UNITED STATES — Have you ever heard a hip-hop or rap track for the first time and thought to yourself, “that song sounds like it was made for a strip club?”As it turns out, you may have been right.

According to reports from Reuters and Billboard, topless bars have become a major launch pad for new hip-hop records, a trend that has been growing for some time.

“Strip clubs have become the main breaking place for records, especially in the South,” said Jermaine Dupri, president of urban music for Virgin Records.

The use of strip clubs as a sort of test market was born of necessity, according to the music industry sources paraphrased in Billboard. FM stations run very short play lists, making it very difficult to get tracks onto the radio and standard dance clubs tend to stick pretty close to radio fare. Thus, strip clubs, where DJs have more room to experiment, have become prime spots for trying out new tracks.

Another aspect of the association between hip-hop and strip clubs is a cultural nexus; the power of word-of-mouth marketing leads hip-hop promoters to pump their goods where the fans are, directly.

“Word-of-mouth is still one of the biggest promotion factors out there,” Universal Motown VP of rap promotion Troy Marshall told Billboard. “That has helped turn strip clubs into big business.”

Kevin Black of Interscope records said it’s a simply a matter of strip clubs being another “lifestyle venue” that fits in with the larger hip-hop culture.

“When we work records, we work lifestyle venues like barbershops, beauty shops, skating rinks, bowling alleys – anything with a culture to it,” Black said. “And strip clubs fall into that category.”

The “strip-club-as-proving-ground” phenomenon is not exactly new, according to Robert “Kaspa” Smith, co-founder of the Atlanta-based Hittmenn DJs, a DJ collective with over 70 spinners on its roster.

“Lil Jon, the Ying Yang Twins, and Ludacris are all artists who were helped early on” by getting play at strip clubs, said Smith. “Now today they are some of the biggest artists in the country.”

As far back as the 1980’s, Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew forged a bond with the strip club business; according to Billboard, the dancers who worked with Campbell onstage and in his videos were strip club dancers.

“I didn’t have a big budget where I could hire regional people,” Campbell said. “I had to be creative and use all the different avenues I could think of.”