Why hip hop stars love crypto

Fifty years after Cool Herc's legendary DJ started hip-hop in the Bronx at his sister's party, the world has changed dramatically.

Back in the day, labels and radio were the gatekeepers for artists to break through – today anyone with talent and a mobile phone can record music, grow a fan base and build a sustainable career from their bedroom.

With all the attention on crypto and NFTs during the bull runs of 2017 and 2021, it's no surprise that many rappers are dipping their toes into the space, some seeing incredible success: Snoop Dogg, Logic, Nas, Ghostface Killah and Eminem among them. .

The two movements have much in common – from anti-establishment roots and entrepreneurial spirits to pushing the envelope with technological innovation.

But given the massive success of rap music on a global scale, does hip hop really need blockchain and crypto? Is it just another way to make money or is there something that attracts more rappers to Web3?

Rappers and their love for crypto

In the year In November 2020, rapper Logic revealed that he had invested $6 million in bitcoin, possibly the largest publicly known emcee purchase. In June 2022, the Grammy-winning “1-800-273-8255” rapper doubled down, telling radio personality Big Boy, “The market is down, but […] I'm three to five years in my head. Don't even look at it.

He's not the only one. The most popular and dedicated rapper is probably Snoop Dogg, who is seen by many as a Web3 ambassador. He once considered turning Death Row Records into a meta counter account and experimented with the Web3 live streaming platform with NFTs and token-gated fan experiences.

Snoop told Vanity Fair in 2021 that NFTs “have a direct connection to my fans and my community.” I can't meet you when you buy one of my records or download one of my songs. Did you dig it? With NFTs, I can. […] There is no platform or broker to check my message.

In the year In 2022, Snoop teamed up with Bored Up Lover Eminem for a BAYC-themed song and music video. It has made the Cointelegraphs Top 100 list for two consecutive years – in 2022 and 2023.

Soulja Boy is a longtime fan of Bitcoin naming another 2018 song after him. But despite how much money he made from cryptocurrency, he was accused of selling various pump and dump and NFT fraud projects.

Most recently, Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah dropped new music as Bitcoin Ordinals, with owners free to use the music as they wish under a Creative Commons Zero license.

Others tried to fake the royalties associated with their songs. His debut album, Illmatic, is internationally recognized as one of the greatest hip-hop records, and Nas had a hugely successful fall at Royal in January 2022. Collectors who bought NFTs received a cut of the royalties generated by the songs. Rare” and “Ultra Black.

Nas was an early investor in Coinbase and will probably have a cool $40 million or more by the time the exchange goes public in 2021. He was recently featured in a get-to-the-vote event hosted by Stand with Crypto with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. , an advocacy group that pushes pro-crypto policies, says that cryptocurrency is “creative, fresh, new, exciting, a different way to interact with central banks and change things in a more favorable way.”

Crypto and Hip Hop: Are they meant to be a match?

Many up and coming rappers have also been bitten by the blockchain bug. So why do rappers seem to love crypto? To begin with, hip hop and cryptocurrency are both based on counterculture and rebellion.

From NWA and Public Enemy to Mutt Prez and Immortal Technique, hip hop has a long history of challenging authority and speaking out on issues that affect urban communities, such as poverty and police brutality. Likewise, Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin emerged from the wreckage of the 2007-2008 financial crisis as an anti-establishment challenge to the power and authority of the traditional financial system.

Hip-hop and Web3 also prioritize self-ownership and control, says musician and NFT creator Latasha, who started out as a rapper but now describes herself as an “artist and world-builder.”

“Jay-Z is like a precursor to me. [and] Nipsey Husley is the predecessor of Web3. “Their whole mindset was about freedom,” she told the magazine. It was about ownership. It was to preserve everything as much as possible.”

“I think back to the beginning of hip-hop and what it was about before hip-hop took over the industry, it's about that experiment for me, the ability to sell that CD out of your trunk. That's the vibe that I love most about music and hip-hop, and it still resonates through Web3.”

In the year Nipsey Husley, who was tragically shot in 2019, was a big believer in cryptocurrency. In the year In 2018, Nipsey described crypto as a “kind of karma”:

The banks had such a twisted model that the engineers and software designers and programmers said, ‘We're not going to fix this with a protest, we're not going to fix this with a Wall Street rally. We will fix this with technology.' And they created an equaliser, it would have sealed the whole game,” he said.

Get rich with NFTs or try

Nipsey Husley was a real-world pioneer of multi-signature NFT activities such as item scarcity and peer-to-peer trading. In the year In 2013, he made a very limited edition of 1,000 copies of his mixtape Crenshaw and sold them for $100 each. Supporters have rallied around the hashtag #ProudToPay.

In the year In 2015, he repeated the experiment, this time selling only 100 copies of the more limited edition for $1,000 each by pressing Mailbox Money only.

Fans can listen to both projects online for free — the same way anyone can view Bored Ape's JPEG online — but buyers get a limited edition collection and the familiar knowledge that their money went directly to the artist. This is a strategy that many musicians use today with musical NFTs.

Nipsey's entrepreneurial spirit is deeply rooted in hip hop, and music has given many people the opportunity to escape poverty and live a life of luxurious financial security that was previously unattainable. Rappers have gained a reputation for flaunting and flaunting their wealth, from jewelry to luxury cars and expensive clothes.

Likewise, the melting and accelerating front of crypto is seen as an opportunity to build wealth in a world full of Lambos success stories and where the cards are stacked against the have-nots. In fact, despite their deep cultural roots, both crypto and rap music have their fair share of people in it to make as much money as possible.

Hip hop and cryptocurrency are both rooted in technological innovation and creative culture.

“Marle Marle invented the sample, didn't he?” Renata Lowenbraun, CEO of Infinity, a free music Web3 platform focused primarily on hip hop and R&B, suggests music advocacy.

She also points to MP3s, where rappers were some of the first musicians to wholeheartedly embrace the novel distribution method of online mixes pioneered by artists like Lil Wayne in the mid-2000s.

The foundation of rap is built on repurposing old technology to create something completely new and unique. They became turntables, and vinyl records became samples from which new songs were created. Today, developers tap existing blockchain protocols to create something unique, while memes on Crypto Twitter are copied and merged daily.

“I think hip hop culture and hip hop's forefathers, who were always technologically advanced, always thought about how to do things differently,” Latasha said.

“I think hip-hop is a technology in itself, and so it makes sense to connect with Web3.”

Crypto and the music industry

Web3 offers an alternative route to success for major record labels with a reputation for exploitation, control and predation.

“If you're an independent artist and you want to be successful without relying on streaming or major labels, this is the first time you can do that,” argues Lowenbrown.

Her company, Infinity, recently partnered with the popular hip hop magazine The Hype Magazine, focused on spreading the word about the power of Web3 in the hip hop community.

The publication was the first to feature cover stories on rappers such as Ludacris and Soulja Boy, and—adding evidence of hip hop's embrace of new technology—was also one of the first publications to go digital.

Hype Magazine founder Jamilah “Just Jay” Wilkerson was first drawn to the magazine's ability to give back control to artists on Site 3.

“I was like, ‘So, can we give artists control over their property rights?' You know, this is not something in my life. I'm 21 years old, and I've never seen that. I've always seen labels dominate everything.

“This is the first time I've had people in the entertainment industry willing to teach artists how to own and make money from their work.”

The kid is “Chief Hip Hop Officer” Tragedy Khadafi, a hip hop icon in Queens, New York who was the first to use the term “Illmatic” on a record – later Nas adopted the name for his classic debut album.

He also assembled the group Capone-N-Noreaga and gave Havoc of the Mob his deep rap name.

But he told the magazine that his experience in music was a “sad lesson” and that “not knowing, not being in control of what you're creating is never a good thing.”

That's why he's excited about Infinity and Web3.

“I'm all for the artists, empowering the artists, informing the artists, educating the artists, you know? And this is very important to me. “

NFTs give rappers an independent way to release music

Perhaps having heard the horror stories of artists like Tragedy Gaddafi, many in the current generation of rappers have no regard for the music industry at all.

Mumbai-based independent rapper Jay Kila, who founded digital crowdfunding project OTP India, says blockchain offers the promise of not having to rely on simple payments offered by streaming services.

“I have no faith in the streaming economy,” he told the magazine. “I don't trust record labels, and NFTs represent a new frontier for artists to really, you know, monetize their music and their art.”

Kyla got into 2021 NFTs after hearing about the $69-million sale of Beeple's “Everyday: The First 5000 Days” artwork. “The idea that these NFTs were changing the lives of artists, or that you could sell an NFT and, you know, make $500 or $1,000 — that's more than you'd make from a song on Spotify in five years.”

Spotify pays about $0.002 to $0.003 per stream. That means a song needs to be streamed 333,000 to 500,000 times to earn $1,000. This led him to launch OTP India and release India's first popular hip hop NFT EP, “No Free Tracks”.

Now compare Spotify to a platform like Sound, where Latasha dropped her song “Showtime” on NFT in September 2022. 100 fans earned the song 8 ETH – more than $10,000 in bear market value. It took 3.3 million–5 million streams on Spotify to match that payout.

Why hip hop needs crypto and Web3

Crypto and hip hop offer economically disadvantaged communities a way out of poverty.

To date, black American households hold only 23.5 percent of the wealth held by white households and are largely unbanked. Research shows that black Americans tend to hold crypto to a higher level, with many seeing crypto as an opportunity to narrow the wealth gap.

In the year As of 2021, 17.2% of households in the Bronx, where hip hop started, are unbanked — four times the national average. For Lowenbraun, this is all the more reason to make sure these communities get on board with Web3 and NFTs, providing access to financial opportunities and networks previously closed to the average person.

“You have to want to worry about Web3 because that's what it's all about — it's for the underbanked,” Lowenbraun said.

“Web3 is about not relying on financial institutions to run a business, whether it's buying music, selling music, anything.”

A big issue, however, is that accessing crypto requires reliable internet access, and there are parts of the Bronx where more than 40% of households still don't have broadband internet access.

“I was concerned from the very beginning that this was like a digital divide,” Lowenbraun said. “These communities, which are huge consumers of hip-hop, of many different genres of music – shouldn't be one of them. They should be users.

Special challenges of hip hop in crypto and Web3

In addition to the lack of access to certain technologies in many communities, there are some unique challenges for hip hop in particular.

For example, rap music often contains samples, and sample cleaning can be complex and expensive. Owners of the original rights are generally entitled to a portion of the revenue from the new song.

Releasing that new song as an NFT on the blockchain adds an additional level of IP complexity – and there is currently no clearly defined legal and regulatory framework for music NFTs. And if an artist has “this twist” and decides the process is too complicated and releases an NFT without clearing the sample first, well, then there's an immutable, time-stamped record of copyright infringement.

Artists can also get into hot water for promoting NFT collections by continuing to tank, which fans hold worthless collections.

Lil Uzi Vert was dragged over the coals in September 2021 after dropping support for the rapper-inspired NFT collection “Eternal Creatures.” The NFTs sold upon release now have a floor price of just 0.0145 SOL – a 99% reduction from the mint price of 2.5 SOL.

Disgraced rapper-turned-informant Tekashi 6ix9ine in 2016. After the failure of the “Trollz Collection” NFT in 2021, one of the Discord mods found himself in the middle of a controversy when they spotted a cheater and the collection's followers browsing for crypt.

But Latasha pointed out that the media prefers to focus on crypto controversies rather than crypto success stories.

“You don't hear how an artist like me or an artist like Heno knows it and is a regular Web2 streaming artist and they've gone into Web3, and it's changed our existence so that we have more to do. And give more, right?”

“When fans hear those stories, I feel like it speaks to a different perspective on Web3 and gives a different identity to what this device is.”

The future of crypto, Web3 and hip hop

Ask any true blockchain believer about the future, and they will tell you that blockchain is the future. Today there is an entire ecosystem of websites, apps, influencers, mentors, podcasts, and content creators dedicated to empowering independent rappers and other artists so they don't have to rely on major labels. It seems only a matter of time before a similar ecosystem emerges around blockchain tools.

“We're starting to see the amazing things people are doing,” Lowenbraun said. Just wait until you start embracing hip hop.

Subscribe

A very engaging read in Blockchain. It is given once a week.

Jonathan DeYoung

Jonathan DeYoung is a senior copy editor at Cointelegraph and co-host of the Agenda podcast. He is interested in how decentralized technologies can strengthen communities and the ways blockchain can empower independent artists and creators. In his spare time Jonathan raps and produces under the name “MADic”.

Follow the author @maddopemadic