Hindi rap + Canadian pop: An unlikely but also unsurprising win

Divya here, reporting from my desk next to a nice new bookshelf that is filling the room with excellent vibes. I’ve been listening to a new-ish song by the Canadian pop duo Crash Adams called New Heart, which I found in a very roundabout way.

I follow an Indian-American musician called Shuba. A few weeks ago, she popped up in a video with Crash Adams. They were walking around the city and asking different rappers to freestyle one verse with them to promote their song, and the mix of this boy band pop and all the rappers' different language/flavour bars was delightful. That was actually how I discovered Crash Adams, although I’m sure most people went the opposite route. They’re already pretty established, and these videos were pulling in serious views, which meant the smaller artists were suddenly sitting on a wave of reach they wouldn’t have accessed on their own. 

I 100% prefer her version to the original

This was so smartly done. The entire “campaign” (which wasn’t at all framed as a campaign) was done as a man on the street voxpop thing (which seems to be Crash Adams' entire MO), and each featured rapper seemed to come from a different pocket of the internet with a smaller disparate fan base of anywhere from 10K to 800K followers (approx- unsure how big each of them were before the collab). Each one was obviously very motivated to share this piece of content that placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with a bigger act. And of all the rappers they brought into this series, Shuba seems to be one of the most popular ones.

I dug a bit and found this stat that seems to be old news for the music industry. Spotify’s data says collaborations across borders can transform your audience footprint - 84% of streams for international collabs come from outside the main artist’s home country, versus under 60% for single-artist tracks. That is pretty cool, and shows how art travels when artists cross lanes and tap into scenes that have nothing in common except curiosity.

My takeaways are twofold:

• There’s something wholesome about creators or collaborators getting a lift — celebrated in a way that makes them want to share content even if they weren’t being paid for it. This is obviously more complex with the transactional nature of brands' relationship with influencers, than with two artists making something together, where the energy and joy of creation naturally shine through. But it's a good North Star to steer towards when possible. 

• Cross-pollination creates new audiences because of the sheer “What??” nature of it all and can be more interesting/sticky than neat well-aligned collabs. Growth is often sideways, moving upwards and outwards into new audiences with new interests who are drawn into your fold for different reasons. That’s really the spirit of this whole Inspired By Anywhere series anyway -  follow something slightly outside your lane and see the fun new places it takes you for your ideas, inspiration and references. 

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I realise that the last blog post I wrote was also about a Canadian musician who has become VERY good at international collabs to grow his body of work and reach. Huh.