Upon receiving approval from the IRB I would engage members of the hip-hop community through popular forums that I am already a longstanding active member of. On these forums I seek to collect a sample that hopefully is diverse in race, age, and class backgrounds. My plan is to post some general questions about the culture, current state of the scene, and authenticity on popular forums and discussion boards such as reddit.com/hiphopheads (HHH), niketalk.com/f/7355/music (NT), and boxden.com (BX). I have selected these forums because of each has their own particular demographic as well as tastes. HHH is probably the most active board dedicated to discussing hip-hop music’s latest mixtapes, albums, and news stories. In the era of social media, many message boards have ceased to exist due to their somewhat slow pace and long measured responses. However Reddit has stood strong, as the discussions on HHH and other subreddits move just as swiftly as any Twitter exchange. Just like its host site, HHH continues to be home to lengthy conversations as well as AMA (ask me anything) sessions with the rappers and artists themselves. HHH’s main demographic tends to be white males between the ages of 16-24 and the discussions encompass the entire genre but tend to have more of a …show more content…
The biggest difference between NT forums and the other forums included is the broad scope of their members’ collective taste and ages. NT's taste skews towards up and coming and underground artists, as the forum’s members tend to be the most progressive and adventurous of any of the other boards and amongst many artists’ earliest supporters. Most artists that have started to attract a substantial amount of have likely had an active discussion thread running for months before you even heard of that