… i mean cmon… Shock G played 2 characters. Money B was smooth… Humpty was hype… but that rapper 2Pac that they had rolling with them? I heard 2-Pac on the video for “Trapped” and i just heard something in his voice… i made an investment with my own money back in 1991 when I bought that “Trapped” cassette from 2PAC. It was a hard shell cassette… maxi single i think was the name but don’t kill me if i blew that… i can’t go search and don’t want to ai it up. 2Pac’s tape Trapped was one of the first cassette tapes i ever purchased with my own money. Tupac Shakur was raw but you could heard what he could become in those early digital underground features… but “Trapped” and “Tha’ Lunatic” were something brand new. So glad Rap City had my back on channel 41 on those weekday afternoons… timeless…
i bought that cassette tape in 1991 for $4.99 at The Wherehouse Music in UTC in San Diego, CA… This cassette didn’t have a explicit sticker on it so i was able to buy it with ease. Otherwise I would have been parked outside asking total strangers to buy a 90’s gangsta rap tape for me… yup… the good ole days as a young white kid trying to buy rap music in the Mid90s.
$4.99 for the Pac cassette tho…. keep that price in mind as we go through this story….
$4.99 of my hard earned money though… i bought something that was a timeless classic for my collection
i went off to college in ‘98… i left my all cassettes at my parents’ pad because i was officially a CD guy now… but i was also more ready than ever to make some cash in different ways. I was ready to be the next E-40… the next Too $hort… the next Master P… but I didn’t rap… i just loved rap music….
at the same time as i went to college, the world wide web was coming uppppp and i was hitting some message boards and learning things about music that not many other people knew. i found myself joining different message boards like BAY AREA RAP TALK and the 91SICCNESS… there would be sub-categories within each message board subject where they would be niched down… i found one little message board group all about rare Bay Area and Sacramento rap albums from the 90’s. It was there I learned about Freaky Fred and got to see a picture of what his album looked like. My mind back in the late 90’s was a library for rapper’s names, album names, album covers, record labels, years… i was a catalog for 90’s california rap music. specifically bay area 90’s rap and sacramento gangsta rap.
in 1999 you could find me researching rare rap shit but i was also around the college computer lab overhearing other people whispering to each other around the internet. i was a lucky enough to have an iMac back in ‘98 but i didn’t want to eat up our phone line… it was at the Arizona State computer lab where I found out about this new website that allowed you to sell things that you owned to other people… in 1998 or 1999 i learned all about eBay which was an online sales store. in 1999 i started my first business on eBay. i bought and flipped a Freaky Fred CD called Game Check. Bought it for $8.99 and flipped it for $35.
I bought and flipped about 5 freaky fred’s in a year… i was the only one who had inventory online… sure people had it but they weren’t up on ebay in 1999… that was the comeup…
so when i sold a freaky fred… i bought a new one… and then the cycle continued… and i set the market at $35 - $40 on that freaky fred CD. nobody had a stash but i kept findings gems hitting up all of the record stores with big used CD sections dedicated to rap back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
Let’s see what freaky fred goes for now… oh wow… this is crazy… Freaky Fred Game Check is on eBay at $380 at the lowest… wow.
I never rolled dice or gambled as a kid… i didn’t have the money to lose… but getting credit cards for the first time without any kind of education was wild… really wild… i now had more cash flow to go buy more CD’s… to buy more tapes… to buy more DVD’s… to buy more… everything? My CD collection started to grow because I started to get high off my own supply… i started taking profits from what i was selling and just buying more and more CD’s… i needed them all… but then i’d get in a hole and i learned about selling at a loss… my biggest loss… it’s an emotional one… it was selling off my 2Pac “Trapped” cassette tape back in 2000…
you see… i hadn’t even listened to that cassette tape for years… but when I saw that somebody sold their copy for $400 a couple of months prior i flipped my wig… I had my parents bring all of cassettes out on that next drive out to visit me… and i figured out how to take pictures of it and get it on line to sell to other human beings all through the internet was wild…. eBay was crazy to me. i sold that Pac cassette tape for $250 to somebody in Canada which opened up a whole notha can of worms… how do i mail something to another country? no time to stress… i swooped up THE CLICK and their fire album, DOWN and DIRTY. E-40 was crazy…. I learned what an OG copy of an album started to mean… now it wasn’t just about tracking down rare rap albums, but you had to ensure you had the real OG. An OG of down n dirty from the click could be purchased for 7.99 and then flipped for as high as $79.99… 40 water had that shit that would fuck up your brain.
8x multiple season was crazy… i was paying for christmas gifts for the fam and not borrowing money from my mom… it always gave me a lot of pride to do that… i kept wanting the next hit tho… 8x multiple? keep going…. I’ll never forget laying eyes on Gangsta Dre’s GANGBANGIN POETRY Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 in the used bins at record stores. But that Gangsta Dre was hard to get rid of because the album was so good. and to a music connoisseur like me, i wanted to listen to the real thing. The Gangsta Dre Gangbangin Poetry CD’s could fetch over $100 back then… he was big out in Sacramento and his reach was extending… crazy talented cat… one of the most slept on rap classics of all time?
it wasn’t always wins… i was sitting on deadstock of some releases that would likely never get moved… i would get whatever i could from the record stores of those… they started to know me at the record stores… i gave my head nod and just went digging… then i found it…. the holy grail of my time… or at least the attainable holy grail in my lifestyle… this was a CD from YOUNG DRE-D and the album was called TROUBLED MIND. This tho?????
My first learnings as a business man came from buying and flipping gangsta rap CD’s in the 90’s. I crushed some sales with unreal profits but learned about inventory purchased that couldn’t be moved… the rap CD hustle showed me how I could make money by finding a niche that everybody hasn’t nestled all up in yet. I found opportunities as a kid in the late 90’s and made money off my passion of hip hop. that was so cool… i want to do it again… and while buying up inventory is fun, so is moving units even if you take a loss. Money in, money out… sometimes you have to get rid of that 2Pac cassette if the price is right. right? now i’m just going to start telling you more about my various buys, flips, losses, and everything in between. in the mix of all of this was who i would become as a business man which is always TBD… gonna try my hardest this go around thooooooo….