It may be hard to imagine today, but almost exactly ten years ago, in March 2013, the dominant topic in the German rap cosmos was a new album that was about to be released. Yes, really. A new album. With music. 16 tracks, 52 minutes playing time. The album was called BLAUES BLUT, it was Fler’s ninth solo album by now and marked a radical break in style in his entire oeuvre.
Fler, who had already helped shape Berlin gangsta rap in many crucial places, and the producer trio, the Hijackers, prepared to bring a broad-based trap sound to a German mainstream production for the first time. At best, the fan community reacted with outrage, but mostly just made fun of the lyrical reduction and the rhythm, which is unusual in the German-speaking world and has never before seriously been on an album in this form. So far there was only Moneyboy. And nobody really took it seriously. BLAUES BLUT was released four years before Trap actually began its triumphant advance in German-speaking countries – and everyone rapped like Fler did in 2013.
Today, ten years later, in March 2023, Fler once again dominates the headlines. But instead of talking about his new album, “Trendsetter 2”, which he recently canceled himself, the talk is only about the new Fler-Phone. Yes, exactly. The new Fler Phone. The Fler-Phone is actually not a Fler-Phone at all, the Fler-Phone is a Fler hotline, a 0900 number that you can dial in order to make a call to Fler. If you want to call Fler, you have to pay 2.99 euros per minute.
The rapper, who publicly calculates a five-digit additional monthly income, calls it fan service. Sure, you could possibly call it a rip-off, but on the one hand there was a failed attempt to introduce a Fler-Phone and the whole thing even cost a bit more and on the other hand, well, the term would be a bit den overshadow cultural added value, which is already being revealed in the form of numerous video snippets circulating on the net, in which people call the rapper to insult him, only to be insulted back by him. The last remaining creative powerhouse of the German rap scene, Twitter, will be able to draw on this material for a long time to come. Thank you very much.
The Fler-Phone as a symbol of a new development
It is of course very easy to make fun of the Fler-Phone, but actually the Fler-Phone is only the symbol of a new development, the origins and effects of which are much more profound and meaningful for the German music scene than it was at first look may appear. In any case, music is no longer the dominant theme in German rap. The days of arguing about a certain sound, let alone a controversial album, are long gone. We are experiencing the provisional end point of a development that also began exactly ten years ago. Because the second major topic that German rap dealt with in the onset of 2013 was the much-heralded collaboration album by Kollegah and Farid Bang, which was entitled JUNG, BRUTAL, GUTAUSTEHEND 2. While BLUE BLOOD fell short of all commercial expectations, “JBG2” set new standards. The album not only broke all sales records and flushed a new generation of rappers into the mainstream. Much more important: It also laid the foundation, the blueprint, for all future marketing measures that were to shape Deutschrap from then on.
Thoroughly choreographed promo strategies in German rap
Elvir Omerbegovic, head of Selfmade Records, the label behind the album, had choreographed the entire promotion phase for JBG2 down to the smallest detail. On a weekly basis, the artists not only published music videos, but also YouTube blogs, with which they added a show, an entertainment package, to the actual product they wanted to sell, the CD. The strategy behind it was well thought out. “JBG2” wasn’t just an album. It was a happening. And the more the fans could identify not only with the music alone, but also with the artists behind it and the show they offered, the higher the number of pre-orders for the premium boxes that they wanted to sell. “JBG2” was the actual beginning of a marketing strategy that focused on the sale of deluxe boxes. Not without reason.
German rap has been particularly creative since the ’00s when it came to asserting itself in its capitalist market environment. And the market environment in which Deutschrap moved had an international peculiarity that one could take advantage of. In Germany, the rating system for the charts was sales-driven. This means that it was not the number of CDs sold that determined the positioning in the hit parades, but the turnover generated by the products. So instead of a standard CD worth 17 euros, they simply released a deluxe box worth 50 euros, added a few posters, stickers and other gimmicks and moved the entire promotional phase for the album to the period before the actual release. The more premium boxes were sold in advance, the higher the chart entry in the first week of sales and the higher the chart entry, the greater the subsequent media hype.
The artist sells himself, not his art
From that point on, it was no longer the art, it was the artist that sold. The higher the identification potential from fan to rapper, the higher the willingness to pre-order an often overpriced product in order to enable the highest possible chart entry. The more artists revealed about themselves in interviews, YouTube blogs, and social media stories, the more likely they are to earn audience loyalty. The highlight of this development was Bushido’s album CCN3.
Bushido, then at the second peak of his commercial success, managed to mobilize his fans so much that they pre-ordered the premium boxes thousands of times – without them even having heard a single song from the album they were listening to at the time preordered. Bushido completely dispensed with video releases. The album still debuted at number 1 – and achieved gold status. Thank you deluxe box.
The deluxe box became the YPS booklet of a generation
With the dawn of a new decade, the rules of this game have changed. On the one hand, because the multimedia infomercial for the advance sale of deluxe boxes has reached a creative end point. At that point in time, the strangest content that was used to encourage fans to buy included a capsule with blood, a coke tube, fake urine, sweepstakes or even a sponge. The deluxe box became the YPS booklet of a generation, but at some point the story was told. In addition, the chart rating had changed due to the greater consideration of streaming numbers, so that Spotify streams are the hardest currency in the industry today. However, streams in large quantities can no longer be generated via sophisticated promotional phases, but much more easily via prominent playlist placements. And since playlist sound is generic, today’s most successful artists are the rappers who are the least creative with their sound.
A new era of playlist rappers
The new era of playlist artists is another fundamental shift in the scene. Because the streaming numbers of many rappers are collapsing and sales via boxes are no longer working, they are looking for new business areas. Hip hop in general is still the globally dominant youth culture and German rap in particular is the dominant sound in schoolyards, but the music is now so firmly anchored in the mainstream that it has lost its subcultural clout. Innovations haven’t existed for a long time. The general sales figures are declining significantly. It has been a long time since an artist has been able to generate real hype for himself. So artists are trying to transfer the self-marketing model they have learned over the past few years to new media.
Twitch is the next logical step, because Twitch offers the opportunity to get even closer, unfiltered and uncensored access to the artists. And: Twitch itself is a lucrative source of income. In this way, German rap is increasingly becoming a daily soap, which is only about the characters, their conflicts and disputes that are carried out in the live stream, but no longer about the music, the product that has lost its value in the value chain . Especially considering how much the scene has been brutally vehement against rapping YouTubers for many years, it is amazing how quickly people opened up to rappers becoming live streamers.
Daily soap German rap
The artist is now completely decoupled from art on Twitch. In the best of all cases, he becomes an entertainer, but in most cases he is just a clown who sheds his dignity in front of the webcam for a few subscriptions and views. A Manuellsen, for example, who is artistically one of the most talented singers and rappers on the scene, dismantled himself so radically in a very short time that his actually proud legacy is reduced to a Twitter meme that he has become today. Fortunately, in the history of pop culture in the past, the gentle veil of oblivion has often been drawn over the shortcomings of the artists, which allowed the work of art to shine in the first place. Twitch destroys this veil and relentlessly reveals how little the artist can still be reconciled with his artwork.
A Fler can also be found on Twitch today. In the past he provided the blueprint for modern gangstar rap with Bushido, then he brought Trap to Germany and finally opened up to all newer, ultra-modern varieties of US rap with VIBE in 2016. Today he sits in front of a webcam and answers viewers’ questions. First on a free Discord channel, now via the Fler-Phone. 2.99 euros an hour. The times when German rap was still defined by German rap have come to an end here at the latest.