I still remember the last concert I attended before it all went to shit.
G Herbo was performing at Brooklyn Steel, a midsize, no-frills venue located in a dead section of Williamsburg. It was February 27, 2020, and the Chicago rapper was set to drop his third album, PTSD, at midnight—a release that would be overshadowed by another album coming out that evening, Lil Baby’s breakout My Turn.
Random moments from that show still stick with me: the multiple tributes to Pop Smoke and Juice WRLD, both of whom had died in the past two months; the kinetic energy from one of the openers, a young street rapper named King Von; and appearances from A Boogie wit da Hoodie and Fabolous, the two patron saints of regional New York City rap. But the lasting image I have—the one I can still see the sharpest—is one solitary figure behind me, watching the show while wearing a surgical mask.
On March 11, just 13 days later, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19—a virus that had been spreading in China since November and had reached the U.S. by January—a pandemic. Within days, schools, venues, movie theaters, bars, and restaurants all shuttered. If your job involved sitting at a desk and staring at a screen, you were ordered to stay home. Zoom became the most downloaded non-game app in the world.
The enforcement of lockdowns, which were an attempt to control the spread of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, was a seismic event that, in some ways, permanently altered the way we live. Stuck at home with Wi-Fi, iPhones, and an abundance of time, technology became the intermediary for almost all of our interactions. Tech companies—at least those not named Quibi—leveraged this moment, accelerating us towards a future where technology has a hand in every aspect of human life. In the process, it changed our relationship with culture.
No entertainers benefitted as much as rappers, who had already built a head start due to the agile, direct-to-consumer approach they’ve adopted over the years. Hip-hop might have started out in the park, but entering its middle-age years, it showed it could be adaptable to being stuck in the crib. Almost instantly, rap took over the pandemic, finding ways to eventize their presence, while also uncovering ways to innovate.
But where has this left us five years later? Since the end of the lockdown, concerns within the genre have grown louder. In 2023, the year hip-hop turned 50, no rapper hit No. 1 on the Billboard album chart until the middle of July. Hip-hop’s market share has fallen for four consecutive years, dropping from 28.2 percent in 2020 to 24 percent in 2024. When you factor that in with the substantial growth of pop, country, and Latin, it’s hard to downplay the trend. This, compounded by a noticeable absence of younger rap stars, questions about the quality of the music, worries over stylistic shifts, and a lack of support from record labels, paints a concerning picture.
Ironically, the genre’s influence has never been more evident, with elements of hip-hop—its musical style, fashion, lingo, and distribution strategies—being adopted by nearly every other genre, from country to K-pop to regional Mexican music. (It’s a somewhat fitting outcome, considering hip-hop became such a dominant force by borrowing from other genres.)
The current hip-hop landscape has been shaped by trends that began in March 2020 and lasted until the spring of 2021, when vaccines became widely accepted. The question now is: Has this shift become permanent, or is it just an aberration—and is it all for the better or worse?
The rise of the content-first rapper
A day before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, there was a warning that echoed louder than anything Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, “America’s doctor,” had said up to that point. Cardi B, who had been sending out subtle warnings on various social platforms, went to Instagram and started ringing the alarm. “Coronavirus! Coronavirus! I’m telling you, shit is real! Shit is gettin’ real!” That moment would be remixed, flipped, and turned into memes. But it also represents how ahead of the curve rappers were in recognizing the shifting times. While A-list celebrities were doing tone-deaf, cringe-worthy John Lennon covers—acting as if their presence alone made some sort of statement—rappers dove headfirst into the content frontlines, often meeting their audiences on their own terms.
There were pandemic-era freestyles (Lil Uzi Vert), DJ sets (DJ Nice’s Club Quarantine), song battles on the ‘gram (the first year of Verzuz), live sessions with artists just kicking it (Tory Lanez’s Quarantine Radio), rappers gaming on Twitch (Danny Brown), shouting matches on Clubhouse (everyone from 21 Savage to Meek Mill), and various TikTok attempts—remember Tyga’s “Bored in the House”? Speaking of TikTok, one of the first big challenges of lockdown was the #SavageChallenge, in support of Megan Thee Stallion’s single of the same name.
“The pandemic was such a defining moment; it marked a clear difference between pre-2020 and post-2020,” Kojo Osei, director of marketing at Interscope, told me recently. At the time, Osei was doing digital marketing for 300 Entertainment, where before the pandemic he often saw old-school approaches still dominating. “Things are a lot more digitally focused now. Even artists are more tech-savvy. It’s a younger batch of artists coming up, compared to when I first started, when I’d have to coach some artists or give them new ideas that were foreign at the time. TikTok existed, but there weren’t many artists on it. It was a battle just to get them on there.”
The era of mixtapes and freestyles—essentially illegitimate music—primed rappers in many ways to go all in, almost in a guerrilla fashion. For years, producers Mike and Keys, previously known as The Futuristics, got an education in branding and marketing by working closely with Nipsey Hussle, a master of direct-to-consumer distribution and innovative marketing tactics, like selling a mixtape for $1,000. Now, the duo, who recently cut tracks with burgeoning West Coast figures LaRussell and Lefty Gunplay, sees themselves thinking more entrepreneurially to stay ahead of the game.
“You have to be a content creator,” Keys told me. “To keep it 1000, people forced us to do that, and we didn’t want to do it at first, but I know things grow into something else. That’s just how life is.”
This mindset was honed during the pandemic and has now become the normal mode of operation. Why wait for a label when you can drop 100 gigs of shit on your own site? Got a new song? Throw it on the ‘gram, fuck it. Something controversial happens? Skip the journalist—go live and address it yourself. Want to know how I made a song? Watch me spend an hour with Plaqueboymax punching in vocals live on stream.
Some rappers have expressed ambivalent feelings about this, like when ScHoolboy Q dismissively called modern rappers “content creators,” or when Polo G joked about getting into streaming for monetary reasons. But the point remains: There are clear benefits to being in charge of the content you create. And, because of the surge of online content during the pandemic, audiences are now primed to engage with experiences that go beyond just music. Songs matter, of course, but there’s also lore, inside references, story arcs, leaks, and slang—all contributing to a more immersive, actively engaged experience.
The rise of micro-scenes
TikTok, which was originally Musical.ly, had been around for a couple of years before 2020. But TikTok culture in many ways started with the pandemic. The app saw 180 percent growth among people aged 15 to 25, partly due to TikTok’s billions spent on user acquisition. The most obvious impact of the app has been the rise of the algorithmically driven “For You” page, a feature that has since spread to other popular social platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and Spotify. In the span of a decade, the way music is discovered has shifted from blogs to large editorial playlists, and now to algorithms, with listeners becoming their own tastemakers. This shift has made it easier for artists to connect with audiences and home in on a specific sound.
“I feel like discovery is difficult, and once you do discover it, which is great, you end up in this pocket,” Sophie Ash, manager for Mike and Keys, told me. Ash started her career working with Nipsey Hussle and has had stops at Def Jam and Beyoncé’s Parkwood. “In order to have success in this industry now, I think you need to have very close relationships with your fans and take a [direct-to-consumer] approach with it.”
While TikTok has often been framed as an app for discovering music—and, in fact, record labels have looked at it as a platform to launch hits—it hasn’t necessarily been a reliable venue for star-making in hip-hop. Sure, it’s been effective for achieving buzz quickly, but the platform has more or less settled into its role of churning out modern-day “turntable hits”—songs that capture attention and generate some revenue but don’t necessarily lead to sustainable careers.
Meanwhile, rappers who have hammered away at one sound—e.g., the members of Griselda or Rod Wave—are finding ways to build engagement and build sturdy followings.
“In this industry now, success really comes down to those close connections,” Ash said. “The current landscape feels vast, with no clear barriers to entry, but the communities are tighter.”
The era of relying on editorial recommendations has been completely overtaken by algorithms that reward constant engagement, which in the process causes listeners to dive deeper into their own silos. As a result, micro-communities thrive and evolve, while mainstream artists struggle to keep up with the changing landscape.
During the height of the lockdowns, pluggnb—an offshoot of the plugg music scene that emerged in the mid-2010s—exploded, with streams for the genre surging sixfold, according to SoundCloud. In 2020, the usage of the “pluggnb” tag tripled on the platform, before more than quadrupling the following year, partly due to the virality of artists like Summrs and Autumn!. From there, the scene splintered even more, evolving into microgenres like darkplugg, emoplugg, dreamplugg, and sadplugg. In the wake of lockdown, SoundCloud also reports spikes in internet-centric genres like jerk.
From afar, these micro-scenes can look the same to a skeptic, but if you get closer, you start to see the details. You want to shit on drill? Fine. But which drill are you talking about? Philly drill (which is dramatic, slow-building, and epic)? DMV drill (spastic and intense)? Or maybe New York drill (which can either be party music or aggressive, depending on the borough)?
Or you want to talk about underground rap? Cool. But what does that mean? Are we talking about older rappers creating dense, philosophical tracks like billy woods or Mach-Hommy? Or the kids making noisy, messy, rage-filled music? And if it’s the latter, what underground sub sector are you speaking of? The New York-centric version that Xaviersobased represents? Or the aura, rockstar-adjacent corner Nettspend occupies?
“Regional music is definitely making a comeback, especially since the pandemic. There are more defined sounds coming from New York, whether that’s drill or the Slizzy sound, from Detroit rap, Atlanta, or the West Coast,” Osei told me. “But then, there’s also the boundaryless underground scene, where location isn’t the defining factor—the internet is the ‘location’ and the sounds are more creative and experimental.”
Did COVID kill the rap superstar?
In 2025, artists aren’t necessarily incentivized to reach the largest audiences possible. In fact, what makes young rappers so exciting is their apparent desire to subvert the need for mass reach, choosing instead to focus on cultivating their own dedicated fanbases.
But how far can that strategy really take you? So far, the most successful new example is someone like Yeat, who took Playboi Carti’s rage soundscape and ran with it, essentially creating his own world with his own language and a loyal fanbase that has delivered him a No. 1 album. Yet, despite his success, he still finds himself in what feels like a kind of star purgatory.
In this environment, the idea of a single rap king feels more outdated than ever. Last year, the Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake beef was the dominant unifying force in music. What often went unspoken was that this could be the last time we see something like this—two universally recognized rap all-time greats, in terms of both commercial success and artistic ability, vying for the top spot.
“I felt like the whole ‘Big Three’ and all that beef was the last big, culture-defining moment from that class of rappers,” Osei said. “Because you talk to the new kids listening to the newer artists, they’re not as diehard about it compared to the people over 25 or those with a more traditional take on hip-hop.”
In exploring this topic and tracing trends from the pandemic to now, I wanted to get the perspective of someone who’s been around for decades but still has some skin in the game. This led me to Rene McLean, who, alongside his wife, Lylette Pizarro McLean, co-founded Influence Media, the BlackRock-invested company who has bought catalogs from artists like Lil Durk and Future. Before that, he was a manager and veteran in the music industry, with stints at RCA and Elektra.
While acknowledging that hip-hop is in a bit of a “transitional place” right now, he remains optimistic about the future. To put it bluntly: McLean has seen this shit before. And there is more he’s encouraged by, including the fact that rappers can age gratefully now, than he is dismayed about.
“Right before the SoundCloud era, you had all this glossy rap with no new ideas, nothing fresh, nothing groundbreaking. But there was also a creative undercurrent that went counter to that. We got artists like XXXTentacion and Lil Uzi Vert, who emerged during that time, leading to the next generation,” McLean said. “So I just feel like we’re in that same time period now. We went through something similar 15 to 20 years before [that], when Wu-Tang showed up.”
I tend to agree with McLean. These smaller scenes—which admittedly can be rough around the edges—is why I’m still bullish on rap. No other genre is as diverse as hip-hop. And rappers are finding ways to prosper in their own cocoons. Rap is messy but also hyperfocused, largely because that also describes the most engaged and invested fan. If the rap stars from the last decade were regional acts trying to transcend by aggregating other regional sounds—à la Drake and Kanye West—this decade feels like a correction, with regional, scene-representing rappers solidifying their place in their own lanes.
This is the biggest way COVID-19 changed hip-hop: It was an event that triggered a flood of content, overwhelming the traditional mechanisms that once propelled certain artists to the top. The main innovation during that 16-month stretch was actually an evolution—a shift from communal, outward-facing spaces to more localized corners of the internet, where things became exclusive and harder to penetrate. To me, it’s not a coincidence that there was a surge in success for middle-class rappers making boom-bap-adjacent music, such as Freddie Gibbs, MIKE, and Boldy James. And as the lockdowns eased—with fans needing to release pent-up energy—you saw the rise of high-energy subgenres like Jersey Club and gnarly moshpit rap, thanks partially to the success of Carti’s magnum opus, Whole Lotta Red.
“You got a lot of music that’s merged with hip-hop, that are part of subcultures of it, but not completely in the mainstream context of what rap is,” McLean said. “Carti, to me, is the illest shit in the world right now. The dude is number 43 in the fuckin’ world on Spotify, and the motherfucker hasn’t dropped a new album.”
Five years after the pandemic, hip-hop is still large and important (I mean, Kendrick just performed at the Super Bowl). But it’s also more fragmented, a little stranger, and a bit all over the place. Ultimately, this is healthy for rap as a genre. I can’t speak for the industry, though.
“Sometimes business doesn’t align with what needs to be done creatively, and then it all aligns,” McLean tells me. “They just have to realign.”
View news Source: https://www.complex.com/music/a/dimassanfiorenzo/how-covid-19-lockdown-affected-hip-hop
