(“It’s sort of a notch for an artist, when you can put a site down,” says Ponte.) Later, Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot N-a,” Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” and Future’s Purple Reign all either debuted on or gained significant traction through the site. Cole’s Truly Yours 2 and Chance The Rapper’s Acid Rap both premiered on the platform - as the first, and to date, only, time Audiomack ever crashed. The site saw some significant early success: Macli and his co-founder and CMO Dave Ponte point to Apthe day that J.
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The mixtapes were released for free, downloaded or streamed for free and didn’t generate revenue for the artists, instead serving as marketing and promotion opportunities in anticipation of a bigger deal. That early idea put the site more in line with the last vestiges of the mixtape community - defined at the time by Datpiff and LiveMixtapes and, a little further down the road, SoundCloud - than what are thought of as the major streaming services today. We wanted to build a platform where any artist could come in, upload to the site without limits and then we’d make money off the audience via advertising or subscription.” We felt like that model was shortsighted. “The idea was simple: We didn’t feel like it was a good model to charge artists to upload music or to get stats. “At the time, there were other services out there that charge artists for uploading music, or for advanced stats - ReverbNation, BandCamp, SoundCloud - and we saw that streaming was the future,” Macli says about the site’s founding. It’s a testament to the platform’s growth, influence and evolution since its early days as a mixtape hosting site in 2012 before riding the streaming wave to a new, more legitimate standing.Įminem Fires Back at Machine Gun Kelly With Blistering Diss Record 'Killshot' 3 debut on the Hot 100 overall, despite Nielsen and Billboard’s charts not counting activity from Audiomack in their metrics. 14, albeit shortly after its Audiomack premiere), was the most-streamed song in the country in its first week of release according to Nielsen Music and shot to a No. The record was hot on every platform it touched - “Killshot” became YouTube’s biggest debut for a hip-hop video in its history (where it also appeared Sept. The only song added more recently than “Killshot” that sits above it on the ranking is Tyga’s “Taste,” which was added six months after its original release last May, and after it reached No. 29 with 8.6 million plays in just four months. “It scaled extremely quickly.” That’s an understatement: among Audiomack’s most popular songs in the site’s history, “Killshot” sits at No.
“ Paul Rosenberg called us up and said that they had a record, that it wouldn’t be out in stores for a couple days, but that Em wanted it out right now,” David Macli, Audiomack co-founder and CEO, tells Billboard. In September, Eminem surprise released a diss track aimed squarely at Machine Gun Kelly, called “Killshot.” But while it’s not exactly shocking that a former battle rapper known for his scathing pen game came at another MC on wax, what was a little unorthodox was the place where Em chose to release it: not Spotify, not Apple Music and not Soundcloud, but the six-year-old, youth-focused, free music streaming service Audiomack.