The Article is completley ludacris. Hiphop is not dead at all, infact hiphop is hotter than ever. Some of the anit-hiphopists written about in the article are women who see nothing but the woman degrading videos on MTV. They probably haven't ever listened to an entire album from Nas, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Lupe Fiasco and Lil'wayne who raps the good stuff. IMO you see what you want to see, if the guns and women are what you focus your eyes on in the videos than you have really missed the whole point.
As for the sales the music industry as a whole has suffered a great deal the latest years but that's not becasue people are tired of music, right? The answer is piracy and a great number of hiphop lovers I know are too cheap to buy the records, and heck I'm guilty. i should be buying records to show my appretiation for what talented people have created for my ears, and further more I love the cristal clear sound from a proper dics. Unfortunately I'm too cheap to buy CDs, I'm a bootlegger and so is a large majority of the hiphop fans out there.
With that being said the drop in sales has nothing to do with people not appretiating hiphop any longer. Hiphop will never die, the creative use of words and rhymes is nothing that any other genre offers.