Kojey Radical on how to get your music heard and how streaming is a genre of its own
As the East London artist returns with a new single, he talks us through how to get your music heard.
[L]ast year’s formidable 23 Winters EP represented a coming-of-age for Kojey Radical. The East London artist confronted family, faith, race, love, austerity and enemies on a record that sounds like a disorientating stream-of-consciousness over sparse, filmic production. Sprawling social commentary interlaced with biographical details, 23 Winters established Kojey as an outsider artist on the London scene, beyond the chase for major label contracts, too invested in his own vision to yield to the demands of an industry that requests everything should sound like identikit pop. Now he’s back with the release of the imperious “After Winter” premiered last night on Julie Adenuga’s Beats 1 radio show.
Last week, speaking ahead of a secret show at Brighton’s Great Escape festival on a panel hosted by SoundCloud, we heard Kojey talk about how to get your music out there as an independent artist, the importance of maintaining creative vision and the opportunities that streaming services afford emerging musicians. Read his words below.
On getting started in music…
I started by drawing and painting and then got into poetry. I remember I was in my last year of university doing illustration and creative direction but in my final term, I just got bored of drawing and then had this idea for a book. I took it to this guy called Jay Prince and he created a soundtrack for it and put it up on SoundCloud and it ‘banged’. I put the whole project out after uni, let the internet do its thing and it just took off from there.
On putting his music out there…
SoundCloud was one of the first things that just taught me that you could just get your music out there. Once you got over the formula of what SoundCloud was, I could just put up my track and didn’t have to worry about distributors or anything. There was a point where SoundCloud was almost like a genre to me, I’d just say that I’d listen to mad SoundCloud artists – these were the artists where the platform just really worked for them to put their music out and then they grew from there.
On making money…
No one wants to be broke but people can see from the outside when you’ve done something just for money and it ruins the quality of how people view your work because it comes with that sense of selling out. People want to feel like their sense of belief in you and their investment in you is through buying your music and through getting tickets to shows because it is an investment. They don’t want to feel like it’s a wasted investment and that it’s not just going to some suit and tie somewhere. You have to examine both worlds, you can’t sell your soul because it’s not worth it – you can’t keep a receipt for your soul!
On how people find music now…
I’ve got nieces and nephews and can watch them sit on YouTube all day watching videos back to back. I remember the point where I was probably using SoundCloud most prominently was between late college and going into uni. I didn’t want to pay for any services and SoundCloud was sort of this free haven where you could just go and enjoy music that was nowhere else. Then I started seeing these artists grow and appear on other services too and eventually i’d see them on iTunes and i’d be like, you’ve blown-up. But now it’s much easier to target all the services at once. You have to figure out as an artist what platform allows you to communicate with your audience.