Sound Advice: Femdot.

Chicago rapper femdot. shares strategies for keeping fans engaged between tour dates and album releases.

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Welcome to Sound Advice, the weekly interview series spotlighting artists’ creative process and their SoundCloud journey. We’ll get the inside knowledge straight from the source on how musicians, producers, and creatives are leaning into the many facets of Next Pro to reach their audience and grow their careers.

“Writer by nature, rapper by craft” reads the SoundCloud bio of femdot., a Chicago artist whose onslaught of original releases showcase high-caliber wordplay, effortless dexterity and immaculate attention to detail. An impassioned student of his craft, femdot. has spent the past decade establishing himself as a Midwest staple, balancing his evolving music career and busy tour schedule with running the non-profit he founded Delacreme Scholars.

femdot. started rapping at the age of six, captivated by ’90s East Coast hip-hop. Steadily releasing music since 2013, femdot. experienced a new level of attention around his 2019 album 94 Camry Music, leading to tours with SABA, tobi lou and redveil as well as partnerships with companies such as Toyota, Lululemon and the Chicago Bears, who commissioned him to write the theme music for their 2021 season opener. Fresh off releasing Free Samples Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, femdot. drops wisdom about keeping audiences engaged, release strategies, and using SoundCloud as an archival source of inspiration.

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When did you first start to notice your music was resonating with audiences on SoundCloud?

2016 was the first time people outside of Chicago were really gravitating to it and I started doing any type of numbers. At the time, people were able to download from HulkShare, so I would upload music to SoundCloud with a “Download here” link that pointed to the ZIP file; that way, I’d be able to track like, ‘Oh, 1,000 people downloaded this folder.’ Even now, people will ask me about those songs, and I’m like, ‘They’re only on SoundCloud, my guy!’ I did a series of EPs that were each titled with a number (4, 3, 2 and then uno) and they were all spelled a little weird. They were each part of a countdown that concluded in a compilation of all four EPs called The 20/20 Hour that was released in 2017. Each EP had a different sound and feeling. Because of the songs I put out in 2016, I was able to start performing my own headline shows; I was part of this program called Red Bull Sound Select, and I did my first show outside of Chicago.

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Learn how to share private tracks or playlists on SoundCloud

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How did you utilize SoundCloud during the pandemic?

The first couple of months of the pandemic, it was really like, ‘Damn what’s happening?!’ I’m reading scientific articles in my house, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know if it was the right time to drop music. So, the first thing I decided to do was put a freestyle on SoundCloud and just see how people felt about it. I wasn’t with a distribution company so I was dropping everything pretty much on my own and all of the records that I dropped at the time were doing the best on SoundCloud. My original fanbase, which started out on SoundCloud, showed me there are people who want this music, even in the midst of all of this going on. I feel like it’s easier to fluff other numbers than it is on SoundCloud, where a lot of the numbers are based on people who have been around for a while or going out to actively seek music. It was just super reassuring to know that what I put out was doing numbers. It signaled my fans still want to hear from me, so that was really cool.

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What inspired you to record and release the “Greenroom Freestyles” as a way to promote your tour?

I wanted to figure out something interesting or unique to do that fans could have outside of regular content. It was like, ‘Well, I’m a rapper. I like rap [laughs],” so I ended up doing a freestyle in every green room on tour. I did one for every city so it’s about 20-something freestyles and we were able to package them as if it were a mixtape. We put ’em up on SoundCloud for people who didn’t want just to watch the videos on Instagram and TikTok. It ended up being really cool because we were promoting the tour off the freestyles in general. We were doing them every day and trying to get them posted within 24 hours. It also brings people back to the moment they had when they saw me on tour. I wanted each one to have references to the city we were in, so some [feedback] was like, ‘I didn’t know you made a whole freestyle referencing my high school and where I’m from in Columbus, Ohio.’ People would ask for the next one. I would be by the merch booth or something and was meeting like 200 people a day after the shows, and people would bring up the freestyles.

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What are your favorite features on SoundCloud and what do you use most often?

[SoundCloud] was the first place I could check my insights and what my numbers are and where my fans are. You can even see their usernames; I like to see which profiles are playing my stuff all the time. I’ve always loved how you can just upload and it’s not a waiting process. If I’m feeling this right now, and I want people to hear this right now, people can hear this right now. Everything else takes time and there’s delays, or I’ve got to submit by a deadline.

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Learn more about using First Fans on Next Pro

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How have you connected with beatmakers and other collaborators on SoundCloud?

Chicago between 2012 and 2016 was kind of a boom. You were able to find people in the city but the first thing everyone would do is go to your SoundCloud. When people were looking for a catalog or seeing if they should rock with you or not, we were all sending people to our SoundCloud links to listen to our stuff. We have a really big open mic scene, or at least we did when I was coming up, and the follow-up was always like, ‘Oh, you hard! What’s your SoundCloud?’ Like, immediately. That’s how we were all able to just put music out at a consistent rate without worrying about anything. A lot of our careers were literally made just off SoundCloud. By the time I started having a little motion in 2016, I was already putting out music on SoundCloud for over three years.

One of my earliest producer homies I met DM’ed me on SoundCloud in 2013 and now he has placements with everybody. Other times, people would DM me with a playlist, like, ‘These are femdot. type beats; these are beats I have in mind for you.’ It’s been a couple of times where I can explicitly remember taking the conversation from another platform to SoundCloud (so people could connect immediately and hear the music), or having people immediately send me music via SoundCloud message so I can figure out right away what I want [to use] and what I want to listen to.

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How to get the most out of the DM feature on SoundCloud

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When you’re in album mode, does SoundCloud help you find producers to work with or help you stay inspired?

What SoundCloud does for me now is it makes it so easy to send me beats. Anytime I’m meeting a new producer or working with a producer, they’ll always send a private link on SoundCloud, especially if they don’t necessarily want to send over the song files, so you can listen and see if you’re interested. I also have a lot of my favorite mixtapes saved on SoundCloud: Kendrick Lamar’s Overly Dedicated, Dom Kennedy’s The Original Dom Kennedy and the Yellow Album, Wiz Khalifa’s Kush & OJ. Also, if I want to rap about how I was when I was 18, I can go back and listen to music. I can look at my likes when I was 18 and put myself back in the moment.

Anytime I’m in a slump or if I’m not being creative or if I feel like I’m not progressing, I’ll go back and listen to my old music, just to remember who I was in that moment.

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What are you working on now and what can fans look forward to in 2024?

Since 2016, I started creating this world where all my projects are technically connected. There are Easter eggs in every project that connect them to each other. It’s all rooted in my next album, which I’m really excited about. This is the album I’ve been trying to make since I was 18 so right now everything is building up to this full-length. I’d love for it to be done in the fall, but in the meantime, I’ll continue giving people music to listen to that lets them understand my creative process and where I’m going sonically.

Outside of music, I run a nonprofit called Delacreme Scholars that’s in year six now. We give out mid-year college scholarships to black and brown students and artists in Chicago. We’ve also done grocery delivery services throughout the pandemic, as well as toy and coat drives. It’s really focused on civic engagement but the lens is helping through education.

I’m a community baby for real.

My community is what made me and it shows up in how I rap and what I rap about. I think it’s really important for me to invest into the community that has poured so much into me.

SoundCloud was one of the first places that I was able to find community online strictly because of music, not because somebody knew my older brother or because I’m cool in school or whatever but because people have found my music and want to circle around it.

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What advice do you have for artists wanting to grow their presence on SoundCloud?

I think the biggest thing is just letting music go. I know you be overthinking it at times and wanting to sit on stuff, but SoundCloud is a place where it’s pretty forgiving. I feel like people who are on SoundCloud want to grow with you, versus feeling like you have to be super polished out the gate. There was an era of “SoundCloud rap” where the music wasn’t polished, it wasn’t mixed, the drums was dirty. There are artists who have transitioned out of that and have evolved over time, but they wouldn’t have gotten there had they not just tried it out on SoundCloud first and spent time finding out who they were. DON'T BE SCARED TO EXPERIMENT AND BE OKAY TO GROW AS AN ARTIST.

Also, art is not just made to be consumed. If no one ever plays your music, you can still be an artist. The way music and art in general is consumed now, everything is attached to numbers. So when people are starting out, I’m always like, Tthe fact that you were able to take an idea from your head and turn it into something that is now in the real world, that is art.

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Click here to learn more about femdot.’s SoundCloud journey. 

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