NY Times Article About De La Soul

On Valentine’s Day in 2014, De La Soul did something surprising: The group gave away almost all of its work.

After gathering fans’ email addresses in an online call-out, this hip-hop trio from Long Island sent out links to zip files for its first six albums. Those albums — including its 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, a platinum record in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry — are some of the genre’s most influential and sonically adventurous, threading samples from obscure, kitschy records alongside recognizable pop, jazz and funk hooks.

The links were available for a day, and the group says the response overloaded the servers hosting the music files. They also attracted the attention of Warner Music, which has owned those records since 2002, when it acquired the catalog of Tommy Boy Records, a pioneering indie Hip-Hop label.

The attention wasn’t just because the group was giving its catalog away. It was because those six albums have never been available to buy digitally or to stream.

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