How To Choose Rappers To Collab With
1) Does the other artist fit your niche?
Meaning, if you collab with that artist, are you likely to even gain fans from his side of the trade? If his fans ONLY listen to TRAP music and you don’t talk about ANYTHING trap and you don’t have ANY trap sounding beats, you might not gain too many fans from his side of the fence.
2) What will your fans say?
If I go work with a fake ass trap rapper, my fans are probably going to get really mad at me and I might even lose a few fans.
Consider that who you are going to work with also affects your core listeners. They see values and morals in you and your music. If the other artist carries different beliefs, you could end up looking bad from the collab.
Some people may not care about what their fans think or say about them, but I always have.
3) Does the other artist have a similar sound?
Aside from niche, does it make sense for your style to be working with their style? Sound wise.
4) Are they trying to charge you to collab?
Don’t pay, rapper verses are a waste of your money unless they have a hardcore fan base you can tap into and gain fans from.
You can buy a verse from almost any rapper out right now. Why pay some random rapper your hard earned money when you can buy a verse from a MUCH MORE known artist?
5) Do you like what they stand for and do you like their actual music?
Don’t just collab with someone so you can gain their fans. You should only work with people who you actually like. If you don’t you’ll feel like a sell out when you’re done.
If they stand for something and you can respect that, then you can work with them. But if they are just making random club songs about drinking and bitches, let them crash and burn on their own with the other 10 million wanna be rappers who stand for nothing. Don’t worry about that shit.
6) Check their stats on all social media
Don’t go work with someone who is saying they have a fan base but they don’t even have fans. Check all of their social media numbers. Also make sure they are actually active and have released a song in recent months and that they are promoting their music on a regular basis.
If they aren’t promoting their music on the regular why would they promote your collab? If they aren’t going to promote as hard as you do, it might not be worth collabbing. A lot of people are lazy even though they post a bunch of Instagram statuses calling themselves a hustler. If they were really hustlers they would probably a lot further haha.
7) Are they local or over the internet?
How are they going to record your collab? Do they have their own studio to record the vocals? Make sure they are capable of even making that collab happen!
Last thing you want is for you to be sitting around for 2 months to get a verse from some guy because he had to wait for his cousin to get out of jail because his cousin has the home studio. lol I’ve seen this actually happen that’s why I even brought it up.
ADDITIONAL UPDATE: 8) Make A Group Of Rappers
Everything will move much faster if you have a group of people all focused on one goal. I don’t mean you all have to collab together either. I mean you are all promoting each others music at first and then it grows from there. Whoever works well together works together.
Odd Future is a good example. It is a ton of different artist who are friends from one area all helping each other and promoting each others music until one of them finally popped. Once your bread winner makes it, you all gain some attention and grow.
I’ll put it this way, you are only 1 person, imagine with 20 people pushing each others music can do. Then you can start collabbing with each other and start gaining fans from the other 20 artist who are gaining random fans. You are literally growing 20 times faster than you would on your own. You’ll also get shows easier since you can sell more tickets.
There are many benefits! Just start reaching out to rappers and asking “Wanna collab?” I get asked that about 200 times a day.