By: King Acklin
With the Pandemic hitting everyone hard in 2020, most people, including music artists, had to get resourceful. As tours were cancelled along with other shows and appearances, artists had to figure out a way to stay financially stable. Music artists were forced to adapt and depend more on streaming and virtual ways to make money than they had before. The pandemic just made some people go harder.
As it turns out, the people in music genre that went hardest, were hip-hop artists. According to Billboard, Hip-Hop had 12 artists make their Top Paid Musicians of 2020 list, up from 3 in 2019. Post Malone and Drizzy Drake were the top 2 hip-hop artists. Post Malone made $23.2M to gain the #2 overall spot and Drake with $14.2M to push him to the #6 overall spot. A surprise name on the list, coming in 3rd for Hip-Hop, was YoungBoy Never Broke Again. YoungBoy bulled his way to $11.9M and #9 overall, with $10M of that coming from just streaming alone. Lil Baby came in next with $11.7M to round out the Top 10.
Hip-Hop is definitely flexing its earning power, we’ll see how they keep this up for 2021.