Who Is DJ Hustlenomics?
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, music has been a part of my life as a career for 12 years now. My journey started at around 17, when a few friends from middle school began to showcase their rap skills during high school. My father is a house music DJ and has been before I was born, so stepping into music myself was almost a natural selection.
I learned a lot of basic production and had social media skills to get the ball rolling, but a year into this new path I realized I didn't have a real blueprint. I was primarily scratching and tossing DJ drops on artists songs I liked as a co-sign. In 2011, one mixtape changed all of that and the Chicago scene entirely. An artist by the name of Chief Keef had taken the entire industry by storm with our mixtape release “Bang” followed by his string of legal troubles.
This project alone had made the “DJ Hustlenomics' ' alias a local household name in a matter of weeks, and everybody wanted to copy & paste what Keef had just done. A mixtape with my signature effects and drops, mixed with some of the most cringe banter I could have come up with, now vocalized history. Many people liked that surprisingly, they would recite my talking from the “Bang” mixtape like actual song lyrics when bumping into me in public.
https://spinrilla.com/mixtapes/chief-keef-bang
Over the next 6 years I would go on to touch hundreds of mixtape and single releases with artists everywhere, even a few rappers from overseas. A few more Chicago artists I helped break made it to mainstream status right along with Keef.
Providing other connections like; graphic designers, video directors and producers for artists' creative process made me a reliable resource bank over time. I later took on audio engineering and production full time, which I've been keeping myself busy with the past 4 years.
Chicago. Web3 To The Rescue
Chicago is no stranger to politics and payola in music, something artists here struggle with everyday. There are only 2 mainstream stations for our HipHop, R&B genres, which offer minimal & less attractive time slots for indie artists music. Music journalism has been on an overall decline for years here in general. When the Drill scene finally got its fire in 2012, there were maybe 2 dozen blogs and social media pages dedicated to covering all of Chicago music. Now there are less than a dozen, and only a few of those cover all bases. This left our current generation of artists unsupported and discouraged across all genres. A lot of seemingly key players vanished and found something new in life, while more moved away to a new city with their music resumes, to protect their livelihood and expand what they started in Chicago. Some people put a timer on their careers taking off based on the success of their peers, and sometimes you hit a creative cap here and moving opens up the new doors you need.
One of the biggest issues here is our extent of segregation. Artists here are split by; genre, side of the city you’re from, amount of clout you have, and ties to street life to name a few. This may seem like something every city with a music culture has, but you won't know how deep it gets unless you live or work in the middle of it as a Chicagoan. This isn’t always by a choice, or done by a higher power. Sometimes that's the physically safe route to take, or a route where you might not get blackballed. One artist working with a media outlet or video director may influence these people not to work with other artists directly or indirectly, for their personal beef. Our scene has as many amazing artists as Atlanta, but we don’t have that revolving door of putting each other on, or all the resources they have. We don’t have 100 clubs, and 30 radio podcasts and radio stations that cater to a primarily Black music scene.
The easiest way to maneuver as a Chicago artist with a very limited creative budget now is, with self made managers or A&Rs who have great industry connections and bankroll. They choose to put their name, time and money into building up artists for a living, helping them navigate through eventual label deals, or a successful independent career for a future ROI.
Being a fan of another artist also has its own toxic psychology here. Musicians here don't always support another too heavily because they believe it will dim their own light. “Why give this musician the spotlight when I can give it to myself”, is mentally how artists treat a lot of situations, and that’s because we have only had small door openings since the scene exploded years ago. Deaths from rap beef, prison and viral humiliation began to undo the drill scene in the same ways it fueled it in the beginning. Casualties from certain artists' beef began expanding into people with no involvement. Many artists have suffered casualties related & unrelated to music, and it’s a dagger to them when music expressing that gets overlooked.
I think NFTs will aid in solving a lot of the problems above. Minting a song gains musicians an instant potential to gain tens of thousands of fans via collector social status and blockchain transparency. There is not much need for a radio station when the music lives on the blockchain. Music NFT collectors are the current A&Rs and playlist curators in the Web3 space. Spotify wrapped and playlists are a thing of the past when the blockchain shows a whale added your music to their collection, you had a 10x mint sale on the secondary market, or your mint sold out in minutes. Now these dozens of artists who feel like they are stepping on each other's toes, or feeling overlooked at home are building fan bases through new avenues. Retweeting each other is beneficial for each other now and not burying their own links. Chicago artists shilling each other's mint day would be a turn for our scene.
Artist A’s top collector buys Artist B's music, and vice versa. There is no longer a fight for blog posts or a race to 100K views. With Twitter spaces we can have a spaces panel with new artists that represent multiple genres every week. For every IRL or virtual web2 obstacle, I see a silver lining in the NFT space.
A one day lineup for Lollapalooza, is the amount of Chicago artists that are just a dozen of the right NFT collectors away from achieving so much more in their career.
NFT Communities Are New Foundations For Fanbases.
My first NFT community was G’Evols by Kid Eight, a very well known digital artist, who is no stranger to the mainstream and underground music industry himself. Not even a day after I changed my Twitter PFP to one of his signature generative Cherubs, and did a welcoming call I got 300 new followers. Few people actually knowing me by my music history was a surprise and a plus being new here. The real excitement was seeing people embrace your talent almost immediately when you join a community like this. People I just followed a day before were retweeting my music and 3D art, giving genuine feedback. This is something I can see musicians using to their advantage. Unlocking an extended fanbase and audience from a shared interest and organic engagement.
I’ve probably won about 6-7 pieces from engaging with other artists posts, and a few free mints for providing support where I can. With NFTs you can find someone amazing to do almost anything technical or design related in a matter of hours on Twitter now too. You can build an entire team with the right amount of time and research. There are so many people you didn't know you wanted or needed to meet in this space.
I hope to do a ton of public and shadow work here in Web3 myself, as the NFT space alone has given me an entirely new way to deploy my creativity, and given me a new outlook on the future of art & entertainment as a whole.
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Twitter, Instagram, & Discord: @DJHustlenomics