Russ is Right, Music Blogs Don’t Really Matter
We’ve done two video features called Numbers on the Board now (watch them here and here), where we take a look at a rising artist who’s putting up huge numbers. It’s an interesting time for new music, because we see more and more artists take off and build serious followings without any help from radio or media outlets. Seemingly out of nowhere, underground artists surface with built-in audiences and millions of streams.
For our latest Numbers on the Board, we wanted to focus on New Jersey-born, Atlanta-based rapper Russ. He’s still a new artist to a lot of casual music fans, but he’s been releasing music for years, selling out shows all over the world, and racking up tens of millions of streams. We reached out to Russ for a comment, but his response wasn’t what we expected. He pointed out to us that he’s sent us dozens of emails over the years and we’ve never his music, and wrote to us: “My quote is, blogs don’t matter.”
It wasn’t the response we hoped for, but it started an interesting conversation, and we realized that there’s a lot of truth to what Russ is saying. So we made a video about it. You can watch it above, and subscribe to Pigeons & Planes on YouTube for more news, music, and conversations.
UPDATE: After several bloggers and journalists shared old emails from Russ trying to get his music posted years ago, he responded with this:
