Kanye West Accidentally Made This 18 Year Old Famous
Rory Fresco is a young rapper from Kansas City. He made it big thanks to Kanye West’s new single Real Friends. How you ask – did he feature on it? produce? did Kanye give him a shoutout? Nope, just luck of the draw.
At 18 years of age Rory Fresco from Kansas City in Missouri has signed to the major Epic Records, a division of Sony Music. His success can be attributed to SoundCloud and Kanye West even though neither of them directly did anything for him. When Kanye put his new single ‘Real Friends’ on SoundCloud, Rory’s track ‘Lowkey‘ was the lucky-yet-random selection to autoplay straight after.
With 668,000 followers and millions of plays on all of his tracks, being chosen to follow up to Kanye is a big deal and has pushed Rory into the limelight. Rory’s track has managed to rack up an immense 1.7 million views, such an impressive number that it caught the eye of major music executive L.A. Reid. Of course, it takes more than just an autoplay feature to get signed to a label like Epic Records and Rory’s got talent, but whether he would have made it as far as he has in the past two months without it… who knows.
In an email to Pigeons and Planes, he said: “I have no idea how this happened. It was Random. Had no idea it would grow to this. I got girls from middle school hitting me up lmao. I’m a huge fan of Kanye… I’m inspired. I just wanna show the world more of my creations from my bedroom in the basement.”
Fresco had reportedly been trying to get the attention of L.A. Reid for “a while” before he eventually got noticed thanks to his SoundCloud hit. Fresco said of the deal: “Well, he came off his book tour for a day just to see me and I blew him away. I decided to sign because I wanted to get to the next level. My plan was never to be an underground artist. I want to be the biggest in the world.”
Since the release of Kanye’s new album, exclusively on Tidal, he has taken Real Friends leaving Rory’s newfound success as the only sign it was ever there. Listen to Lowkey on SoundCloud and watch the music video below.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu5VgThbmAo?rel=0&w=640&h=360]