Before rap became commercially visible with The Sugarhill Gang's 1979 release of Rapper's Delight, it was best known that emcees would speak or rhyme over beats during neighborhood barbeques. The genre quickly gained traction after Kurtis Blow's 1980 The Breaks became a Top 5 hit that eventually went gold. For over 40 years, rap and hip-hop have influenced society by even normalizing words like twerk and crunk. Statista reported that in 2018, hip-hop and rap music accounted for 21.7% of total music consumption in the United States, more than double the percentage of R&B music sales.

Wendy Day, founder of Rap Coalition, has helped shape the industry to what it is today by launching the careers of some of the most famous rappers in the world, including Master P and Eminem.

Rap Coalition is a not-for-profit artists advocacy organization to educate, inform and unify rap artists, producers and DJs. "In March 1992," Day said, "I started Rap Coalition. For the first couple of years, I was introducing rappers to lawyers that could pull them out of bad deals. I shortly realized that just pulling somebody out of that deal wasn't enough; I needed to be able to help them get into a good deal."

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT FORBES !