Hip-Hop

A little more than a decade ago, Mumford and Sons were everywhere, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with Babel and going on to win album of the year at the Grammys. Journalists cranked out articles about the ascendance of like-minded acts that favored acoustic instruments, and one writer called up Joie Manda, a longtime hip-hop executive who had then recently started a new gig at Interscope Records. “I was asked, ‘How do you feel rap is doing with other kinds of music prevailing this year?’” Manda remembers. 
Manda’s job has changed — he is now founder and CEO of Encore Recordings, home of rising acts like Victony and Uncle Waffles — but he is still humoring the same questions. “All this is cyclical,” he says. 

Last year, music executives noticed that the market share of hip-hop and R&B was gradually declining; then this June, Billboard reported that rap had yet to produce a Billboard 200-topping album or Billboard Hot 100-topping single in 2023. The second fact took on more weight in light of the first, and questions about hip-hop’s commercial health surged once again, careening around rap Twitter and touching off think pieces and aspirational marketing plans (Toosii told SiriusXM he aims to have rap’s first No. 1 of 2023). “Everyone’s speaking on how we haven’t had a No. 1,” says Aaron “Ace” Christian, who manages the rapper Cordae and the producer Turbo. “This is a filtering process. It’s like survival of the fittest.” 

Existential concerns about the fate of various genres and scenes appear increasingly common around the music industry. K-Pop is allegedly “in crisis.” Even entire nations are worried: “The global market share of U.K. artists has slipped” markedly, according to the former head of the British Phonographic Industry, leading him to call for additional government investment in music in 2022. 

All these gloomy pronouncements are likely lost on most listeners — fluctuations in genre fortunes from year to year are barely perceptible from ground level. While the general public couldn’t care less about genre market share, however, the music industry relies heavily on these numbers for its own internal report card. 

And in an intensely competitive industry, conversations about genres’ commercial momentum are also inextricably tied to power within music companies. Everyone flocks to a space that’s bubbling, hoping to grab a piece. Conversely, when a genre is believed to be on the downslope, that often impacts the way resources are allocated inside labels. Budgets can be trimmed, opportunities denied. “Black music is such a large part of the music industry,” Naima Cochrane, a Black Music Action Coalition board member, told Billboard earlier this year. “But if that starts to slip, then our voice becomes a little less urgent.”

Executives with long track records in rap are acutely aware of this dynamic. “It’s not just a hip-hop thing — pop’s [market share is] down too,” says Dave Gordon, a streaming consultant and manager. (Pop’s portion of the market is down 5.8% year to date relative to the same period in 2022, but that fact hasn’t elicited the same handwringing around the industry — possibly because the space has still produced chart-toppers like Miley Cyrus‘ “Flowers.”) 

“Obviously when you’re at the top and the No. 1 genre, which some people [in the music business] dislike, you have a bullseye on you,” Gordon continues. And the stat about No. 1’s, which he calls “unnecessary,” “feels like a, ‘yes, finally!’ type of thing” from an industry that was never entirely comfortable with hip-hop’s dominance, and may be hoping that its lead continues to narrow.”

Several longtime executives also point out that genre-related statistics are increasingly ill-suited to describe a world packed with blurry genre-hybrids. “I don’t feel that hip-hop’s not present at the top of the charts,” says the producer Salaam Remi (Nas, Miguel), pointing to the undeniable rap influence in SZA’s SOS, which spent the first five weeks of 2023 atop the Billboard 200. “This is just hip-hop energy switched around.” 

For another example of hip-hop getting the assist, if not the points: Morgan Wallen is classified as country, but he slips easily into a rap cadence on the second verse of his multi-week No. 1 “Last Night.” Elsewhere on his chart-topping album One Thing at a Time, he borrows from the Rich Gang classic “Lifestyle.” 

Wallen “is a country artist who takes a hip-hop approach to his songwriting,” says Simon Gebrelul of Isla Management, whose roster includes prominent rap producers like Boi-1da, Jahaan Sweet, and OZ. “Hip-hop is the No. 1 driver in our culture right now.” Of course, the success of rap-inflected country may do little to quell the concerns of hip-hop devotees. But it does point to a side effect of prominence: Nearly every other commercial style of music has swiped elements of hip-hop for added oomph. This is a testament to rap’s influence — and a challenge to its dominance. 

Some hip-hop executives do see the recent numbers as a call for a direction change within the genre. A manager in the space worries that the underwhelming chart statistics from the first half of the year reflect “a lack of innovation in sound — everybody got comfortable grabbing a beat from an Atlanta trap producer.” 

Others focused more on lyrics than sound: “Subject needs to matter again,” Christian argues. “If you don’t have anything to say, then eventually people are going to stop listening. Hip-hop became so quick and transactional that the value of it is being diminished, and that’s why people are resorting to other genres.” 

Another longtime challenge identified by hip-hop executives is the genre’s tendency to spawn vibrant regional scenes that are hyper-specific. These may not always translate nationally — they weren’t designed to — even with major investment from record companies. “Drill is the last subgenre that really came to the forefront, but the subject matter is very regional,” Gordon says. As a result, drill fandom “really doesn’t go much further than Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and maybe Philadelphia listenership-wise,” adds another hip-hop A&R who requested anonymity to speak frankly. 

But the hip-hop-tide-is-ebbing narrative has the potential to obscure exciting trends in contemporary rap. “You have more ladies in front — so many of these women are doing something that’s raw and making noise,” Remi notes. “You have a lot of niches rearing their heads in different ways,” adds Max Gousse, founder of Artistry Group and a longtime major-label executive before that. 

Those developments — along with the fact that hip-hop and R&B still claim the largest chunk of market share, even if growth has slowed — are part of why a number of the executives who spoke for this story see the chart-focused headlines as alarmist. “I was a manager for 20-plus years, and I would have really amazing years, and not so amazing years, right?” says J. Erving, who got his start on street marketing teams for the likes of Mobb Deep and Cypress Hill and eventually went on to found the artist services company Human Re Sources. “The Lakers don’t win a championship every year.” (Gordon uses a slightly different basketball analogy, alluding to the fact that the biggest rappers have yet to release an album this year: “This is like the USA team with all college kids on it — the NBA is still the best.”)

When it comes to marketshare statistics, Manda radiates indifference. “If you’re an executive, and you’re only looking at the data and what piece of the pie hip-hop is to make a determination about how you invest in it, you should probably stay out of it,” the executive says simply. “Because you don’t love it.”