Once upon a 2007, Kanye West and 50 Cent had beef.
Here’s what went down: Fiddy and Ye were preparing to drop new albums on the same day in September. In the meantime, their rap-star egos were growing restlessly swollen.
50 Cent was itching to sell records or die trying, so he grabbed the media’s mic and said if Kanye’s record sold more copies than his, he would straight-up retire from rap. 50’s claim was bold, and what ensued was a hip-hop feud fit for AP U.S. History textbooks.
50 Cent and Kanye landed their faces on the cover of Rolling Stone, and an ungodly amount of trash talking went down. Pasty suburban rap fans across America were dying to know the answer to Rolling Stone’s cover headline: “Who Will Be The King of Hip-Hop?”
Judgment week arrived. Drop a drumroll beat…Yeezy won. Kanye sold 957,000 units compared to 50 Cent’s 691,000 units in the albums’ debut week. Did 50 Cent quit rap?
Of course not. 50 and Kanye took a look at the sales numbers, shrugged and started counting their respective millions. In 2012, 50 Cent even called the feud a publicity stunt.
So why did 50 Cent and Kanye have such a public feud, putting their egos on the line, if they didn’t actually care who won? That’s because of the economic effect of co-opetition.
Co-opetition occurs when two firms collaborate to attain mutually beneficial results. In “competing” with each other to sell more albums, 50 Cent and Kanye received ridiculous amounts of free publicity — and each rapper sold more albums than he would have alone.
As my friends prepared to rush Franklin Street last Thursday, after our Tar Heel basketball victory over Duke, I was also elated but remembered the parable of 50 and Ye.
