"Them CDs didn't pay for me to go all across the U.S. It was the paycheck. We grind to get it, baby."

That's ST 2 Lettaz, half of the buzzed-about Huntsville, Alabama rap duo G-Side. ST, along with his brother, runs a gas station. Yung Clova, the other member of the group, owns a barbershop. Huntsville International, the mixtape/street album that the two released last year as a free download, was thematically centered around the idea of music taking them places they'd never imagined they could see: "Wanna shed a teardrop/ Every time my ears pop/ Way out in London repping Huntsville hip-hop." But ST and Clova have never been to London or anywhere else in Europe. They'll tour the continent for the first time this spring.

Ten years ago, G-Side might've had a major label contract in hand, like Montgomery duo Dirty did in the early 2000s. Or they might have slowly built a regional fanbase-- the type that once brought folks like Master P from mythically selling CDs out of the trunks of their cars to writing their own tickets once the labels came calling. With their gorgeous synthetic beats, sticky choruses, and joyously striving verses, Huntsville International and the duo's last album, Starshipz & Rocketz, feel much bigger than they are. It's the kind of thing that could catch on, back when things like that caught on. It's closer to the thoughtful bounce of Atlanta's Dungeon Family than Master P's beautifully ignorant thud, but it has the makings of something that could have once at least become a local phenomenon. And even being a local rap phenomenon used to be enough to pay people's bills. For Dirty, it never translated to national success but in plenty of other locations-- New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta-- this sort of regional fame did.

The Internet has changed rap in a lot of ways. MySpace has done the same thing for rappers that it's done for artists in other music genres, and so many people have used the social networking site to attempt to build audiences that the term "MySpace rapper" has now become a distinct pejorative à la "blog band." And then there's YouTube and Onsmash, sites where rappers can post their low-budget music videos without worrying whether guns and lyrics will make it past censors at MTV or BET, or whether their budgets and productions are up to those networks' standards.

Most of all, there's the matter of the mixtape. Rap mixtapes have existed for about two decades. They were once sold on cassette or in slimline CD cases, usually by bootleggers in mom-and-pop stores or street-corner vendor stands. Thanks to the format's questionable legality, rappers didn't have to worry about clearing samples, and many mixtapes became ways for artists to showcase themselves by performing over established tracks. It's something artists did to keep their name out in the world, but there was at least the vague possibility that someone could make money from them; after all, people did pay five bucks a pop for the things, and that money had to be going somewhere. But now mixtapes exist almost exclusively on the internet, and nobody has to make pilgrimages to hotbeds like New York's Canal Street to pick up the latest product. Rappers are offering the things themselves, for free, at a click. And some of them are pushing the project to absurd extremes. Witness, for example, Atlanta rapper Gorilla Zoe, who released 28 mixtapes in 28 days this past February-- way more music than anyone could reasonably be expected to process. And since these things are being offered for free download, no strings attached, nobody's making money-- just like with MySpace or YouTube.

For the past decade or so, major labels and the mixtape universe have shared an uneasy symbiotic relationship. Mixtapes being both illegal and something that wasn't going to make money directly for the labels, you'd have occasional clashes, like the infamous incident where the RIAA raided DJ Drama's warehouse. More often, though, the majors would use mixtapes like a farm system. 50 Cent became one of the decade's defining stars when he jumped directly from NY mixtape cult fave to massive pop stardom. There were plenty of reasons for 50's takeover: the great story, the pop choruses, the Eminem/Dre cosign, the bullet-dimple smile. But 50's mixtape stardom gave him a grassroots word-of-mouth appeal that no label marketing department could conjure. Other mixtape prospects like Papoose or Saigon never panned out, but then, one Nirvana can buy you plenty of Wools and Jawboxes.

More recently, established major-label stars have used mixtapes to build and maintain buzz. In the two and a half years between the release of Lil Wayne's Tha Carter II and III, the man dumped insane amounts of material onto the mixtape circuit, threatening to saturate the market to the point where nobody would want to pay full-price for his music after buying or downloading it for so long. Instead, the opposite happened. Wayne, flush with goodwill and credibility, sold a million copies of Tha Carter III in a week during an era when those numbers were thought to be long-passed memories.

Wayne's historic triumph happened in summer 2008; yet between the tanked economy and the implosion of the music business, that seems like a long time ago. More recently, another rapper seemed primed to make the leap from mixtape phenom to megalithic pop star. Gucci Mane might not have had Wayne's pop history or crossover appeal, but he did spend the parts of 2008 and 2009 when he wasn't in prison releasing a long avalanche of music onto the mixtape circuit in a run that compares favorably with Wayne's. Everything seemed to be working in Gucci's favor. He had a rabid cult, a way with hooks, a cell phone full of star connections, and a few singles that'd gained grassroots steam. The major label album he released in December 2009, The State vs. Radric Davis, seemed primed to cash in on all this, with its loaded roster of guests and its difficult balance of street-rap grit and general catchiness. But in its first week of release, it sold about 89,000 copies-- respectable, but not even in the same universe as Wayne. To date, it's moved about 300,000-- just a fraction of Tha Carter III's sales. A new superstar he's not.

Gucci's in prison right now, but when he gets out this year, he stands to make plenty of money-- not from record sales but live shows. Especially in the South, there's a thriving network of clubs willing to pay top dollar for performances, and an Ozone article from last year alleged that Gucci's managers had actually made a ton of money booking him for out-of-state live shows despite knowing full well that he wouldn't make it to any of them. Most of these interactions are cash-based, so they're hard to trace. But I once watched the Baton Rouge rapper Lil Boosie-- who, at the time, hadn't had an album out in two years-- get paid a substantial fee, all in stacks of $20 bills, to do a 25-minute show in an Orlando club parking lot.

Boosie wasn't the headliner that night, but he still commanded that kind of money. He'd released one solo major-label album and another as part of a duo with Webbie. He'd had a few minor hits. But like Gucci and Wayne, he'd also released a ton of material onto the mixtape circuit. He'd done well for himself, but he wasn't a major star, and the mixtapes-to-majors model didn't seem to be working for him. (He'd spent that afternoon in a hotel room complaining to me about how his label didn't take him seriously.) So, at least in Boosie's case, the mixtape farm system had, to some extent, broken down, replaced instead with a mixtapes-to-live-shows model. Boosie was still making good money; he just wasn't doing it through record sales.

The Gary, Indiana rapper Freddie Gibbs spent a couple of years earlier this decade signed to Interscope, but the label kept him on the shelf, releasing none of his music. Gibbs only started building a name for himself nationally after parting ways with the label, when he released a couple of highly regarded mixtapes last summer. In the past, he might've leveraged his buzz from those mixtapes to land another major-label deal. And that does still happen sometimes; Gibbs' frequent collaborator Pill reportedly inked a recent deal with the Warner-distributed Asylum after releasing two acclaimed mixtapes. But Gibbs says that he's "not really" negotiating with labels, that he has other career ideas in mind. "When my music starts moving forward, it's helping me get more and more out the streets. I'm starting to get more show opportunities to supplement my income and take care of my family. There's ways to make money in music; you just have to go about it in different areas, other than selling a solid, physical record."

Next:> Internet Success and Failure