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Chamillionaire Talks Digital Marketing with TechCrunch

Posted Aug 2nd 2010 5:00PM by Carter Maness
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Jeff Kravitz, FilmMagic for Vh1

Prior to last week, it wasn't really a thing for rappers to visit the technology world in Silicon Valley, but now that Kanye West started his official comeback tour with appearances at the headquarters of both Facebook and Twitter, it's quickly becoming all the rage. Last Friday, rapper Chamillionaire attended TechCrunch's Social Currency CrunchUp -- a tech conference that explores the intersection of tastemakers in the digital and real worlds.

The Houston native sat down with reporter Mike Arrington to discuss how he uses the Internet and other digital technology such as smartphones to his advantage. Chamillionaire is considered an early adopter of social networking in hip-hop. He was one of the first to use his own website for fresh content and has been a longtime user of platforms such as Twitter to communicate with fans. When asked about the advantages of the digital age after his panel, Cha had a lot to say.

"Everything," he said. "Access to people through social networks. We don't build these social networks, we don't blog on TechCrunch. People here are like what would a rapper care about TechCrunch for? It's crazy, it's about distribution of information. It's just getting information to people, that's just what major labels are. They've got companies that distribute for us now so it's like cutting the record labels out - I'm doing you a favor, you're doing me a favor and I'm getting to where I need to get to."

Head over to TechCrunch for the full video interview and some excellent pictures of Chamillionaire posing with his BlackBerry collection.