This and long lasting artists = more profit and better long term payoff for royalties a legacy act becomes a star in ur hall for money and fame of ur company
Labels just really struggled with artist development and adapting to promotion in a post pandemic world till last year they started getting it cuz the industry changed so quick. Esp after the rapcaviar era ended

Music has moved away from albums and too pure tiktok hits

carti

all these new artists dont even put the work in to release multiple mixtapes independent and build a cult fanbase

they just think releasing singles infinitely until somehting catches is the play

thats the issue

Doechiii comes to mind

No one gives a f*** about these new dudes because the majority of them are trying their best thugger/carti impression

we barely had any in the last 10 years not just the 2020s

A 2020s star is someone who made they debut in the 2020s

2020 is the cutoff point. We first hear about them in the 2020s.

Who were the rap stars by 2014 that people had only heard during or after 2010

All of em

The earliest one can say was Drake in 09.

But he really made his way onto the scene in 2010.

Shoot to make it even more easy. We can make it their debut albums have to be in the decade.

drake was popping in 08 and had his first big hit in early 09 bro so far gone was quite big
mixtape culture was a way bigger thing back then and what makes an album or mixtape is dif now

and by "all of em" i mean list them

Future (fall 2010)
Chief Keef (2011 to most people outside of chicago)
Thug (2012-2013 stoner was when we first heard of him lol)
Migos arguably depending on if you think they were stars in 2014
Fetty Wap instantly was a star by like spring 2015 going into that fall
If we push it to fall 2015 that Uzi tape instantly hit bc of his Thug Slime Season ft imo. It was surreal cause type beat channel era Taz Taylor lol was posting bout him that summer on KTT1 producer thread
Travis? Lol

Bc tbh they’ll just be releasing tapes into the void but it depends on what type of artist they are

If you a project type artist yea but if you a random compilation of songs type artist like most niggas now the single method kinda works

i would not call future or thug a superstar by 2014 at all tbh
future had been considered to take a dip and was just a new guy with a few hot songs that was constantly hated on at that point. monster dropped that year and it was very liked, but superstar? nah. he was close to achieving that tho that would be like 2015
thug was still often hated on, underrated, and all he had at that point was stoner and lifestyle. barter 6 and slime season tapes hadnt come yet
migos again had like 1 huge hit and it had a drake feature on it, they were just a popular trap group that was well known and good.
chief keef id grant sure.

oh just saw ur edit we not talking 2015 cuz 2025 just started. Uzi was not a superstar yet in 2015 anyways lol

You said rap star my boy lol

Superstar you’d be right but rap star, all the guys mentioned were at the top trendsetting and visibility points of rap

Uploaded October 1, 2014

Lifestyle came from Tha Tour tape which may have been a little “underground” (heavy quotation marks lol) but IMO thats what set him up for Barter 6 buzz wise

I think you said you a lil younger so i’ll cut u some slack but Migos had hella songs buzzing besides Versace. The YRN tape was everywhere that spring leading up to Versace. and as far as 2014 specifically the songs Fight Night and Handsome and Wealthy were club staples in 2014 lol

To bring it back here the only people on this level that debuted after 2020 would be Yeat and maaaybe Ken and Lone

migos had buzzing songs and so did thug but that isnt all you need to be a STAR right? yes migos was influencing but i wouldnt call them stars yet just because they had popular club songs right. if this is the standard i can name mad people maybe i was putting the bar too high. as for thug yea he just wasnt a star atp he was building up to stardom he wasnt there yet, he was on the comeup.

if this the standard then
pop smoke for 2020 (he got 15 of them hits)
yeat 2021-2024 (13 or 14)
glorilla 2022-present (7)
ice spice 2022-2024 (10)
ken carson 2020-now (7)
destroy lonely 2020-2023 (5)
doechii 2023-present (8)
Id count lil baby, yb and gunna but ig since they only got on the scene like 2018 we not counting them. thats 7 tho. not bad for 2-3 of those years being affected by no tours nobody able to bring anyone on tour with them and stuff, imo if club songs puts you there sexxy redd might be there too she got like 8 massive club hits. those guys have reached higher heights commercially than thug or migos at that point other than versace prolly

tommy richman

Dominant rap drums have been in the direct lineage of the TR-808 drums and the Polow Da Don 2006 drums since 2017…exclusively. And in every region. Every subgenre (except for the drumless sample sound that’s big rn in the underground and Drake). That means something. Not every region or individual producer used the same sounding rimshot snare in the late 90s-early 2000s, or clap, or kick, hell not in most of the 2010s. The most homogenous identifiability about that was the types of textures of sound categorically and nothing more. Not literally the same exacts textures of sound copy and pasted

Also sorry but a distortion gimmick, while hard in a lot of this new underground s***, does not cover up its involvement with the ongoing homogeneity in textures of sound in current dominant hiphop percussion

It doesn’t help that on the harmonic side of things, compositionally speaking, a lot of identical two-chord dark and moody vamps that have a little Phrygian flare at best. And again, in every region

if we were to count people that debuted like 2018 and up it would be
Doja cat 2019-present (more hits than i can count)
lil baby 2018-2023 (more than i can count)
gunna 2018-2023 (his first studio album was 2019 i cant count his hits)
nba youngboy 2018-2022 (his first album was 2018 and second was 2020, i only heard of bro in mid 2019 cuz of ai youngboy 2, again more than i can count)

Jack harlow maybe?
Dave blunts

Smiley missed his window

Jordan carter