How Has Playboi Carti Changed the Way Musicians Market Thier Music?

Playboi Carti (aka Jordan Tarell Carter) is using online marketing to its truest potential, using cutting edge marketing strategies that have never been used before and he is paving way for the way music is publicized for years to come.

Carti is notorious for his energetic concerts, rapping about wearing high end fashion, screaming in the mic, and somehow mysteriously always seemingly ending up top hip hop albums with vocals, and even his samples. He first hit was “Playboi Carti (mixtape)” which hit global billboards in 2017 and this was the first of many albums that shaped modern rage and trap music. Funny enough, Carti says that this wasn’t a proper album and that his first proper album was “Die Lit” in 2018. Carti, alongside with Lil Uzi Vert said in an interview with a Los Angeles radio station, REAL 92.3, That “We know what we are capable of” and that they have “about 100 unreleased” songs together.

How does Carti stay relevant?

Carti uses his keen since of fashion, SoundCloud (a popular music streaming service that does not require a music destributer), as well as his social media/online presence to stay cutting edge in the music industry.

Fashion

Carti has always been big into fashion and even walked the S/S 2019 Off-White Men’s Collection (pictured above). Carti’s close ties with Virgil Abloh could have kindle inspiration for his own personal brand and music label “Opium”. This has been his way to experiment with his fashion interests and connect with other Hip-Hop artists such as Homixide Gang, Ken Karson, and Destroy Lonely. The “fashion house” Opium is notorious for using unattractive models and using big graphics and words like “narcissist” as well as using mugshot photos of serial killers. It is so repulsive but with out a doubt his whole inventory will sell out in a couple of days.

Soundcloud

Carti first signed with a local underground record label Awful Records based in Atlanta in 2014, so it would be naive to assume that he doesn’t have an understanding of the underground music community and its workings. Whether Carti meant to or not, all of his music, released and unreleased is on Soundcloud, and its been on there so long that users remix the unreleased music and make their own variations of them which has created its own musical community. The community that the constant remixing has made, where it is almost like listeners are collecting songs like baseball cards has the audience smaller, but also tight. It would make a lot of since that Carti himself released his songs on Soundcloud and remixed a couple to get the train rolling and waited for his fans to find it.

Online Presence

Carti has almost zero online presence, which is a differing approach to most modern musicians. With attention spans getting lower every year, and almost every company fighting for users attention on their phones, the entirety of the music industry has moved to social media as a marketing tool due how cheap and versatile it is. How is it that Playboi Carti has zero online presence but is still relevant? Although he hardly ever posts on his social media, the same community that posts remixes of his songs on Soundcloud in recent years has moved to TikTok. The biggest question is how did he instill a remix community? Was this all on accident and an “overnight success” or was this something that took years of cultivating a neiche?