“I’ve always been that entrepreneur where I’d do any job. If it’s a family member that needs help painting, I could go do that. If it’s a garage, I could go do that,” says Mist, a 29-year-old rapper from Birmingham. “One thing I’ve been taught is always have residual income.”
Mist has five UK Top 40 singles to his name, a Mobo award and a mixtape that went to number four in the UK album chart. He also runs a record label, clothing brand and CBD business (aka cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive substance found in cannabis which is used in medicinal and beauty products). Next year he will present a Top Gear-style driving series on BBC3.
In 2014, before he was a rapper, he was involved in a high-speed chase where police pursued him up the M6 motorway with 10 cars and two helicopters. He served 14 months in prison for dangerous driving and driving without a licence. After his release, he was homeless for nearly a year. His breakthrough came in 2015 when he filmed a freestyle rap in his car that has been watched nearly 19m times on YouTube. He was living in a hostel at the time.
Like Mist, British rap is now thriving. In 1999 it accounted for 3.6 per cent of all singles purchased in Britain. In 2020 that figure reached 22 per cent. With the British music industry contributing over £5bn to the UK economy, the value of British rap — including grime, drill and a spectrum of artists making music that resembles hip-hop — is soaring.
During the pandemic, music industry revenues have dropped off a cliff as countless tours — a primary source of income for many musicians — were cancelled. But the rise of UK rap, easily the country’s fastest-growing genre, has continued: two weeks ago, Dave’s We’re All Alone in This Together debuted at number one in the British album chart, with the biggest opening week of the year and the biggest for a rap record since 2010. Digga D reached number three in March despite having to pass his music through a series of strict legal checks pre-release (as detailed in a BBC documentary). And in the same month, Russ Millions and Tion Wayne’s single “Body” topped the singles chart for three consecutive weeks, also reaching number one in Ireland and Australia.
This success comes despite a number of challenges. For years British rap lived in the shadow of its US counterpart. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, while US hip-hop became an international sensation, British charts and festival line-ups were dominated by rock and pop. When British rap scenes have emerged — such as grime, which began as a London club sound made by teenagers in the early 2000s — they have had to contend with tough opposition from police and the media, as shows were shut down with little explanation and music publications rarely took artists seriously.
That opposition has increased dramatically in the past five years as the scene has come to be dominated by drill, a music created by warring gangs in Chicago, London, Sydney and beyond, and has not lacked for controversy. Due to its disputed connection to gang violence, drill rappers have been criticised by the Metropolitan Police, the mayor of London and the tabloid media. Drill producers have had their songs removed from YouTube, been banned from making music entirely and received prison sentences for performing songs live.
“It’s demonisation,” says Corey Johnson, a music producer who owns Digital Holdings, a studio in south London where nearly every British rapper has recorded at one time or another. “I think there hasn’t been enough spotlight on the positives that’s been created.” He points to a historical lack of investment in British rap music at grassroots level, which has forced aspiring rappers to fund their studio time and recording costs through other means. “We’re being treated like this is Sierra Leone,” he says. “Like drill music’s become a new blood diamond, where everybody’s happy to be profiting and eating off the music, but nobody wants to put in and invest.”
Johnson praises the entrepreneurialism of British rappers and the teams around them. “These kids have gone from a black market, the one opportunity they’ve had, with no investment, to being a multimillion-pound industry. This is not kids selling their CDs on the corner: the banks are seeing this money, the Treasury is seeing this money. So for something that’s contributed like that to the economy, all of a sudden there’s all this focus on the negatives?”
In a music industry that only a few years ago seemed doomed by dwindling record sales and disproportionate streaming revenues, young artists in the UK rap scene are finding endless ways of making money. Chris Rich, a 19-year-old producer from Cardiff, recently signed a record deal with Sony the same month that he finished his A-level exams. Before signing, Rich was already generating significant earnings through a variety of means.
He started by making what are known as “type beats”. “There’s a lot of money to be made,” Rich says. “It’s all about marketing.” Each type beat explicitly mimics the style of a famous artist. Rich uploads a track to YouTube with a title like “Pop Smoke Type Beat”, then aspiring rappers who want to sound like Pop Smoke can click on a link in the video description that allows them to purchase exclusive rights to the beat — usually for up to about £100 — on an online marketplace called Beatstars. They then record vocals over the instrumental and release it as their own track.
Rich has produced beats for a long list of British rappers, including Aitch, Central Cee, Unknown T and OFB. He estimates that he has made 10 times more money from selling type beats than he has from streaming (“not millions, but six figures”). He can also make money through brand sponsorship deals on Instagram, advertising on his YouTube channel and making short melodies or loops to sell to other producers, as he did for Aitch and DigDat’s viral single “Ei8ht Mile”. His ambition is to produce a track that goes to number one.
Rich also has a desire to work with artists in the US. “The amount of money you make over there is another level,” he says. So far British rappers have had little to no impact in the US charts, but recent developments — such as the late New York rapper Pop Smoke’s work with British producers — suggest there are ways for Brits to make money from the US market.
Such ambitions might explain his decision to sign to a major label. Despite an enduring distrust between rappers and the establishment, majors maintain a spectral presence over the British rap scene. Mist releases his music via his own label, Sick Made, but shares a 50 per cent cut with Warner Music. All but a select few indie artists have some kind of deal with a major label.
But maybe the big labels’ attention on rap is simply the sign of a scene in good health. “Hip-hop’s the culture right now, and UK rap especially,” says Rich. “The American charts used to be pop and rock. Now if you look at the top 10, it’s all rap. If you look at the UK charts, it’s mostly dance and pop, but I know it’s going to follow the same trend. Rap will replace it.”
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