Post Malone, the smartest dude in the industry
Post Malone has been the most streamed artist of 2019 (he has accumulated over 6.5 billions Spotify streams globally). On any streaming platform, just 30 seconds of listening are enough to count a stream, so with songs starting directly with the chorus, Post Malone seems to be the artist who best understands how to sell music in internet times. Smart kid!
Austin Richard Post, known by his stage name Post Malone, gained major recognition in February 2015, after the release of his debut commercial single White Iverson. Four years later, he seems to be on an unstoppable roll of success and there’s no doubt that Post Malone is one of the biggest megastars of our time. Very prolific, he is also breaking all kinds of streaming records.
Post Malone ́s music is a creative merge of hip hop, trap, country, pop and rock that in fact he prefers to describe as ”genre-less” music. And he has a unique gift for catchy melodies and choruses you can’t forget, yet at the same time often wrap his songs in a dark and melancholy mood that won’t leave the listener alone.
Born on July 4, 1995, in Syracuse (New York), still a kid, he soon moved to Grapevine (Texas) where he grew up listening to his dad ́s Metallica, Megadeth, Johnny Cash, UGK, and The Notorious B.I.G. records. As a funny anecdote, once he was even voted by his classmates to most likely one day become famous. They weren’t wrong. At the age of eleven, he would trade his Guitar Hero controller for an electric guitar and after graduating high school and releasing his first mixtape online, he picked up and headed west to Los Angeles, where he still lives today. Despite “partying too much” and not “having any money for cigarettes or Ramen,” the 19- year-old met production duo FKi and started making music.
One day, Post created the beat for White Iverson in his bedroom, laid down the vocals, and uploaded it to Soundcloud in 2015. The response proved overwhelming. After that debut single, Post Malone has had three massive albums in a row (Stoney in 2016, Beerbongs & Bentleys in 2018 and Hollywood’s Bleeding in 2019), and he seems to have barely started.
A meteoric success story, which have caught many by surprise and there’s no telling where all this will end. Last summer, during the final part of his show at the Sziget festival, Post stopped the concert a few seconds to tell how hard his beginnings had been in Los Angeles, where he had a “tough time trying to find money for smokes and beer” and people were “calling me a one hit wonder and every name under the sun…Now I’m in fucking Hungary in front of tens of thousands of people.”
Post Malone will spend the winter touring the United States, but he will return to Europe in Summer to play in the Swedish edition of the Lollapalooza festival.
Learn more about Post Malone and stay updated on upcoming tour dates by visiting his website.
Cover drawing by Cillian Mitchell
