Will Smith has done just about every kind of press junket and media appearance imaginable, but last month he made one of the odder stops in his career. As part of the push for Based on a True Story, his first new album since 2005, the rapper-actor sat in on the Twitch livestream of the 21-year-old YouTuber PlaqueBoyMax. Though nominally part of a shared hip-hop culture, Smith is a world away from Max's usual guests, niche artists like xaviersobased, summrs and Jace!, while Max has no known affinity for what can best be described as Smith's sermonizer rap. Still, the two fumbled through conversation as they played each other music from across a generational divide, including Playboi Carti's cacophonous, squealed "OPM BABI," which Smith tied himself into knots trying to embrace. Max also took the opportunity to submit Smith to an ongoing ritual on his channel: a live session where he creates a song on the spot with his guest, playing host, facilitator and engineer. Seeing the streaming star working shoulder to shoulder with the Fresh Prince, one of the most recognizable figures in entertainment, was bewildering — not because of the culture clash, but rather the respective paths they'd each taken to becoming artists.
The spectacle of that video is part of the larger story of the rise of the hip-hop influencer. You needn't be a rap fan to have stumbled across music-adjacent characters like DJ Akademiks, a podcaster and YouTuber with nearly 4 million subscribers across his channels, who has become an insider communing with rappers behind the scenes; Kai Cenat, the most subscribed streamer on Twitch, whose stunts have made him commercially viable opposite Snoop Dogg; or Adin Ross, an internet personality who interviewed and endorsed Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election. None of these figures are journalists, but they have become hip-hop middlemen: Rappers provide them release updates and song snippets to share on their streams, and occasionally pop up on camera in their bedroom studios. "Reaction" content, where streamers share impromptu impressions of everything from albums to news to comedy sketches to their own peers' uploads, is another central plank. These videos aren't criticism, but they do function as assessments in their own way; it isn't hard to imagine a viewer turning to them as a recommendation agent. You can consider this streamer cabal a new commentariat, one not beholden to any ethic in particular.
PlaqueBoyMax, who turned 22 last week, is a brand-new iteration. Initially another streamer filming reactions, the New Jersey native transitioned from a member of the esports brand FaZe Clan to hip-hop's favorite promoter in under a year. Max evolved into a real-time curator with the series Song Wars, where SoundCloud rappers debut material or compete in a tournament-style competition to make a song to a selected type beat. His In the Booth series, the now-flagship property on which he hosted Will Smith, takes the program a step further. Many streamers invite major rappers onto their platforms — Cenat, for one, has hobnobbed with Nicki Minaj and spent a full 24 hours with Offset — but Max, who raps and produces in addition to his streaming gig, may be the first to do so with the express purpose of making music with them. As he goes live in his home studio and records a song from scratch with his guest, viewers pour into the chat to witness the process in real time: One camera focuses on him seated before his computer, the screen displaying FL Studio, while another captures the rapper laying vocals at the mic. Sometimes they stay on stream for hours, tinkering until they settle on something. The resulting songs are posted to his YouTube channel.
I hadn't thought of Max as anything more than a self-promoter making a savvy play for attention until a few weeks ago — when, on March 20, he debuted LONDON, an EP of songs recorded during a set of In The Booth streams with U.K. rappers. It's not the first official music he has released, but it is his first play as a top-billed artist in the vein of a Metro Boomin or DJ Khaled. A week later, he was announced as a performer at the rap festival Summer Smash; on the poster, his name is nestled between past In The Booth guests Babytron and Lazer Dim 700. If he'd read until now as an earnest hobbyist (there's a moment during his session with the rapper Ian where he calls someone mid-setup to troubleshoot a recording snafu), these moves indicate a clear desire to be something more.
It may have been inevitable that such a figure would come along, vying to be both a part of the commentator class and a serious player in the industry it covers. The other influencers are just as interested in insinuating themselves into rap theater — Akademiks was effectively positioned as a Drake propagandist and hype man in the feud with Kendrick Lamar — they just never sought to be participants to this degree. Max wouldn't be the first social media star to parlay that visibility into production work — the Vine star Jay Versace has since produced for SZA, Doja Cat, Westside Gunn and Tyler, the Creator — but he might be the first to harness the power of his platform to turn producing itself into content that can then springboard a music career. And perhaps it's only natural for recognition to beget professional ambitions — something similar has taken hold of niche platform stars like Addison Rae — but most cases don't have a built-in conflict of interest. Max's domain, which oscillates between vlogs, off-the-cuff reviews, puff interviews and personal plugs, is a field of mushy distinctions between commentary and promotion, and is representative of the complex landscape we've entered, where a "creator" can be both a person who makes music and one who shapes discourse.
In recent years, as the rap ecosystem has migrated online, the border between artist and influencer has become increasingly blurry. Most artists are just as online as the rest of us: Plenty test out snippets with followers, Questlove spins records on Twitch streams, Timbaland frequently gives up-and-coming producers feedback on their beats live on TikTok. But for some, it has come to feel like a key component of their celebrity. Established names like T-Pain have converted to popular streamers in the wake of successful careers as musicians. On the other end of the spectrum are lesser-known personalities who identify as rappers and release original music, but exist more broadly in the public imagination as armchair commentators — guys like Scru Face Jean and Knox Hill, who spend half their time uploading responses to the stories of the moment. Somewhere in the middle is DDG, another In the Booth guest and a direct precursor to the PlaqueBoyMax content strategy: Part rapper and part vlogger, DDG appears to treat everything he posts online, music included, as part of the same entertainment portfolio.
To a certain extent, Max is an actual producer, creating beats for rappers and working through turning them into songs. He is not an expert, but that doesn't make him a dabbler, and there has been clear growth across his streams. In The Booth isn't without precedent either, as his own personal version of The Cave, the beloved video series where Kenny Beats invited a rapper to his studio, made a beat for them and had them freestyle over it. But The Cave was not live: Viewing it felt more like being a fly on the wall than part of a circus act, and as its catalog grew, it built a little creative community out of Kenny's personal call log. Until recently, In The Booth was simply "content." The process mattered more than the product, and both mattered less than the engagement. These latest moves suggest a desire to go legit — to move Max's music-making from unscripted spectacle to actual industry cachet. It feels obvious and a bit odious, and yet the music somehow still seems like an afterthought.
The songs on the LONDON EP are far from exceptional. In fact, divorced from the circumstances that created them, they wilt. Even the best of the bunch, "Less is More" with the grime veteran Skepta, has a clinical, lab-grown feel, made not from the bonded souls of its creators but for the Ws in the chat. Without the screen time or the mechanism behind it, the connection feels like industry politicking — the rapper gets a signal boost and Max accumulates producer cred. Even the internet's self-proclaimed busiest music nerd, online reviewer Anthony Fantano, spoke even-handedly of the collab in his weekly release roundup, labeling it "meh" but conceding that it was part of a larger door-opening process: "I mean, is it mind-blowing? No. But it's just cool to see somebody who is in the streaming world making so many different connections in music and actually making some viable, pretty decent music and some, just, cool crossovers in the industry." "Decent" would not normally be a compliment for an artist on his channel, but in this instance it clearly is, the music secondary to the networking that birthed it.
It must be noted that even as In the Booth takes off, Max has continued to post reaction videos. He reacted to Young Thug getting released from jail. He reacted to Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl halftime performance and Drake's collab album with PARTYNEXTDOOR. He reacted to Playboi Carti's set at Rolling Loud LA. In the Booth and Song Wars are now the tent poles around which he builds his supplemental content, mixing day-in-the-life vlogs with rambling conversations with guests like Kevin Gates and hooper turned rapper LiAngelo Ball. No matter how you define him — a pro commentator and an amateur musician, an amateur commentator and a pro musician, pro at both or amateur at both — there's a weird friction created by his operation, which seems to weaponize his following toward both ends. Kenny Beats was just a producer who recorded some of his sessions as a look behind the curtain; he wasn't also a talking head and interviewer. And someone like Will Smith exists so beyond Max's creative orbit that each of them feels, overwhelmingly, like a publicity tool for the other. The song they assembled together doesn't need to exist beyond its utility as a peg for the series, and the series is the thing that keeps people watching.
It's fair to view the entire exercise cynically. It's also true that this is our new reality: The move from one form of content to another is getting harder to parse, and attention is so scarce as to make this kind of thing feel necessary, both for Max and the rappers he invites on. Most artists must now participate in social media's publicity matrix to find, build and maintain their audiences, and in that lens one can recognize PlaqueBoyMax as a weird kind of success story. That doesn't mean there isn't something sticky about the arrangement. And as he migrates from one space to the other without relinquishing his position as a commentator, he introduces a new, intriguing challenge for the spectator. To follow his experiment to its logical conclusion is to picture a rap ecosystem powered and policed by content creators, where music creation is purely clickbait — a means to draw watchers, not listeners — and where conversation and critique are funneled across their platforms in an endless feedback loop. Musicians have already largely taken control of their narratives, but Max seems to want to dominate discourse and engagement too.
The lines between artists and influencers will only continue to get murkier, and the onus will be on those tuning in to trust their instincts when something doesn't seem to pass the smell test. All signs point to trajectories like Max's becoming not just normalized, but bankable, and art clearly matters less than cash in that equation. Even the career rappers are taking notice: While live on the streaming platform Kick in 2023, Drake claimed he'd be willing to sign a billion-dollar deal with the company. And this January, the platinum-certified Polo G posted that he wanted to become a streamer one day, joking that he heard it paid better than rap. As influencers continue to broach the boundary, that day might come sooner than he thinks.
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