Indie Power Players

In 2015, Dana Biondi was looking for the future.
The frat-rap and weed-rap crazes in the early 2010s catapulted artists like Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y to fame, but by the middle of the decade, Biondi — who had promoted shows at New Haven, Conn., club Toad’s Place and had some rap management experience — sensed a different energy on hip-hop’s horizon. “I had really seen a lot of the fans sit at shows and just kind of bob their head,” he recalls. “I knew that the industry was pushing toward a new movement.”

Biondi found that future in $uicideboy$. At the dawn of what would come to be known as the SoundCloud rap era, the New Orleans hip-hop duo, consisting of cousins $crim and Ruby da Cherry, had quickly attracted a passionate cult following with their strikingly personal lyrics, rock-influenced sonics and attitude, and, particularly, their riotous live shows. “The first show that I went to to see them was at the Roxy [in Los Angeles] — and it was chaos like I had never seen before,” says Biondi, now 36. “Between the mosh pits and the fandom and the overall show just being… chaotically beautiful, in a way. I [knew] that they were really special.”

He started managing the Boy$ shortly after — along with longtime friend Kyle Leunissen, who introduced him to the duo — while also serving as music manager for G59 Records, the cousins’ own label. Distributed by The Orchard, G59 now boasts a battalion of similarly minded artists like Shakewell, Germ and Night Lovell who have since cultivated their own fan bases. But the empire all revolves around $uicideboy$, who have not only hit the top 10 of the Billboard 200 with each of their four official studio albums but also become a popular arena act with their annual Grey Day Tour (which in 2024 grossed $50.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore) and a dominant brand in artist merchandise. (Biondi cites merch sales of over $30 million in 2024 alone.)

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Biondi initially endeared himself to $uicideboy$ and proved his capabilities by helping organize their early merch operations. But his versatility is what made him indispensable; now a G*59 label partner, he finds himself “jumping from a marketing call to a merchandising call to a call directly with the artist, to a call with the artist’s family, to a call with a major label, to a call with a lawyer,” wearing many different hats for both artist and label. (In a more literal hat-wearing sense, during his Zoom call with Billboard, Biondi reps the brand with a GREY59 skull-and-crossbones cap that complements a G59 RECS hoodie.)

And as Biondi has helped the duo build its empire, they’ve mostly avoided traditional pathways to mainstream success: The pair, which has no real conventional hits and only reached the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in 2024 (with “Us vs. Them,” which peaked at No. 96), has minimal radio promotion and does few media appearances. But Biondi is proud of what he has achieved with the Boy$ — who’ve already surpassed 1 billion on-demand U.S. streams in 2025 alone, according to Luminate — largely outside of the broader industry machine, and he believes it will only get easier for artists like them to blaze their own trails.

“If you’re a phenomenal artist and you’re very creative and you wrap the right team around you, the world’s yours,” he says. “I think that the future is indie.”

Dana Biondi photographed May 20, 2025 in New York.

Matthew Salacuse

When you saw $uicideboy$ the first time, could you see parallels between them and any other artists?

At the time, the fandom is what caught me. I saw how the crowd was chanting “G59.” I saw how mesmerized these fans were. There was only, what, 300 or 400 at the show? Maybe even less than that. But they were so engaged — and I just recognized early on the brand [strength]. And to me, that’s the most important thing: creating a brand and creating the stickiness of a brand with fans. That’s what will keep you around forever.

As far as comparing them [to other artists], I saw a combination of a hard-rock audience that was wearing black — and that was like skaters and more alternative — but then, obviously, they’re rappers, so I was able to hear the hip-hop influence of Three 6 Mafia and Bone [Thugs-N-Harmony]. It was kind of the perfect mesh of both genres, and that was really appealing to me because I had grown up listening to a lot of Bone Thugs and a lot of different alternative music.

They’re obviously much bigger now. When was the first moment that you went, “OK, this isn’t just something that can happen — this is something that is currently happening”?

When we started working full-on together, one of the first things I did was I brought them overseas and had them play proper club rooms. That was kind of a defining point — I was in the middle of Europe and the fandom was insane. I was like, “Man, this is going to work on a very big level, both here and domestically.”

A large part of our early success was doing a proper tour with proper routing overseas, in Australia and in Europe, and kind of showing the U.S. fans that this was a cultural movement and it was worldwide… and they were pulling the same amount, if not more, of people overseas than they were pulling in the U.S. The U.S. had to play a little bit of catch-up.

It’s pretty unconventional for mainstream acts to do an annual outing like the Grey Day Tour, as opposed to touring in conjunction with an album or a promotional cycle. What made you confident that this was the best touring strategy?

Growing up, I had always loved the concept of Warped Tour and how they went to so many different cities and brought so many different people around. It really created a yearly concert that each fan, no matter what, just signed up for. They were like, “We trust the Warped team to give us a great bill.”

The year that we started Grey Day [2019] — the year before was the last year of Warped. I saw a void in the marketplace, and that’s where Grey Day came from. Our lane was emerging, and it was very similar to that hard-rock, Warped lane — but it was obviously much more focused on hip-hop.

So I said, “Let’s just create our own yearly [tour], and let’s always look at some new artists that are up-and-coming — some friends that we just like to work with and like to tour with — and continue to keep it fresh and new and give the fans what they want.”

Dana Biondi photographed May 20, 2025 in New York.

Matthew Salacuse

Earlier this year, Billboard reported that you guys were shopping the catalog. Why did you think now’s the time for that, and has anything come of it yet?

It’s something that we are doing, and we just felt like it was a good time to try and gauge interests, really, and see where the market was for it. The guys have put out a lot of great music, and we plan on putting out a lot more albums and a lot of other great music. We look at the new music, starting this year, as the next phase of $uicideboy$. We’re just interested in the reach of the old music and looking for a partner to possibly consider for that.

But nothing firm there yet?

We have something firm, but it’s not done yet. So I can’t really speak on that.

Are there specific goals that they or you and the team have for the next few years?

We’ve hit so many different home runs in terms of touring and ticket sales and merchandise sales and streaming numbers. It would be nice to finally get some notoriety on the awards side of things, just because we feel like we are one of the biggest artists in music and our numbers and all of our credits show it.

And then, other than that, just continuing to make the Grey Day Tour bigger and continuing to get more eyes and views on the music. There’s still so many times where somebody will ask me what I do and I’ll tell them, and they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve never heard of those guys.” Which means that there’s more fans for us to attract. It’s always something that I enjoy hearing and shows that we still have some more work to do.

Would $uicideboy$ play the Grammys?

(Laughs.) I think so. They would definitely do it their own way because that’s how we do it. But I think they would. I think they would rock the house, and I think the rest of the world would view that performance as something really different and something that they might enjoy themselves. A lot of people would discover the $uicideboy$ on a stage like that.

Dana Biondi photographed May 20, 2025 in New York.

Matthew Salacuse

As $uicideboy$ become $uicidemen, have you had a conversation with them about what the next 10 or 20 years look like? So much of what they’ve done so far is centered on youth culture and around their fans discovering them at a formative time in their lives. And I’m sure that’ll continue. But as the guys enter their 30s and 40s, have you talked about how to keep the brand vital?

We like to focus on about a year or two at a time. It just helps us stay more on the pulse. I mean, nobody knows how or where music is sonically going – and they don’t focus too much on the overall sound of everything. But I think our focus is always about a year or two out, and we kind of plan our moves accordingly. Like I said, they’re going to be around forever. What that looks like in five to 10 years? I don’t know.

Time will tell. We’ve worked at a really fast pace to this point between doing 50-, 60-, 70-plus shows a year and traveling the world and putting out two to three albums a year. Their pace has been phenomenal. At a certain point, it’s got to let up. But for now, we have a lot of great releases and a lot of really good plans in the future for the next couple of years.

What advice would you give young artists or labels that are just starting to catch their footing?

Picking the right people around you and formulating a team is the most important thing for me. Having everything from an agent to a lawyer to a marketing guy… It’s not just a one-man show — it’s a whole team, and everybody has responsibilities on that team to move the ball downfield. I would also say concentrating on your fans and continuing to develop your brand.

There has been a lot of discourse about the lack of developed hip-hop superstars in the past five years — but it seems like when people have those conversations, they’re mostly talking about the top-level crossover hit-makers of the last 30 years. Do you think cult stars like $uicideboy$ are the future of hip-hop stardom? Is the future of hip-hop independent?

I think so. Fans are now just focused on what they want to listen to. We did so many years of going on a playlist, like a RapCaviar, and finding out about songs. And now I think word of mouth is back and hearing about songs — whether it’s through quick videos like Instagram or TikTok or friends that are listening and hearing about new sounds — I think it’s back to the streets, even though the streets are in a different form these days.

Digital streets.

Yeah, the digital streets — and I think that’s the key to the future. People will take notice over time. It might not happen immediately — or it might happen immediately — but people will take notice. It’s all about developing that brand and creating something that has stickiness and has power.

This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.