In a year where no rap albums went platinum, the music industry is in a dire state whether they want to admit it or not. Enter Ryan Leslie. Although he hasn't had a breakout single in a number of years, Leslie is quietly enjoying the biggest success of his career by attempting to change the way music is sold and marketed while giving the power back to the artist.

The former boy genius who graduated Harvard at 19-years-old has developed a platform called Disruptive Multimedia. The platform, which he coded and crafted himself, takes the power out of the hundreds of hands that eat off of artists and essentially puts it right back into their own hands.

Let's put this in perspective. During Kanye West's sit-down with Steve Stoute and Ben Horowitz at Cannes Lions, West called Leslie a genius for this platform and as one of the few artists that understands how to blend creating art and interpreting the ever-important data in the digital age.
As a part of Disruptive Multimedia, not only are you able to sell an album to a consumer, you are able to retrieve the data of said consumer. Why is this important? "You can sell 100,000 units and actually know all 100,000 of those people who supported you," says Leslie. "There's a lot of people who made a lot of money on the back of...it's the nature of the business. It's exploitation," he continues. "Somebody will actually come to a record company and say 'look, I want to sign away 80% of my livelihood to you for a small advance.' That's just become an accepted practice. So when that little 20% trickles in, and there is somebody sitting at the top of the label that is participating in 80% of the revenue of multiple artists, then it's obvious that they've already made a great deal a money and it might be time for them to allow someone to come in and show them a different way. It should be more transparent, it should be more equitable. Just because it's an accepted practice doesn't mean it's the way it should be."

Is this the future of the record business? Artists like Kanye West, 50 Cent and Talib Kweli seem to think so. Check out this exclusive interview with Leslie himself as he sits down with STASHED and explains Disruptive Multimedia.

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