It isn’t the newest thing on the internet, but unless you are partial to Australian hip-hop this YouTube phenomenon may have passed you by. The idea was launched late last year by an Australia MC 360, who based it on a similar U.S ‘rap tag game’. However, 360 took it to the professionals and set some very clear rules as to how the game should progress.
It’s pretty simple, one person raps over a beat to the camera and tags the next rapper by saying their name. The next rapper will do the same and so on… To date the Rapper tag series has been running for just over a year and has accumulated a total number of views well over the magic 1,000,000 number.
The success of rapper tag as a phenomenon lies in that it has empowered artists to create content for their fans, whilst they are simultaneously able to compare and align themselves with their peers; in the same way that they could back in the days of Myspace top friends. The model myspace helped pioneer in which artists could use owned channels to pubicly align themselves with other artists to expand their fan bases has always worked. However, rapper tag has taken this model to the next level by turning it into an independent artist driven form of content creation for fans. The artists involved have diversified the touch points they use to talk to their audience, taking control over their owned channels to engage each other and their audiences. In doing so they are (albeit on a small scale) subverting the power of music directors, labels, and media; who in this case are being exposed to the content after the fact; rather than controlling who sees what, and when they see it.
Since it’s inception rapper tag has spawned an underground (copycat style) rapper tag here in Australia, an arabic rapper tag and recently a U.K version kicked off by one of the U.Ks most talented and successful MCs, Mystro.
