Ludacris and T.I.’s much hyped beef has taken a curious turn into the Internet domain—literally. Visitors going to ludacris.com will be surprised to instead find a slick-looking T.I. dressed in a black pin stripe suit gracing their computer screens.
That’s because the site is automatically forwarded to T.I.’s trapmuzik.com homepage, which takes the name of the Atlanta rapper’s earlier album, Trap Muzik. Ludacris’ official site is ludacris.net.
“It is possible to register a domain name and have it redirected to a website that already exists,” said a customer representative from register.com, a company that provides domain name registration for web sites like Ludacris.com. “But you need approval from whoever owns the site, first.”
T.I.’s home record company, Atlantic Records, said the label had no knowledge of the site’s redirection until this week. According to sources, neither Def Jam nor Atlantic Records ever owned ludacris.com, contrary to internet chatter. When exactly the site began to readdress to T.I.’s site is uncertain.
Representatives for Atlantic and Def Jam declined to comment on this story. And phone calls to T.I.’s Grand Hustle Entertainment imprint were unanswered at press time.
If Atlantic did not legally authorize the domain name ludacris.com to be directed to T.I.’s website, the register.com rep said Atlantic Records can have the site pulled.
“This is new to me,” said Kareem Graves of Plot Designs, the creators of T.I.’s trapmuzik.com site. “This is controversy. I know [Ludacris and T.I.] had beef so this is big.” Any changes to T.I.’s site, Graves added, would be authorized by the site’s host, which would likely be Atlantic Records.
Otherwise, the incident is the result of a hacker disrupting the site’s operation.
The administrator of the domain name ludacris.com is an Atlanta resident named C. Williams, who started the site in 1999 and last updated the information on December 13, 2004, according to register.com, who said they could not provide the legal registrar of the site.
Williams could not be reached for comment by press time.
The misinterpreted conflict between T.I. and Ludacris began when T.I. said he thought he saw someone in a Trap Muzik shirt getting beat up in a Ludacris video. T.I. lyrically retaliated, rapping on G-Unit member Young Buck’s “Stomp,” “Me getting beat down? That’s Ludacris.”
According to Ludacris though, the man in the video was actually wearing a T-shirt from a line called Trap Wear.
“I had no idea why he said me by name, and you know the name of the game, somebody says your name in a record you have to react to it,” Ludacris told AllHipHop.com back in November of last year. “Trap is a word that has been used in the South for sometime, so [T.I.] admitted to reacting off something that his homeboy said.”
Both southern emcees have chocked up their beef as a simple misunderstanding. “I kinda took it the wrong way,” T.I. told AllHipHop.com in a recent interview. “We sat down and talked about and said if it ain’t worth getting in the street and fighting about it, we might as well let it go.”
T.I. said he also plans to work with Ludacris in the future.
