UndergroundHipHop.com Is Back (A Holiday Miracle)

This year starts with exciting news. Just a week after we informed you that UndergroundHipHop.com will be shutting down, a “holiday miracle” happened and the UGHH founder Adam Walder announced that UGHH is back. Obviously the news of shutting down UGHH spun the web and he got a lot of calls from supporters willing to maintain the site alive. Hit Continue Reading to check the whole post by Adam.

My life is a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. This past week has been a roller coaster ride I will never forget, which began with the announcement of our site closing last Wednesday. Within two hours of that blog post going live, I had a phone call from a company in our industry who expressed serious interest in purchasing UGHH and getting us back on our feet, along with several ideas on how to improve the current website – yeah! About 12 hours later, I get contacted by my good friend Apathy, with the news that someone he knows is trying to get into contact with me and wants to discuss the purchase of UGHH – holy crap! The next day, I get a call from a good friend who is also a one of the most popular underground hip hop artists out there and he wants to know how he can help out with his marketing power and wallet – holy crap (x2)! I then reach out to the biggest hip hop artist I know, and he wants to know what he can do to help get the site up and running again – unreal!

Over the next several days, I spent a lot of time reading through literally thousands of comments on the blog post I had written about closing, as well as social media posts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. 99.99% of every post was praising UGHH for how much we meant to their lives – from customers, fans, artists, labels, etc. I knew people enjoyed our site but people were comparing our closing to the death of a family member – lol! I cannot thank you all for all of those posts you made – it really touched all of us at UGHH in a way I can’t describe with words and made us feel very special and lucky to have such dedicated fans around the globe. To say I have been completely re-energized and genuinely excited about our reach to people around the world is a complete understatement. THANK YOU.

Back to the main issue at hand – getting UGHH back up and running, and being even better than ever. I had a fantastic dinner meeting with a hip hop artist, who is interested in purchasing the company. This individual has been a fan of the site since our inception 20 years ago and has come a long way from a passionate underground hip hop artist to running a successful company of his own. He not only has passion for our genre, but has a lot of resources and ideas to make UGHH a profitable entity. The great thing is we are both friends with many of the same people in our industry, so there is an instant comfort level working with him (as opposed to a random venture capital firm for example). We talked about ideas for 2017 and beyond, hip hop in general, and ate some delicious Asian cuisine – not a bad night 🙂 The meeting ended with a commitment to partner on an immediate re-launch of UGHH.com while details of an organisational re-structure (i.e. transfer of ownership) are worked out during the month of January. I have confidence that this individual will be able to do many things for UGHH that we have wanted to do for years, but never had the resources or man power to do.

So how will this transfer of ownership look? UGHH will continue to operate out of Boston, but we would now have a satellite office out of Manhattan. The website will continue to operate the way it has been (at least for the foreseeable future) – keeping the online store stocked with all of the great products we are known for and of course, running smoothly as we always have. The new owner shares our love for customer service and wants the store to thrive again before he begins to implement his ideas as time moves forward. However, the one idea the new owner would like to do immediately is to host a celebratory concert for our 20th year anniversary as soon as possible so if you have ideas of who you would like to see perform, leave it in the comments below. I’m currently working hard on getting my staff reassembled in a way that this partner deems fit and makes sense. Anyone who knows me closely knows my motto is “Everything happens for a reason”, and this time was no different.

I am looking forward to 2017 (rot in hell 2016!), as it is off to an incredible start (and we are only a couple of days in!). I cannot wait to hop back on the roller coaster this year, and see where it goes – I hope you will all join me and I am sure you will.

I’m not one who asks for favors, but I think showing the new partner your appreciation for what he is doing would go a long way. Please leave comments below, share this blog post on social media and make a purchase from our online store to show your support is not only visiting the site, but financial support as well – it would really mean a lot to me. I love you all.

– Adam Walder
Founder, UndergroundHipHop.com

Via UGHH.