The posters were everywhere. To promote the new Jim Sheridan film Get Rich or Die Tryin' - the biopic of 50 Cent which opened this week in the US - Paramount Pictures had massive billboard posters depicting the rapper holding a microphone in one hand and a gun in the other.

The Los Angeles county supervisor was so incensed by the image that he wrote to Paramount, claiming that "this billboard conveys a disturbing message actively promoting gun violence, criminal behaviour and gang affiliation". In response to this and other complaints, Paramount took them down. But not before the story about the posters for the new 50 Cent film had been featured on most every media outlet in the country.

As Fiddy so succinctly put it himself: "They are talking about it [ the film] on media outlets I didn't have plans to market the movie to. They are helping me out." The rapper, bless 'im, needs all the help he can get because November has now become 50 Cent month.

We're talking unprecedented media convergence here. Just after the film's release, his new biography, From Pieces to Weight, hits the shelves. The day after that (or so it seems) the "highly anticipated" video game, 50 Cent: Bulletproof, is released. That is swiftly followed by a straight-to-DVD documentary on his life, 50 Cent: Refuse to Die. There's also a big new push on the 50 Cent clothes line.

It used to be that a musical act was pushing it if they released a film about themselves and then had the temerity to try and flog the soundtrack album too. With the commodity that is 50 Cent, we can't be too far away from the airline. And you can make your own jokes about what it would be called.

Thomas DeFrantz, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks about this unprecedented media convergence: "It's all happening at the same time. He is the first musical act to put these four pieces together."

Underpinning all this commercial activity is the clever manner in which 50 Cent is tapping into two very potent US myths - that of Horatio Alger and Rocky. Both are classic rags-to-riches (or, in this case, ghetto-to-Gucci) stories, although this time they have been loaded with a contemporary gangsta twist.

50 Cent is the beneficiary of those who came before him in the field, namely, P Diddy (or whatever his stupid name is now), Jay-Z and Eminem. It's doubtful if he would have hit so hard had he emerged seven or eight years ago. Back then, "realness" wasn't so much an issue in the hip-hop world. Now, though, 50 Cent has built what some would refer to as credibility on account of him being a gangbanger (as they're called) and being shot up.

Some find the constant association through advertising campaigns of 50 Cent and the sound of gunfire to be a dubious marketing contrivance. It is a marketing tool that has served him well, but it remains to be seen just how far he can stretch his exposure and visibility over the coming weeks.

For DeFrantz, the attention will soon shift. "The cycles are getting shorter and shorter," he says. "But it is important for these individuals to stand for a moment. And it's something we all know, we've all seen the movie, and we all know the song. It's a cultural flash point. We need these big, pop-conglomerate characters. But people are either artists who want to make music and make headlines or they are really celebrities who are flash-in-the-pan and grab as much as they can when that flash is hot."

Commodity or entertainer? Or both. Welcome to 50 Cent month.