NOT the rapper I’m writing about
This story is about a rapper that figured out how to get signed to a record label, an indie label.
The rapper had been rapping for 3 years but only started trying to get signed to a deal in the last year.
He used to download free beats from the internet and rap over them. He would then upload his songs to his own website on the internet. From there he would tweet out links to his songs to his followers. The tweets would lead people back to his website. He was using software to build up his twitter followers and said that he had close to 47,000 followers at one time. On one of his songs he tweeted out, he got over 4,000 downloads in three days.
A bit of money, a lot of hustle.
He wasn’t making any money from any of this and he wasn’t spending much either. The only money he was spending was the money for the twitter software and $40 per song that he would pay to one of his homeboys. His homeboy had a small studio in his bedroom, this is where the rapper would record his vocals and do a rough mix of the song.
Free beats, only $40 per song for studio time, the cost of the twitter software, the cost of his own website and he turned it into 47,000 followers.
He said he used the twitter software for over a year. He would set it to find other twitter users who mentioned certain well known rappers in their tweets. He felt like his music was similar to these well known rappers, so anyone tweeting about them would probably like his music also. Once the software found these people it would automatically add them as friends.
This is how it would work. He would tweet a link to one of his songs…some of his followers would then naturally re-tweet his tweet to their followers, who would then re-tweet it their followers and so on. With all of his different followers seeing and re-tweeting his tweets, his music ended up on the twitter pages of a lot of different record labels.
He started getting direct messages from a few independent record labels about his music. He didn’t have a press kit to send them so he just sent them a demo on a cd. One of the labels asked him to be the opening act in his city, for one of their rappers that was touring. He did it, sold a bunch of t shirts and said that the crowd was more into his show than they were the well known rapper.
The crowd liked his performance so much, the record label asked him to be the opening act for the rest of the tour. When the tour was over, the independent label signed him to a record deal.
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