A peek behind Trending Raps: Instagram algos, death threats, paid promo, more
A revealing interview with the tapped-in Instagram blog connecting the rap and indie undergrounds.
Chances are, if you're a young person interested in underground rap, electro-pop, and/or indie music in 2026, you're probably not reading very much traditional music journalism. But you're almost certainly browsing Instagram pages like Trending Raps. The popular account is one of many social media-native music blogs that posts news, recommendations, and other alluringly simplistic lists about artists that "tapped-in" listeners under 30 care deeply about: Nettspend, fakemink, xaviersobased, Jane Remover, and other left-field rappers of their ilk.
I have a kneejerk disdain for most accounts of this nature for reasons that are primarily selfish (they're functionally my competition) but also intellectual (most are functionally illiterate). However, over the last few months I've developed a fondness for Trending Raps, who I admire for several reasons. 1. They mostly cover sub-mainstream artists. 2. Their curation is quite impressive. 3. The diversity of musicians they post about says a lot about the changing composition of "underground," the umbrella term Zoomers use to denote underground "internet" rap, but also adjacent artists from intersecting genres like hyperclash (Snow Strippers) and laptop twee (ear).
Trending Raps (59k followers) only has a fraction of the audience that an IG culture account like welcome.jpeg (1m followers) has, and it's considerably more niche than comparable IG music pages like For the Speakers (179k followers) Underground Sound (275k followers), who post about a lot of the same artists. Although Trending Raps has been growing exponentially lately, I think the reason it's slightly less popular speaks to the quality of its content. The page catches onto trends earlier than most other music media properties, and they regularly post forward-thinking artists when they still have miniscule fanbases. I, for one, have discovered a lot of cool shit on Trending Raps that I wish was being covered at more formal music publications.
I've thus far been using the plural "they" to refer to Trending Raps in this article, but that's not actually accurate. Trending Raps is independently run by a 30-year-old Brooklyn resident named Josh, who requested I conceal his last name in this article despite being relatively easy to find on Google. Trending Raps is virtually Josh's full-time job, but outside of that, he's an artist manager who's previously worked as both an A&R and a producer of rap beats. He's also experienced at scaling social media accounts, but as you'll see in the below interview, almost everything he does with Trending Raps is guided by a genuine curiosity for discovering and promoting new, cutting-edge music. Almost everything.
As traditional music journalism continues to decline and social media platforms increasingly cannibalize the surrounding internet, Instagram pages like Trending Raps are becoming the dominant infrastructure for music discovery and online discourse. I don't think this is a particularly good development for the culture, especially considering the type of content Trending Raps specializes in are posts that, in Josh's words, "you don’t even need reading comprehension skills" to consume. Then there's the murky ethics of these pages, which are nominally billed as cultivators of music news and organic discovery, but are almost always, according to Josh, funded by "pay-to-plug" deals with artists, labels, and/or managers that are disguised as editorially independent posts once they hit the grid.
As a critic and journalist running a fiercely independent music blog, I have major qualms with the pay-to-plug business model, and I think a lot of the content Trending Raps posts is, by Josh's own admission, scroll-bait bullshit about Nettspend's dating life. However, what keeps me coming back to his page are the carousels about emerging genre trends, the Spotify streaming stats about rising artists, and the way Trending Raps is championing the ongoing crossover between underground rap, electro-pop, and indie better than most traditional music blogs.
Perhaps even more than the content itself, I'm interested in what Trending Raps' content says about the tastes of his followers and the condition of music media. I had a lot of questions about the way these pages are run, and now I have a lot of answers. Earlier this month, I had a lengthy phone call with Josh where he peeled back the curtain on Trending Raps and shined a revealing light on the cryptic mechanics of the IG music blog economy. I was impressed with Josh's candor on the many topics we discussed, and I think anyone who works in or consumes music media will be fascinated – and maybe a little bit disgusted – by what he told me.
Our conversation taught me about the mysterious person who runs Trending Raps, where he finds emerging artists, how he chooses what to post, the pay-to-plug model, his savviness at finding stars way early, his fascination with Spotify streaming stats, becoming "numb" to the doom-scrolling state of the modern Instagram user, the death threats he's faced from angry artists, how the underground is evolving, his ambitions to scale up Trending Raps, his personal favorite music (and trends) in the underground, and much, much more.
Read the full interview below.