With the exception of more recent Contemporary R&B (as opposed to 50s and 60s R&B/Soul) and mainstream pop, Hip Hop seems to thrive on features in comparison with other genres, even other traditionally African American genres (which, by way of community, was my initial hypothesis on why it visibly features other artists, as opposed to just casually employing them in the more general liner note credits)
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Some of has to do with contracts. Let’s say artist X is contracted to only do recordings first Sony while artist Y can only do recordings for Def Jam.
Now let’s say X wants to do a song and have Y do backup vocals. By contract this technically isn’t allowed. A lot of times the artists would just do the recording but wouldn’t mention that Y is on the recording. People would just kind of know or figure it out. In the 80s there was a song that obviously featured Michael Jackson on backup vocals but everyone involved denied it for years.
“Featuring” someone on your recording is a way of stepping around this contact issue, kind of. It’s a way of saying Y is performing on this song but is not the actual artist.
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