How To Become A Hip-Hop Star And Music Promotion Tips To Launch Your Career

Most of the current generation artists just get to the studio, record a song, upload it, ask people online to listen to the song, repeat, and that is the full circle. From this, they expect to ‘wake up in a new Bugatti’.

To be successful in this field, you will need to go the extra mile. Do what everyone is doing and more. Learn how to walk that extra mile. You may be stuck because you simply don’t know how to go about it but that’s why we are here. This guide is going to let you in on the secret to become a successful hip-hop artist and the hip-hop music promotion tips you can employ to take the music to the world.

Hip-Hop Music Promotion Tips To Spiral Your Music Career

• Make quality music

If you are a new hip-hop artist, you have to make quality music that you need not burger people to listen to. Your music promotion skills could be top-notch but if you have nothing to promote, it will all be futile. Invest in a good studio to record some good sound. The policy here is that you have to spend to earn.

• Create connections
  

In the hip-hop industry like any other industry, whom you know could make all the difference in your music career. Learn to venture out and introduce yourself to people. You could do this by sending out emails to relevant people like DJs, music curators, music promoters and other relevant players in the music industry.

• Use your email list

An email list enables you to reach your fans directly. Build up your email list by making it simple for fans who visit your website to leave their email so that you can contact them later about your tour dates where they can buy your music and other relevant information.

• Be genuine

When communicating with your fans, keep the interactions fun. Don’t sound too professional and hard to relate with. You want to project the perception that you are an easy laid back person to approach to your fans.

Climb to fame with special pack hip-hop star

When it comes to online interactions, don’t flood your pages with just your content. You need to comment on other trendy topics that are of interest to your fans and find other ways of sparking conversation.

Hip-Hop Trends In 2020 And Beyond

Hip-hop music is the most recent genre of music and currently, the biggest in North America and the genre is still increasing in popularity. Reports indicate that in the year 2018, hip-hop accounted for 25 percent of all the music streams with Drake’s album ‘Scorpion’ getting platinum-certified the very day it was released.

There is a lot of potential in this genre of music more than any other. For those who don’t listen a lot to hip-hop, the change may not be apparent but if you’ve been updated enough about the happenings in this industry you sure have noted a few changes taking place.

Going into the 2020s the expectation is that there will be more changes in hip-hop. There are, however, some trends that are already taking shape. Here are some of the noticeable ones.

• Virtual reality music videos

With competition getting more stiff artists are exploring new ways to capture the fans' attention. One of the new trends artists are using is virtual reality or 360 degrees videos.

With these videos, you can use a headset to experience being in the video with the artist or use the mouse to view the video from different angles online.

Hip-hop artists have not been left behind on this trend. A few are already using this technique in an attempt to make their work stand out.

Imagine watching a Nicki Minaj video but she’s a few inches from you shaking her famous butt? Pretty cool, right? 

• Emo-rap

Emo rap is a fusion between rap music and emo. With this kind of hip-hop, artists can express their emotions such as the loss of a loved one, heartbreak, abandonment, and other such other emotions. For this reason, emo rap has been duped sad hip-hop. Lil peep is one of the hip-hop artists in this genre.

• Latino music

Latino music has gained a wide market in North America now more than before. It is not surprising that mainstream hip-hop artists are now collaborating more with Latino rappers and singers.

Take ‘Taki Taki’ featuring Cardi B for instance. As of August 2019, the song had over 1.4 billion on streams on YouTube. The days when Latino songs had to have English translations to cross over to the American market are behind us.

• Gold rush for new hip-hop artists

Revenue streams from hip-hop music have been increasing steadily for record labels. As hip-hop is steadily growing, record labels are in a rush to get the next big artist in the field as hip-hop artists are the cash cow of any record label that is involved in hip-hop currently.

In the hope to catch the next Cardi B or Drake record labels are spending a lot of money signing new artists hoping they blow up the chats in return. Artists like Lil Pump was recently signed by a huge record label after just one hit.

Whereas this trend is admirable on behalf of artists, it may have negative long term effects on the hip-hop genre of music in terms of quality of music.

• Shorter attention span

Nowadays albums are not lasting on top of charts as they used to years ago thanks partly to streaming services and the internet in general. To maintain relevance and lock down your fans nowadays one would have to keep producing fresh content often. This is a challenge to many artists who find it hard to keep up with the pressure and some who succumb and release substandard content in an attempt to remain relevant. Resist this temptation.

• Longer albums

Originally, an album would have about a dozen songs but nowadays rappers are releasing albums with a lot more songs like that. Take ‘rolling paper 2’ by Whiz Khalifa, for instance, had 25 songs.

With this ongoing trend, we can only expect albums to get longer.

• Anti-rhyme rap

Nowadays hip-hop artists are departing from the conventional hip-hop style where a good hop-hop track had to rhyme. I’m still curious where this goes.

• Offbeat rap

Just like anti-rhyme hip hop, another group of rebellious hip hop artists does not see the need to go with the beat. You could be thinking that that can’t be a thing but I hate to break it to you. The new era is here, lets busk in its glory.

• Radio is still relevant

As the streaming platforms popularity increases, one would be forgiven to think that radio is a thing of the past when it comes to audience coverage. A survey conducted recently indicated that a huge percentage of the active users on the streaming platforms first heard of a song on the radio.

This goes without saying. Radio is still a force to reckon with when it comes to your music promotion needs.

 And Now, How To Become a Hip-Hop Star

Hip-hop is arguably the biggest genre of music in the music industry currently. The billion-dollar industry attracts a huge number of youths every year hoping to get a piece of the lavish lifestyle often rapped about by hip-hop artists.

The unfortunate thing is, there is no technical institution where you can go to learn how to be a hip-hop artist. This is one of the biggest challenges as most people starting up in this field have to fumble through it using the trial and error method.

What many people getting into this industry don’t realize when getting into this industry is that becoming a hip-hop star is more than just ‘spitting’ rhymes. There is a lot of different areas that you need to perfect as an artist like branding yourself, promoting your music among other things.  

Here are a few tips on how to become successful in the industry as an unsigned artist.

• Develop a strong work ethic

In whatever craft you are in, if the talent is not supplemented by work ethic, there is always a large percentage of failure. As good as you are in this industry, you must invest a lot of time in making quality music for your fans.

After the music is made, you need to put in a lot of time into promoting the music, it wouldn’t benefit you much if you made great music that nobody got to hear. All this while you need to be active on social media.

All this sounds like a lot to do but the reality is, if you want to be successful, you cannot afford to leave any area unattended.

Being an independent artist, this can be overwhelming some times. To get it all done, you need to delegate some of it to a trusted hip-hop music promoter. With monthly hip-hop music promotion packages at friendly prices, you can focus on other aspects of your music career knowing that your music promotion needs will be taken care of.

• Be informed

You need to be knowledgeable about the industry. Keep yourself informed on the latest trends in the industry, the best method channel to promote your music on, the most profitable playlists to be on among other things.

Most importantly you need to have a deep understanding of your target audience. This will inform the kind of music you produce and the music promotion strategies you employ. Understanding your audience also helps you understand where to focus your effort and which areas you need to work on more.

• Develop an engaging social media presence.

For most people, social media means constantly sharing links to their music. This may not work if your fans do not feel like you are present. You need to find ways to have real interactions with your online followers. You could do this by creating online challenges like asking your fans to do a cover to your song or a dance move on your video after which you select a winner and reward them with a small token like tickets to your concert.

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Once you engage your fans this genuinely, you can get the most out of your online followers and more traffic on your social media pages.

• Produce steady content for your fans
  

You want to keep fresh in the minds of your fans. To do this, you have to keep releasing songs. Don’t just do one hit and disappear, this will cost you your fans.

In an attempt to produce constant content, however, be careful not to compromise on the quality of your music. You want to work on the quality of your music and make sure you don’t put out substandard tracks that will cost you fans. Be consistent with your music quality.

• Build your brand

Your success as a hip-hop artist is dependent on how well you brand yourself. To do this, you need to identify your exceptional selling point. Tell your personal story too. People like to know they can identify with you.

It takes some time to build one's brand but it is worth the patience and consistency.

Most successful artists have come to benefit a lot from their music brand years later by producing other merchandise other than music. An example of this is the famous Dr. Dre’s headphones and speakers.

• Music promotion campaigns

When it comes to promoting your music, you have to get this part right. The difference for those who end up as world-renowned artists and those who sink into oblivion is in the way they promoted their music.

You could have the best hip-hop jams but if you don’t get all this amazing content out to the world there is not much to gain from it.

As an independent artist, there are a lot of avenues you can use to get the message out in this digital era. Streaming, for instance, has made music promotion a lot easier. You need to take advantage of the potential audience that is available on these platforms. The best way to do that is to get your song placed on their playlists.

Killer streaming services

Getting your song on one of the relevant playlists can get you covering huge audiences. However, getting on these playlists is not an easy task unless you know the playlist curators for these platforms. Platforms like apple music do not involve third party curators but with Spotify, you have a chance at getting your song placed in one of the biggest playlists on the platform. Just click here. 

• Set up realistic goals

This is one of the areas that artists forget. You cannot expect to be successful in this game if you plan to walk through blindly.

You have to develop achievable goals and put a time limit to them. For instance, if you set yourself monthly goals, subdivide them into weekly goals and ensure you don’t close a week before you accomplish your weekly goals. That way your long term goals are automatically realized.

• Review feedback

Finally, the feedback loop is a very important aspect of your music career. It is through assessing feedback that you determine the direction your music is heading. Many people forget that no feed is also feedback. If you get no feedback it means you would have to change your strategy.