This year alone, YoungBoy has earned three new top 10-charting albums in 2022 – the most of any act this year - charting at No. A true volume shooter.Īnd the tides have turned quickly as a result, as the prolific rapper has now charted a total of 22 entries on the Billboard 200 since first arriving with 2017’s AI YoungBoy. What’s his strategy for actually releasing retail music, then?
In the big picture, outside of his own team and dedicated fan base, NBA YoungBoy has needed little conventional support from the recording industry to push his records past the regional spaces they first occupied. According to several of the brand’s monthly reports, YB is routinely YouTube’s most popular rapper. Perhaps this all illuminates a growing appetite amongst fans for primarily direct-to-consumer interactions that sidestep the music industry’s typical distribution apparatus YoungBoy has mastered this with a YouTube-first approach. But none of this has stopped the rapper from relentlessly reaching his listeners with project after project. Look at it this way: YoungBoy was literally in jail when his 2021 album, Sincerely, Kentrell, dethroned Drake from the Billboard 200. Additionally, his legal battle and accompanying house arrest prevented him from being able to tour or book live performances like an artist of his stature typically would. 1 albums under his belt, 44 platinum plaques as a solo artist, and 35 gold and six 2x-platinum records, he’s received little-to-no radio play, nonexistent mainstream music press (for the most part). I never finish nothing but my smoke… but nah gangster I then shedded tears from the way y’all been doing me but it’s all for the better.”Ī post shared by Alex Junnier YoungBoy already has four No. “To be honest I really don’t care about this being my last album.
As he said on Instagram regarding his last album: If you ask YoungBoy however, none of that matters to him. This plainly illuminates, as Pearce writes, “a gap between what is promoted and what is popular.” There is a number of reasons why this phenomenon is able to exist, and it begins with the music industry’s obsession with performance metrics. How could an artist capable of doing these numbers ever run the risk of flying under the radar? It’s a product of a term brought to my attention by former New Yorker editor, Sheldon Pearce: invisible music stardom, the notion that artists operating on the fringe of the wider pop culture scope can now realize overwhelming success and major followings whether or not the more general public has bothered to notice. YoungBoy Never Broke Again is the #2 most streamed artist of the year so far in the US, with 3.37 billion on-demand streams.- chart data June 29, 2022 Specifically, the “it” you might have missed was Kentrell Gulden’s unprecedented, meteoric rise from Baton Rouge street rapper to chart-topping, the Grammy-nominated MC we know as NBA YoungBoy. But up until last year (or perhaps 2020), you might have missed it if you weren’t, say, a 14-year-old kid hanging out in a PlayStation chat lobby hearing your friends blasting YB YouTube loosies in the background. 2 on the Billboard 200 after moving 108,400 equivalent album units in its first week (11 of the album’s tracks were made available to stream ahead of time).Ĭonsummating his Atlantic deal freed him up to move on and get to work alongside the very same game-changing artists that have been increasingly throwing around his name of late. Since then, YoungBoy has wasted no time, delivering his final contractual commitment to Atlantic Records, the 30-track project The Last Slimeto, on Aug. It all came on the heels of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana rapper being found not guilty federal felony firearm possession case in LA in July.
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