Any hustler worth their salt knows the only thing more important than accumulation of cash is the the flip. Money earned is good, money saved is better, and money reinvested and working for you is best. Atlanta rapper Money Man lives by this principle and it is the linchpin of his increasingly successful rap career.
Money Man’s tapes, Grow God and Harvest Season, both hover around the 800,000-play count on mixtape streaming site Spinrilla, but his YouTube channel boasts a staggering 116 million total views. After the success of his 2016 songs “Boss Up,” “How It Feel,” and his Black Circle mixtape trilogy, Money Man signed with Cash Money Records in 2017. This past April, however, he made headlines after he put up $250,000 to get out of that contract, citing his desire to keep 100% of the profit for himself rather than splitting it with the label that Birdman built.
Parting ways with Cash Money meant that he would rather rely on his smaller, leaner operation than flex the corporate muscle the label and its distribution partner, Republic Records, have. He releases music at a steady clip through the digital distribution service Tunecore and YouTube, without any deal with a major or indie distributor. His release strategy is based on spontaneity and immediacy rather than the deliberation and calculation of major label-style marketing and promotion; his mentality is pro-digital media and anti-middleman: “If I record the song right now, I can drop it on YouTube right now, and I’m going to get paid for it,” he says. “I got an in-house mixer. If he takes too long, I just put it out rough, so people can feel the realness of the song.” In this way Money Man is like many other indie artists who have realized fans’ voracious appetite for content and the slow pace at which major labels move is incongruous; if you, the artist, already have a homegrown audience you might as well feed the beast yourself.
But where Money Man differs from other business-savvy rappers of today is how he’s getting to his end goal of getting rich after recognizing the connection between cultural currency and real cash money. “I look at rap as a doorway to becoming a billionaire,” he says. “It attracts different types of people for me to do business with, find out new things. It’s like holding a key right now.” Focused on the flip, Money is converting internet celebrity as well as streaming and show money into lucrative investments in the world of cryptocurrency.
In his music video for “Internet,” Money Man pores over a computer screen, intently watching the crypto market charts, his atypical investment strategy seeping into his music. And while you could dismiss this as yet another rapper foolishly infatuated with the crypto fad, it’s clear that, unlike Lil Uzi Vert and DJ Khaled, Money has done his homework on the topic. He claims to have made his first crypto purchases in 2013, eons ago in internet time. “I had Bitcoin back when it was at $300,” he states matter-of-factly. “I just had a hunch that it was gonna explode, and it went all the way up to $18,000 when I cashed them out.” He claims he’s earned at least $100,000 from crypto alone.
On his single “Night and Day,” he mentions staying undetected through his VPN server, possibly the first and last instance of a rapper bragging about a private network. “I learned [about the crypto market] myself,” he said, “I started with the Tor browser, just messing around.” He got into the game during Silk Road’s heyday and waxes nostalgic about cryptocurrency’s more illicit origins. “Criminals usually get the new technology first,” he explains. “You’ve got to look at what they’re doing [because] it’s usually ahead of the curve.” Though he admits to being adjacent to street life in the past, Money’s end goal is legitimacy. “A lot of my music talks about [how] I don’t have to rob [anyone], I can hustle. I don’t have to do the things [other] people have to resort to.” Now that crypto has gone mainstream—and with the guidance of some crypto experts he’s met through his music—he’s bought into Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Potcoin. He plans to perform at crypto conferences in Miami and Southern California soon.
For a hustler as ambitious as Money Man, traditional means of entrepreneurship aren’t nearly as appealing as crypto. “[Owning] barbershops and car washes, that’s slow money to me,” he explains. “It’s just not enough for profit potential. [In] crypto, if you got in early enough, you could hit big.” While trap rappers have traditionally taken pride in being rich before their rap careers took off, Money Man is focused on the future and ensuring that he will still be paid after.