With more than two billion streams, the Dallas rapper and singer Kaash Paige has built one of the most loyal fanbases in independent music. In the first episode of The Music Blueprint, a five-part SXSW series for independent artists, she explains how none of it started with a strategy.
A track athlete who chose music
Kaash Paige grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, between Grand Prairie and Mansfield, in a supportive family. Music was not the first plan: she ran track and dreamed of the Olympics. Then she made a choice that worried everyone around her. She skipped the college entrance exams and told her mother she would not go to college, because she was going to be a star.
Her father, who had worked in music in the 1990s, had a small studio set up in a closet at home. She would ask him to record her every day. He saw the drive in her before she did, and she says she would not be a musician without him.
From SoundCloud to a viral hit
She started by posting songs on SoundCloud, where artists of her generation were breaking through. A few hundred plays felt huge in high school, especially when classmates started singing her songs in the corridors. Then an A&R executive at Def Jam messaged her on Instagram, flew her to New York and signed her. The label gave her real artist development: media training, stage coaching and vocal lessons.
Her breakthrough, “Love Songs”, took off on TikTok, where it has been used in millions of videos. She found out at a college tailgate party, when a stranger told her she was trending on Apple Music. A project, Teenage Fever, a move to Los Angeles and a sold-out tour followed. For a while she resisted the song, afraid of being labelled a one-hit wonder, before embracing it: “A lot of people need more loving music.”
Consistency over algorithms
Paige is wary of the idea of making music for TikTok. Short videos with her songs do help, she says, but a carefully timed post can do nothing at all. Her advice to young artists is to post, stay consistent and stop staring at the numbers, whether five people or five million are listening.
The episode also makes a point about ownership. If every platform disappeared tomorrow, what would an artist still have? Paige now manages herself, works without a label and is building her own team, with a business manager and a lawyer, while expanding into new countries. She still keeps a simple definition of success: waking up alive, with a roof, food, and the chance to be paid for doing what she loves.