Ever wondered who possesses one of the most sought-after web addresses in hip-hop? Here's some clues: he hasn't got a butler called Fonzworth Bentley, has yet to launch his own energy drink and has no involvement with the popular urban prophylactics brand Magic Stick Condoms. The website hiphop.com is owned by a photographer from Twickenham called Paul Hampartsoumian or Paul H. He picked up the domain over 13 years ago and, after a few false starts, plans to launch the site as a kind of magazine and reference source later this month.
"I registered it in 1996," explains Paul, who was working in IT at the time. "It was totally non-speculative on my part."
Though he originally used the site to showcase the photographs he took for British rap magazine Hip-Hop Connection, Paul also included some networking pages, allowing MCs and DJs to hook up with one another.
"That got quite popular," he says, "I received a letter from my service provider, telling me I was using up all their bandwidth. They wanted £10,000 a month." Since then, Paul has been trying to reconcile the domain name's healthy traffic with its attendant financial considerations.
A few years back, a rival internet entrepreneur tried to wrangle control of the site. He still receives a buyer's offer at least once a week, and on one occasion a well-known hip hop mogul apparently made overtures. Another time, he was offered a seven-figure sum.
"That's dollars," he says, "It's always Americans. I don't enter into conversation; I tell them it's not for sale."
This might sound like madness, but at least Paul's attempting to do something positive with the great domain name. After all, a fair few other music genre dot.coms are a shotgun marriage of rubbish music and hasty business sense.
rock.com, reggae.com and pop.com are as eye-poppingly awful as you'd imagine; soulmusic.com is a nice, albeit fannish take on everything from Ashford & Simpson to Musiq Soulchild; classical.com and jazz.com are actually rather good. Elsewhere, indie.com, rap.com, northernsoul.com, crunk.com and punk.com are either parked or under construction. And hardcore.com does not cater for either Minor Threat or Altern8 fans, and is certainly not safe for work.
Paul's plans seem remarkably level headed by comparison. Unlike other hip-hop sites, it won't cover news and gossip.
"The others do that very well," he says, "I think there's another aspect, for people like myself who've grown up with hip-hop and are into all the elements – DJs, B-boys, graffiti art as well as the MC."
Guardian contributor Angus Batey will serve as hiphop.com's editor, and the site's debut feature is written by Chuck D on the subject of Barack Obama. Seven-figure offers are unlikely to come his way again, but Paul is still pleased to have kept hiphop.com off the auction block, and slightly more "real" than many of its flashy genre dot.com counterparts.
"I don't regret not selling it at all," Paul says. "In fact, the only thing I regret is that I didn't get to work earlier."
