For the longest time, Chance the Rapper was the independent rapper. It was something he took tremendous pride in, that he evaded a lot of record deals to avoid bad business deals. Ultimately it proved to a lot of people that they didn’t need to sign themselves over in order to play the game. An artist could end up in Kanye West’s orbit without Def Jam or anything. However, when he signed an agreement with Apple in 2016, it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Now, Chance gets to explain himself.
Recently, Chance the Rapper spoke with Bootleg Kev in promotion of his latest album Star Line. There, he opens up about the backlash he got from signing a deal with Apple for his 2016 project The Coloring Book. At the time, it was mostly a matter of distribution rather than a formal record deal. The streaming wars with Spotify and Tidal saw artists release their music exclusively on certain platforms. Apple nabbing an independent artist like Chance was big for them.
But it only made people thorny towards Chance. Still, he maintains that he never signed a real deal with anyone.
Chance the Rapper Talks About Backlash From Apple Music Partnership
“I feel like I took a hit from people like making it seem like they built my album or built my infrastructure. My entire time. It’s been scary,” Chance says. Nowadays, he argues that labels don’t sign artists with the intention of building them. Instead, it’s about maximizing the audience the artist has already built for themselves and invest accordingly. If you have good organization in your team, Chance the Rapper feels like you still don’t need a label.
“The key to understanding it is like if you can get a team around you that can help you organize into like exactly the spaces that you choose then you can continuously like you know build your fan base,” Chance explains. “I started out in libraries and putting on my own shows at Reggie’s Rock Club in Chicago. It’s like 400-person cap venue. But I’d go to all these schools after school with my dad and my friends and save money and be selling tickets hand to hand or passing out CDs, and that built a fan base.”
“Everybody is independent till they’re not,” Chance the Rapper continues. “I know enough people and seen enough movies to know that usually when you’re not, you seem to have the same troubles, if not more.”
The post ‘It’s Been Scary’: Chance the Rapper Sets the Record Straight on His Apple Music Deal, and the Backlash It Caused appeared first on VICE.
