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genre hiphop  ·  indie  ·  magazine  ·  Music  ·  R&B/Hip-Hop  ·  tunecore
Rapper Russ On Why Working With TuneCore Has Been a ‘Lifesaver’ — And Lucrative

Russ discovered TuneCore by accident: Nearly 15 years ago, he watched his close friend, the rapper Bugus, Google “How do I get my song on iTunes,” and it led him to the New York-based distribution, publishing and music licensing service. Today, Russ is the face of TuneCore — and a blueprint for independent artists looking to play in the big leagues.
“I was getting 20 cents a month [from my music] in 2011,” he recalls while sitting outside his Atlanta home. “TuneCore was a lifesaver… As streaming started to take over and my music started to gain more traction, TuneCore was paying the bills. It was how I was able to take care of my family when s–t went left.”

These days, the 32-year-old rapper is cashing six-figure checks every week from TuneCore — and he isn’t afraid to show off the impressive receipts on social media. “This is what it looks like when you own your music and you have an extensive catalog and you’re distributing it independently,” he boasts.

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While rap’s mainstream has never embraced Russ or bestowed him glossy awards and accolades, he has still managed to build a successful and lucrative career with a rabid fan base. And his numbers can’t be denied: According to the RIAA, the New Jersey-born rhymer passed 35 million units sold earlier this year. In 2022, he became the first solo rapper to perform at the pyramids of Giza.

“I think it’s a testament to having an extensive catalog and having a loyal audience, [and] the music being timeless,” he says. “I try to tell artists you don’t have to try to get a song that immediately takes off. I have damn near 500 songs out and I think three of them have.”

Russ, whose next project, W!LD, will drop June 27 (an accompanying headlining tour with Big Sean opening is planned), has bucked ­plenty of music industry conventions on his way to stardom. He believes in flooding the market and has often spent monthslong stretches releasing singles rather than stockpiling them for albums and their corresponding cycles.

“The reason I’m not a big believer in the traditional way of putting out music is because it puts too much pressure on you,” he explains of his singles-based strategy, even if he admits “the album is still God.”

“When you’re putting out a song a month, you move on pretty quickly,” he continues. “It’s good spiritually. Just put the s–t out and give yourself a chance to be discovered.”

When you think about your journey to selling 35 million units, what runs through your head?

Just build a catalog that your fans can live with over the course of time. I think that’s what my catalog has done. It’s songs about my life, and fans have incorporated them into their lives. Maybe it didn’t go platinum in the first year, but over time, people keep listening to the s–t.

What advice do you have for indie artists today?

Stay in the studio and perfect your craft. Stock up on as many great songs as possible, put them out consistently and detach from the results. The traditional way of putting out music puts too much pressure on you. If you do the whole “I take two years off and I come back with a 13-song album,” that shit better be it. You take two years off and you come back with 13 songs and it doesn’t even resonate, it’s like, “Now what?”

It’s crazy that 2017’s There’s Really a Wolf, the first of three albums you released while you were signed to Columbia, is the first platinum album to be completely written, mixed, mastered, recorded and arranged by one person. What does that represent for you?

It’s a constant reminder that I’m enough. No matter what, I know I can do all this s–t when it comes to the music-making process and reach the mountaintop. A platinum album is still the pinnacle of success, as far as a metric in the music business. Knowing I can sit in the studio, make all the beats, mix it, master it, write everything, put it out and it goes platinum is a big confidence boost. I know that the reason I have the fans I do is because of me and my taste. It’s a reminder that people f–k with me for me.

What can you tell us about your new album, W!LD?

It’s my favorite offering of music. It has my favorite elements of all my albums: the depth and introspection of Santiago, the sonic freedom and versatility of There’s Really a Wolf, the grit that Zoo has and the bars that Chomp has. It’s me at my best.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I think in 10 years, I’m going to be primarily acting. I got a movie coming out [Don’t Move will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September]. I really love acting … it’s a different level of community I don’t get from music. [I don’t think I’ll be] touring nearly as much [but] still putting out music. It’s probably going to go to that traditional place where it’s like you don’t hear from me musically for two years and then I drop an album. Knowing me, I’ll just be putting out songs randomly and it will lead to an album.

This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.

June 6, 2025

genre hiphop  ·  indie  ·  magazine  ·  Music  ·  R&B/Hip-Hop
How Bay Area Rapper LaRussell Is Including His Fans In a New Model for Independence

Hey man, what’s happening?” LaRussell says exuberantly as he walks down the street on a bright Wednesday morning in the Bay Area.
The passerby who just shouted hello will be the first of several to call out greetings to the 30-year-old rapper as he ambles through his hometown of Vallejo, Calif. “Hey!” “What’s up, brother?” “Hi!” he calls back to them like a particularly neighborly sort of mayor — if mayors wore fuzzy hats embroidered with the face of Winnie the Pooh.

“I walk each morning, and no matter if I’m on this side of Vallejo or the north side where my mom lives or wherever, people are excited to see me,” he says, “because I mean something to this place. I’m someone who really made it who went to the same schools.”

LaRussell isn’t just a local, but a local celebrity — one who has created an innovative, community-focused infrastructure to nurture and forge his artistic independence. He has endeared himself to fans with not only his breezy, conversational flow — delivered over groovy production on an astounding 40 albums going back to 2018 — but also a business model built around sliding scales that allow them to bid on everything from merchandise to concert tickets to royalties to the chance to hang with him and play pickleball.

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“In the beginning, I had zero dollars, so I didn’t ­really need checks and balances. If you gave me a dollar, I was richer than I was prior to that,” he says. “As that elevated, I started finding ways to make it make more sense.”

LaRussell’s success is centered on him being both immensely charming, with a wide and frequent smile that’s certifiably megawatt, and prolific. He says it’s never taken him more than 15 minutes to write a song, and songs come to him frequently, creating a lot of material to monetize. “The universe really gives it to me,” he says. As an independent artist, he has the freedom to determine his own release schedule, which so far in 2025 has included dropping five albums.

“The way labels treat artists where they can only release so much music at a certain time, it’s like you’re telling someone to stop doing what they love and not feed their family,” he says. “Music just kind of oozes out of me. It’s what I do when I’m sad, happy, stressed, so being independent allows me to really cater to how I feel as a human.”

LaRussell

Jessica Chou

LaRussell releases music through Good ­Compenny, his label and company that’s based in the creative compound he has built in Vallejo. The sprawling space offers rooms and tools for recording, content creation, photography, merch shipping and more, with construction currently underway on a storefront that will sell all things LaRussell, including his first book, Limitless: The 10,000 Shot Theory, a hybrid memoir/self-help tome he calls “a book about life” that has sold thousands of copies since he self-published it in 2023. Upstairs from the work facilities, an eight-unit residential complex houses him and his family, along with a crew of engineers, videographers, managers and protégés like fellow rapper Malachi.

Here the vibe is familial and the ability to create is always just a few doors down the hall. LaRussell equates this hub to building “a store in a place that didn’t have a store. I didn’t know what people liked, but I knew what I loved and what I needed.”

While he considered decamping to New York or Los Angeles earlier in his career, “because you think all the infrastructure is there, so you have to move there to succeed,” he was broke, so moving wasn’t an option. “That encouraged me to build my platforms and my independence here,” he says of Vallejo, a city of roughly 122,000 north of Berkeley. And “here” happens to be a place where he’s now part of an esteemed hip-hop lineage: Vallejo’s native sons also include E-40 and Mac Dre.

Now he’s literally making change in his own backyard through a series of performances he and his team host at the compound, where music, food, drinks and bounce houses for kids are all part of the package for a suggested donation of $100 (though the team has accepted much less; those who can’t afford to pay more are subsidized by those who can).

LaRussell says he doesn’t tour in the traditional sense, although he does perform more intermittent dates “all throughout the year” at venues nationwide ranging in size from 200 to 2,000 capacity. He says intimate spaces “are preferred” — like the NPR Tiny Desk concert he did with a crew of 10 musicians and singers last November that has aggregated hundreds of thousands of views.

LaRussell photographed May 13, 2025 in Vallejo, Calif.

Jessica Chou

For live shows, he accepts almost any ticket offer. “I like everybody to be in the building,” he says, noting that most people do pay more than the minimum, with several tiers of preset ticket prices also listed for most of his shows in traditional venues. The system is roughly the same with merch: His team screens all bids and sends counteroffers if the initial sum is too low. In 2024, ­Kickstarter recruited him for the Let Me Hold a Dolla campaign, which encouraged people to donate a buck to him en masse. While he initially thought he would decline the offer “because I really go out and work; I don’t like asking for handouts,” he ultimately decided it was OK to ask for “the bare minimum of support.” The campaign ultimately raised $39,423 from 713 backers, with those who donated getting rewards like early access to music, entry to a backyard show and a chance to spend a day with LaRussell.

Collaborators can even bid on LaRussell features, and he has been known to record 10 or 20 in a day. “The minimum I’m getting for a feature is like $500,” he says, “so if I do 20 at just the minimum offer, I’m making 10 grand that day.” Selling portions of his song royalties to fans also generates income: His catalog has 100.2 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate.

His proverbial open-door policy to all aspects of his career naturally also leaves him open to the interesting opportunities that come walking in. When one backyard show attendee later became the head of marketing for the San Francisco Giants, she recruited LaRussell to record an anthem for the team to be played at its home, Oracle Park. He wrote the song, “Nothin Like It,” immediately after getting off a Zoom call discussing the project, then “sent it back to the marketing team in like five minutes.” He’s currently working on more music, another book and a comedy in the style of Chappelle’s Show.

But even as his projects expand beyond Vallejo, he knows his wider success is rooted here: Staying part of this community means that as he champions the city, it champions him right back.

“You don’t just see me online rapping,” he says, continuing his stroll through town. “You see me with the kids and in the public. You see me as a human before you see me as a rapper. I think that feeds a different type of support between me and my base.”

This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.

June 6, 2025

genre latin  ·  indie  ·  Latin  ·  magazine  ·  Music
How Tito Double P Went From ‘Peso Pluma’s Cousin’ To Star In His Own Right

When Tito Double P was deciding on a name for his debut album, he remembered a comment about him that had gone viral on social media.
“Tito se ve incómodo,” someone wrote, pointing out that Tito looked “uncomfortable” in a photo where he appeared in the background with other artists, including his superstar cousin, Peso Pluma.

“As a songwriter, a lot of artists would invite me to hang, and eventually, they would ask me for a song during those hangouts,” the 27-year-old musician explains with a smirk on his face. “But I was always in the background, looking very serious in photos and videos, and someone left that comment — I don’t remember if it was on TikTok or Instagram — and it got a bunch of likes. And from then on, whenever I uploaded a photo on social media, even if I looked happy, everyone would comment, ‘Se ve incómodo.’ It became a thing and I thought, ‘That’s what we should name the album — it will give people something to talk about.’ ”

Today, Tito Double P seems anything but incómodo. Last summer, his set of the same name shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, dethroning Peso’s Éxodo, and earlier this year, Tito embarked on an arena and amphitheater tour — his first trek in the United States — for which his training included doing vocal and breathing exercises with a voice coach over the phone. With his No. 1 album and sold-out tour, Tito, who only just launched his career as an artist last year, has gone from songwriter to superstar-in-the-making.

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“There’s no manual for that, and it’s not an easy process to go from songwriter to singer,” the Sinaloa, Mexico-born artist reflects. “At first, it was always ‘Peso Pluma’s cousin’ or ‘That guy writes for Peso.’ Eventually, I finally became Tito Double P.”

Tito (born Roberto Laija) penned some of Peso’s early hits, including “El Belicon,” “Siempre Pendientes,” “PRC” and “AMG,” all of which catapulted onto the Hot Latin Songs chart in 2022 and helped usher in a global era for corridos and regional Mexican music in general. They also helped Tito become the genre’s most in-demand songwriter, which in turn laid the groundwork for his evolving career. He could have kept to songwriting, but Tito wondered what would happen if he released his own music on indie label Double P Records, which Peso and his manager/business partner, George Prajin, co-founded.

“First I said, ‘Let me release one song,’ because I kind of thought nothing would happen. But then it became a hit, so I released another one and then another,” he says. “The team asked me if I was going to be a singer or a songwriter and I said, ‘Let me record an album and see what happens.’ I also remember thinking that I wouldn’t tour, I’d just release music. But after performing onstage, now I don’t want to get off. I never thought this would happen to me.

“I went from songwriter to singer to artist in less than a year,” he explains, still sounding somewhat awed by his rapid ascent.

With his charming boy-next door personality, hoarse vocals, in-your-face delivery and unique writing style — which he compares to writing rap songs because he adds “too many words” and records in double-time — Tito stands out among música mexicana’s ever-growing field of emerging artists. He scored his debut Billboard chart entry as an artist with “Dembow Bélico,” a collaboration with Joel De La P and Luis R. Conriquez that hit No. 35 on Hot Latin Songs in July 2023. His first top 10 arrived a little less than a year later with the Joel De La P and Peso collaboration “La People II.” Overall, Tito has seven career entries on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 and 23 career entries on Hot Latin Songs; Incómodo — which ruled Top Latin Albums for nine nonconsecutive weeks — reached No. 11 on the Billboard 200 last October. Tito closed 2024 at No. 15 on the year-end Top Latin Artists list, with 1.7 billion on-demand official streams in the United States, according to Luminate.

Tito says Peso is proud of his accomplishments — even if they’ve dethroned him on the charts. “He was proud and like, ‘¿Qué onda?’ [What’s going on?], at the same time,” he recalls with a gentle, almost timid smile as he remembers Peso’s reaction to Incómodo hitting No. 1 on Top Latin Albums. “It’s never a competition between us. To be honest, he was like, ‘Better you than anyone else to take me out.’ ”

That reflects the ethos at Double P Records, whose roster also includes Deorro, Dareyes de la Sierra and Jasiel Nuñez.

“The artists on the label get together in the studio to show each other what we’re working on and get feedback like, ‘That idea is great,’ or ‘I like the lyrics but not the tune.’ We share everything, from the producers we’re working with to writing together and collaborating. We’re like a family,” Tito says. “And we also get to be our own bosses. There’s no set timeline of when I have to release a song. We have so much freedom.”

Tito is gearing up for future projects to maintain his momentum, including “tons of new music” with which he plans to shift from corridos singer to writing and recording songs about desamor (heartbreak). He also has an upcoming joint EP with Peso: “We have a lot of songs, but we’re still working on it because I was on tour and he had his own projects — but something big is coming with [Peso],” he teases of the project, which has no set release date.

Tito’s life has changed so much over the last year — but there’s still one moment in particular that reminds him of his growth. “One time, when Peso was just starting, he asked me to go do an interview with him because he didn’t want to go alone,” he recalls. “Literally no one knew who I was at the time, and I just sat there next to him, didn’t say a word, until the interviewer asked me, ‘And who are you?’ And I quickly responded, ‘Oh, no, I’m just his cousin.’ Today, I’m much more loose, more comfortable. Like, it’s still me but just more mature, motivated and grateful for everything that has happened and for what is coming.”

This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.

June 6, 2025