Hong Kong’s young rappers are spending almost as much time selling their music online as they are making it. For Cheeseekit, Le Shing and DRG, building an audience means producing short videos, studying social media algorithms and dealing with online criticism, all while holding down jobs to pay the bills.
The three musicians are part of a younger generation trying to establish careers in a local rap scene that has struggled to regain momentum since the Covid 19 pandemic. Independent music events have become less frequent, and audiences that once gathered around homegrown performers now have fewer opportunities to see them live.
Concerts that could once fill venues such as the now demolished Star Hall, which had a capacity of 3,600, have given way to smaller club performances. These gigs offer musicians a chance to connect with listeners, but bar sales and limited ticket revenue often determine whether organisers can afford to put on a show.
For artists at the beginning of their careers, performing is only one part of the job. They must also manage production, promotion and their public image in an online environment where visibility can attract new listeners just as quickly as it can invite hostility.
The challenge extends beyond making commercially successful music. Language can become a political issue, online arguments can turn personal, and artists must decide how much of their own beliefs to express publicly.
Making Money Without Losing Creative Control
Cheeseekit, Le Shing and DRG, all 23, understand that music alone may not provide a reliable income. Delivery work and selling pastries are among the day jobs that help young performers cover their living expenses while pursuing their musical ambitions.
“I’ll hold off getting a job until I can’t afford not to,” Cheeseekit said with a chuckle.
Le Shing quickly reminded him of the reality facing independent musicians: “We have rent!”
Despite his relaxed attitude towards employment, Cheeseekit has already achieved a degree of commercial success. He has secured performances that pay him roughly what a waiter might earn in a month for a set lasting just 15 minutes.
His approach to money reflects a tension within hip hop itself. The genre has long celebrated wealth, jewellery and conspicuous consumption, yet those images can appear excessive to audiences outside the culture.
Cheeseekit argues that mainstream society often accepts the same material ambitions when they are presented as success or achievement rather than straightforward displays of wealth.
“Traditionally, in the world of hip hop, you’d be considered cool if you have lots of money, girls, and chains. But to the rest of the world, that’d be considered crass. You need to repackage that as something like the notion of winning big,” he said. “This is the brand of money worship that mainstream society easily accepts.”
His blue baseball shirt, printed with the words “Mr. Enjoy Da Money”, offers a fitting illustration of the idea. The shirt is merchandise from Higher Brothers, a Chengdu rap group known for bringing Chinese language hip hop to wider audiences.
For Cheeseekit, commercial awareness is not necessarily at odds with artistic independence. Musicians need money to continue working, but they also have to decide how much of their identity they want to build around it.
The three rappers have responded to financial pressure by taking charge of much of their own production. Rather than dividing responsibilities among separate teams, as is more common in major label operations, they participate directly in selecting beats, recording vocals, mixing and mastering tracks, and promoting releases.
This do it yourself approach keeps costs down and gives the artists more control over the finished product.
Cheeseekit recalled how difficult it could be to influence a production after the music had already progressed through several stages. During a rare experience working on a mainstream production, he wanted to remove a piano part but found that the beat had been completed more than a month earlier.
Independent artists can make such decisions themselves, although that freedom comes with additional responsibilities.
“The overheads are also lower when you do it yourself,” said Le Shing, who belongs to the independent label Yack Studio.
The savings matter in a small market where performance opportunities are limited and recording budgets can be tight. But when musicians handle nearly every part of their careers, they also have less time to concentrate exclusively on songwriting and performance.
Why Social Media Has Become Another Full Time Job
For the three rappers, releasing a song is only the beginning of a promotional campaign.
Each track can require more than a dozen short, vertically filmed videos, all produced and edited by the artists themselves. The clips must be designed to catch attention quickly, encourage viewers to watch until the end and, ideally, persuade them to listen to the full song.
Cheeseekit describes the difference between attracting attention and turning that attention into a real audience as one of the hardest parts of online promotion.
“Impressions are easy. It’s the conversion rate that’s tricky,” he said.
A video showing him lip syncing to a lo fi beat might reach thousands of Instagram users. Yet those views do not automatically translate into visits to his artist profile or streams on platforms such as Spotify.
The distinction matters because online popularity can create a misleading impression of commercial success. A clip may circulate widely without generating enough listeners to support a release, sell tickets or build a lasting fan base.
According to the musicians, marketing and promotion consume almost 70 per cent of their time. The remainder goes towards creating music and performing.
For young artists working without large management teams, that allocation can be difficult to sustain. Every new release brings another cycle of filming, editing, posting and monitoring performance. They must also keep producing material to maintain a presence on platforms that reward frequent engagement.
The work is not simply a matter of uploading a song and waiting for listeners to find it. Musicians have to package their work into formats that suit each platform while preserving enough of their original identity to stand out.
Cheeseekit believes Hong Kong lacks the promotional infrastructure available in mainland China.
He has performed in Guangzhou, where musicians can operate within a more established system for tracking online engagement and distributing popular releases. On Douyin, China's version of TikTok, promotional teams can monitor impressions and identify material that attracts attention before directing successful acts towards music streaming services such as QQ Music.
That system offers artists a clearer route from online discovery to wider distribution, although China's hip hop industry operates under tighter content monitoring and censorship.
Hong Kong's smaller market presents a different problem. Even an effective promotional strategy has limited potential when there are relatively few acts for agencies to represent and fewer commercial opportunities to support them.
“The problem is just that Hong Kong’s market is too small,” Cheeseekit said.
The result is a cycle in which independent artists must become their own marketing departments because the local industry cannot always provide the support they need. They compete for attention online while trying to create a sustainable audience in a city where live opportunities have become less frequent.
Language, Identity and the Cost of Online Criticism
Promotion also exposes musicians to a more personal challenge: public judgement over the language they use.
Le Shing recalled an incident in which another Hong Kong rapper faced sustained criticism after performing in Mandarin at a festival rather than Cantonese, the city's dominant local language.
“Hong Kong’s internet culture is just too toxic,” Le Shing said, describing the backlash.
He suggested that the situation might have improved since then, but the episode illustrates how quickly a musical decision can become a wider argument about identity and belonging.
Mandarin has carried political and cultural associations in Hong Kong, where concerns about demographic change, mainland influence and the preservation of local identity have shaped public debate. In that environment, a performance in a particular language can attract scrutiny that has little to do with the music itself.
Cheeseekit rejects the idea that language should restrict hip hop.
“Within the scene, we don’t have any biases against any particular language, though I can’t speak for the listeners,” he said, adding that language has never been a limitation within the genre.
For the three artists, mixing languages is not a new development. Cheeseekit recalled a freestyle rap battle in Guangzhou more than a decade ago, where performers moved between Cantonese and Mandarin during cyphers. These informal gatherings bring rappers together to demonstrate their skills and compete for the approval of an audience around them.
Code switching can be part of the performance itself, allowing artists to adapt their delivery, wordplay and expression to different listeners.
Yet what happens in a rap circle can be interpreted differently when a clip reaches social media. A performance that makes sense within a multilingual hip hop culture may be removed from its original context and treated as a statement about politics or identity.
The rappers have learnt to be selective about where they spend their energy. They recognise that arguments with anonymous users on Threads rarely help their music reach new audiences, and they try not to become trapped in endless disputes about language politics.
All three came of age during a turbulent period in Hong Kong's recent history. Their teenage years coincided with the 2019 protests and unrest, followed by the Covid 19 pandemic. Political division and online hostility have therefore formed part of the environment in which they developed both their personal views and their careers.
Rather than treating cultural differences as obstacles, the musicians see them as opportunities for creative expression. Their approach allows them to draw from different linguistic traditions without committing themselves to the idea that one language must define the entire scene.
Expressing Political Views While Accepting Responsibility
Hip hop has a long history of social criticism, political expression and commentary on everyday life. Hong Kong's rappers are no exception, although each artist incorporates personal beliefs into music to a different degree.
That freedom comes with a degree of caution.
The three musicians do not believe their genre currently has the reach to exert mass political influence. Nevertheless, they understand that a song released online can travel far beyond its intended audience.
DRG, who favours boom bap production reminiscent of 1990s East Coast American hip hop, uses Cantonese slang in his recent releases. One example is “澩嫪” (laau2gaau6), a term associated with something messy or chaotic that has been part of Hong Kong's vernacular for generations.
His approach connects contemporary rap with the city's everyday speech, giving local listeners references that may be lost on audiences unfamiliar with Cantonese.
At the same time, DRG is aware that music cannot be confined to the community for which it was created. Social platforms allow a recording, lyric or performance to reach people with different expectations and interpretations.
“Far be it for me to have that effect,” he said, referring to the possibility of influencing a large audience.
“But we’re aware that whatever we release onto the internet can be seen by the entire world, and you have to take responsibility for whatever happens,” he added.
That awareness shapes how the young artists approach public expression. They must decide what to say, how to say it and whether the potential consequences are worth the exposure. For musicians in a politically sensitive environment, the decisions extend beyond artistic preference.
Silence is not necessarily a rejection of political engagement, just as including a personal belief in a song does not automatically make a performer a political activist. The three rappers are working out their own boundaries while building careers in an industry that offers limited financial security and leaves much of the responsibility for publicity in their hands.
Their experience also points to a wider difficulty for independent musicians. Social media offers direct access to listeners, but it does not guarantee stable income, a larger live audience or protection from online attacks. Greater visibility can create opportunities while placing artists under greater scrutiny.
For Cheeseekit, Le Shing and DRG, the work continues on several fronts at once: making tracks, finding paying gigs, holding down day jobs and deciding how to present themselves online. They are building careers in a scene where artistic freedom depends partly on their ability to manage the commercial and personal demands that surround the music.
Can Hong Kong’s next generation of rappers turn online attention into lasting careers without compromising their creative freedom?