Allow me to re-introduce myself — A Rapchat PSA

Today we are happy to announce a new look and feel for Rapchat. We’ve graduated from an app that lets people freestyle to a company disrupting the entire music industry, similar to how Jay-Z ascended from “moving snowflakes by the OZ” to the CEO of the R-O-C (Hov!). Our vision has evolved from providing a pocket recording studio to allowing anyone to create, share, and discover raps. And to kick off the graduation, here’s our new logo:

An evolved vision comes with an evolved brand. We wanted the new logo to embody boldness and fearlessness, two values that are extremely important to us. In order to drop a freestyle, you have to step outside your comfort zone and be bold as you deliver your bars. You have to zone in and ignore what anyone might think of you. You have to let flow take over as your brain runs 1,000 mph trying to come up with the next line. These moments are what the bold, black and gold RC represents…

Beyond a new logo, we designed and developed a completely new Rapchat experience. From the beginning, one of our biggest goals has been to enable creativity through freestyles. The way we enabled this was by creating a simple app that allows you to record raps over beats and send these recordings as a message to your friends. We’re proud to say that over 100,000+ people have collectively created 3 million+ raps.

However, we soon realized that Rapchat can be much more than just a studio in your pocket. We’ve helped artists promote their singles and engage with fans. We’ve given producers a spotlight they deserve which has led to hundreds of producers being connected with rapchatters offline (helping them make more $$ by selling their beats). We’ve seen rapchatters go from 0 to 100 in terms of skill and delivery as they’ve used Rapchat consistently to practice.

We’re connecting the moving parts that makes up the hip hop industry on our app. From casual hip hop fans to aspiring rappers to established rappers to producers — they all have a place on the app.

It’s just that we never designed the app experience to facilitate all these interactions…until now. Rapchat is no longer just a messaging app but now a connected, hip hop network. Here are some of the new features:

Profiles/Following

Profiles are the base of a social network because they give users an identity. You can add a profile pic and links to your various social networks (including Soundcloud). In addition to a greater sense of identity, profiles allow for more interactions between users. We’ve added a lot more tools to discover other users so it only makes sense that you can follow these users to keep up with their latest fire Rapchats.

Feeds

People want the latest and greatest content from those they follow. Snapchat stories was a golden feature because people were able to browse more content instead of having to wait on a message. Until now, the only feed we’ve had on the app was Top Raps which is a list of raps curated by the Rapchat Squad. While our users love Top Raps (and we’ve kept a version of it in the new update), they have consistently asked for more. So, we decided to build out a few different feeds that will allow you to browse and consume more raps.

Likes/Comments

We wanted to add ways for users to give each other feedback on their raps so we added likes and comments (again, another critical feedback loop of most social networks).

Soundcloud Integration

Soundcloud is a massive music platform that is the launchpad for many up and coming rappers and producers careers. Since we have a handful of aspiring artists, we wanted to allow them to post directly to Soundcloud. We realize that they’ve put in a lot of hard work into building their following on Soundcloud so giving them a chance to be able to share music with their fans easily from our app is a major benefit.