When Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book arrived last week, it was with many trappings of the modern major-label album rollout. He announced the release date on "The Tonight Show" only a week ahead of time, keeping with the recent appointment-listening approach surrounding new albums from Beyoncé, Drake, Radiohead, and James Blake. Unlike those acts, Chance didn’t specify a release time, but in the streaming era, fans still knew to be on high alert on the eve of the official drop. Sure enough, at 11 p.m. EST on Thursday (May 12), Coloring Book appeared exclusively to stream on Apple Music.
In one sense, this was state-of-the-art industry strategy, from an artist mainstream enough that he’s no stranger to network TV—except, as his fans know well, Chance hasn’t signed to any label. After an increasingly high-profile string of free mixtapes, Coloring Book—available only to paid Apple Music subscribers—is technically his first commercial release. It’s a testament to Chance’s do-it-yourself reputation that when Coloring Book showed up as a free download on mixtape site DatPiff, it wasn’t obvious that the posting was a leak until the mixtape was removed nearly 12 hours later and Chance’s camp released a statement to Billboard. In stories about nontraditional release strategies, the caveat is normally that you already need to have succeeded the traditional way to get away with them. Still perceived as a down-to-earth outsider to the major label system, Chance is different, partially fulfilling the internet’s promise of direct-to-fan distribution. Of course, he didn’t get there without some industry savvy.
One way to understand Chance’s decision to make his commercial debut with Coloring Book is as a clever ploy for industry award-show recognition. His desire for such honors became clear in February when Kanye West released “Ultralight Beam,” on which Chance raps about his third mixtape (also known as Chance 3)—specifically that he “hears you gotta sell it to snatch the Grammy.” More recently, Chance tweeted a link to a petition asking the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), the organization that presents the Grammys, to allow free music to be eligible for nomination. Currently, Grammy rules for next year’s awards require eligible releases to be available for sale between October 1, 2015 and September 30, 2016. In a statement following Chance’s tweet, the Grammys told Billboard that the process for the 2017 nominations was still under review. Later, an unnamed source told Billboard that eligibility requirements would probably change to reflect the recent rise of streaming exclusives, though admittedly many streaming exclusives end up seeing a retail release within several weeks. But it wouldn’t be very Grammys to open up the awards to just anyone. Restricting Coloring Book to paying subscribers, then, could potentially improve Chance’s nomination odds, should the Grammys decide to leave in place some rules that restrict the eligibility of music released exclusively via user-upload sites like YouTube or SoundCloud.
The transparency about industry ambitions on his own terms that Chance displays on “Ultralight Beam” may even be part of what allows him to scale up gracefully, and throughout Coloring Book, Chance acknowledges the realities of his release strategy. On “Blessings,” the gospel-lit song he debuted on Fallon, Chance links the music’s price tag to a broader objective, rapping at the top of the first verse, “I don’t make songs for free/I make ‘em for freedom.” On the album’s other “Blessings,” he reflects with a wry chuckle, “I used to pass out music/I still pass out music.” In drawing a line between his current free release and his early days, he’s not masking the shifting reality of the biz. On “Mixtape,” a song that celebrates the free mixtape as a great modern artform, he brutally undercuts major-label MCs and their boasts: “How can they call themselves bosses/When they got so many bosses?” Sure, pointing out the false pretensions of superstars may be easy—but it’s another matter when you’ve surrounded yourself with them, as Chance has here. The hook on “No Problem,” with Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz, specifically targets labels that “try to stop me.” Other guests on the album include Kanye, Justin Bieber, Young Thug, and Future, plus—only fittingly—a murderer’s row of homegrown Chicago talent. This last point is key, particularly on Chance’s most all-star release to date. Somehow, rooting for Chance still feels like cheering on the success of a small-business owner who’s uplifting the community along with him.
That quality isn’t new with Coloring Book. After all, it was only last December that Chance became supposedly the first unsigned artist to serve as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live,” declaring at one point during his performance of “Somewhere in Paradise,” “Told your ass since day one, I don’t like labels or titles.” Before Coloring Book, his most recent full-length release was not a proper follow-up to his breakthrough 2013 Acid Rap mixtape, but rather, a pressure-defusing collaborative set with the king of pressure-defusing prolificness, Lil B. Only about two months before that came another outstanding but low-stakes mixtape, Surf, this one credited to the alias of Chance’s trumpeter and backing band, Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment. And whereas now it’s a free DatPiff download Chance’s team is disavowing, back in 2013 his reps denied knowing how Acid Rap came to be available for sale via iTunes and Amazon—a short-lived buying opportunity that landed this otherwise-free album at No. 63 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Ever since Chance’s debut mixtape—2012’s comparatively scattershot 10 Day—began catching the attention of media outside Chicago, he’s been coming into his own as, in his words, the “people’s champ.”
It would be blind, though, to overlook how Chance has avoided signing in part by working with a strong behind-the-scenes team. His longtime manager, Pat Corcoran, a former promoter and blogger in the Chicago scene, hasn’t responded to Pitchfork’s requests for comment, which is not all that surprising—Chance’s brand puts the music, not the business strategy, first. At least as of Acid Rap, Chance’s team included Creative Artists Agency’s Cara Lewis, whose other clients at the time were the likes of West and Eminem; Lewis recently launched her own CL Group (she didn’t respond to an email seeking comment). Another Chance team member from the Acid Rap era was publicist Dan Weiner, who also worked with Childish Gambino—who took Chance on tour in May 2012 and featured him on his Royalty mixtape. So while it’s possible for an unsigned artist to reach Chance-like heights, it probably can’t hurt to impress a big booking agent or publicist while you’re at it.
Still, Chance’s ascendancy as a free agent is all the more impressive in the context of what has happened over the years to other rappers without deals. On Coloring Book’s pre-release single “Angels,” after a quip about Drake’s OVO Sound imprint (itself a Warner subsidiary), Chance enthuses that he “just might share my next one with” fellow Chicago MC Chief Keef. To glimpse the potential pitfalls of signing to a major label, Chance need look no further than Keef, who went from his first mixtape to an Interscope debut album, 2012’s Finally Rich, in about a year and half, only to be unceremoniously dropped by October 2014. Elsewhere, for every A$AP Rocky—who claimed a multi-million-dollar label payday and lasted more than 15 minutes in the limelight—there are big-budget signees like Kreayshawn or Trinidad James, whose profiles have dwindled subsequently. Arguably Chance’s closest peer skill-wise at this point, Kendrick Lamar was only 16 when he released his first mixtape in 2004. He signed to a newly founded local indie label, TDE Entertainment, soon after, but it wasn’t until after a handful of other mixtapes, plus his 2011 debut album Section.80, that he signed to Interscope and Dr. Dre’s Aftermath imprint. That worked out gloriously for Lamar on 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d. Cityand 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, but at this point it isn’t clear what Chance would have to gain from a major label deal. The chance to market a “major label debut”? That just doesn’t sound like him—and he just doesn’t need it.
As tempting as it may be to look to Chance’s success as a template, he seems more likely to continue to confound expectations; what works for him may only work for him given his unique set of abilities. Hours before Coloring Book, a non-mixtape track surfaced titled “Good Ass Kid,” where Chance says, “Everybody finally can say it out loud, ‘My favorite rapper a Christian rapper.’” Christian musicians are accustomed to their own ecosystem outside the major-label system, and the sacred themes in Chance’s recent music reminded me to check in on Lecrae, a Christian rapper from Atlanta who turned heads when his 2014 album Anomaly topped the Billboard 200 album chart. As it turns out, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week reported that Lecrae has struck a deal with Columbia Records. Christian rapper, mainstream rapper, independent rapper, conscious rapper, streetwise rapper—Chance the Rapper remains a category unto himself.