The life of a working musician is often glamorized, but reaching the point where you can support yourself strictly off of music isn't easy. New York's Brandon Rowan — best known by his stage name Birocratic — knows this all too well. Despite first breaking out in 2013 when a still-nascent Buzzfeed Media used his Creative Commons tracks in over thirty of their videos, he has had to work hard to become self-sustaining. But last January, he finally reached that point, and he's running with it. His success isn't surprising, though. Birocratic's music seamlessly bridges several instrumental genres — including upbeat future-funk, electronica,…
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Devaloop keeps a low profile. The industrious Austrian beatmaker — born Fabian Pfitzer in Salzburg — eschews most social media; besides his Soundcloud, Devaloop maintains only a bare-bones Instagram page and a small Facebook page. This may not appear noteworthy at first glance, but it is. As the beat community has expanded online and gained increasing attention, many producers have become just as extraverted on social media as rappers and singers — two groups that have always tended to be heavy self-promoters. An extensive social media presence for producers is now no longer an exception; it's essentially the norm. But Devaloop would rather…
Ntourage came up off the internet. The success he's seen to date is all online-driven, and it's a reminder of how the internet has forever decentralized the modern hip-hop industry. Artists like him no longer need to move to massive industry hubs like New York, London, or in Africa, cities like Lagos and Johannesburg. With the right conditions and the right music, they can now blow up organically despite living in cities that don't have internationally recognized hip-hop scenes. For Ntourage - government name: Nicolas Machado - that city is Luanda, the coastal capital of Angola. Luanda is not best…
Axian is a hard-working man. From his small town of Odder, Denmark, the 23 year-old producer has quietly become one of the most widely recognized instrumental hip-hop artists in the online beat scene. He’s dropped over seventy songs, as well as two albums and several EP’s, and racked up millions of plays on streaming services in the process. And that’s not to mention his successful stints both as a music curator and as an A&R for Chillhop Records. He also refuses to chase trends. Axian’s music bucks many of lo-fi hip-hop’s clichés: the…