Like tuberculosis in the 19th century, spam emails have become the scourge of our age. We all see the fake viagra and sex line ads pop up in our spam folders daily, but those of us even tangentially connected to the music industry get a special kind of spam, usually consisting of shady characters promising that, for a small deposit, you too could own an exclusive verse from the likes of Lil Wayne! Well today I'm fighting back and putting them on blast.
Here's the email. I promise I haven't changed a word:
Thats right we have exclusive verses from some of the biggest rappers in the game for sale!!! if you got a mixtape or an album your working on you need to be serious about your music! What better way to sell sell thousands of records with some of the best in the game right now! When you buy a feature from us you get a 100% EXCLUSIVE VERSE, You will also get the verse pro tools session files as well as complete paperwork giving you the ownership of the feature! So email us now to lock in the feature you want! We in a recession YOU WILL NOT GET A FEATURE FROM A MAJOR ARTIST THIS CHEAP ANYWERE ELSE!
Artists We Have Verses/Hooks From:
* Lil Wayne (Hook and Verse) - $3000
* Juvenile (Verse) - $3000
* Kurupt (Verse) - $1000
* Snoop Dogg (Verse) - $3000
* The Game (Verse) - $3000
* Devin Da Dude (Hook) - $1000
* TOO $HORT (HOOK) - $1000
The Refined Take:
1) I feel like the same people who respond to these things are the same people who see an email with the subject line like "P*llz 2 MaKe UR C*&k BiGGer" and think, "Finally! I've been waiting for someone to come out with something like this." Sorry to disappoint you, but there's no way they actually have exclusives like this (do you really think Birdman would let some spam site sell a Weezy verse for $3,000?) but even if they did, they have to be crap. The Devin the Dude hook is probably just audio of him coughing after taking a bong rip that someone recorded on their iPhone. Like the Nigerian scam emails, it actually makes me a little sad to think people believe this stuff.
2) A Juvenille and Lil Wayne verse are the same price? Really? Who's putting together this price list, Juvenille's mom? On the other hand, in context the fact that Snoop's verse costs about three times more than Kurupt's feels about right to me.
3) I know I'm probably just hung up on this because I'm a writer, but the typos and punctuation on this is atrocious. Just a heads up; if you're going to put something in all caps and follow it with an exclamation point, you might want to spell it right. "THIS CHEAP ANYWERE ELSE!" Fail.
4) I didn't want to make you suffer unnecessarily and include the entire email, but it ends with "IF YOU ARE INTERESTED WE WILL GET YOU A SAMPLE. ONLY WAY WE CAN HOLD A VERSE IS WITH A DEPOSIT!!" So let me get this straight? I send you some money and you send me a snippet of your "exclusive" verse? Sounds solid to me! What could go wrong?
5) I didn't want to reveal the name of this company because I didn't want to risk someone getting sucked in, but fu*k it, if you're dumb enough to fall for it you deserve it. Especially considering that even a minor amount of research (aka Google) will reveal that the
site for Tatt Marketing, the company that supposedly has all this great material, is a shoddy WordPress blog that also offers coupons. Fu*king ridiculous.
