I found Beam when he was 16 years old. He dropped his SoundCloud page onto my Facebook. 'I listened to it and was like, these tracks are actually dope.'
At the end of the day, I was getting really close to quitting. I was starting to accept that maybe I’m just going to be a SoundCloud singer, and that’s when Dreamville came and saved me.
I started my whole career on Soundcloud and YouTube and was always looking for recourses to make music.
I started posting a few covers on SoundCloud in 2017, and that got me into contact with my producer who I still work with, Josh Fountain.
I was in New York in 2014. It was still cold outside. I was sitting there working on 'Exchange' and 'Right My Wrongs' at the time, and a fan had commented on one of my songs called 'Let Em' Know' that was already on my SoundCloud and said, 'trapsoul movement.'
We're expressing ourselves through references to anime and things like that, but SoundCloud music is just music that happens to be on SoundCloud.
It's always the first 10,000 SoundCloud listens; that was definitely a big moment, seeing the online stuff grow and crowds grow.
There's only so much you can do on a physical level trying to tour or pass out mixtapes. Although that matters, I realized that you can reach more people putting your music on Soundcloud and networking with blogs to write about you. It really comes back to the music and what you release.
I just put out some free content on Soundcloud and it just got bigger and bigger with no promotion whatsoever, no industry backing, no radio, not even really any social media presence.
There's no right or wrong way to do things and I think a lot of the SoundCloud rappers with their DIY music are proving that to be true.
