Today marks the 10th anniversary of when Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” was released independently on streaming services.
I remember where I was the first time I heard the song on the radio. I was sitting in the parking lot of the Plaza 46 Shopping Center in Woodland Park, N.J., in my mother’s car picking up some Chinese food at Imperial 46. It had to be around 8 p.m. because I had Hot 97 on and Flex was spinning. The next thing I know, he starts talking about one of the most requested songs right now and dropping bombs. He then played the song I had been hearing for weeks whenever I would come back to my hometown of Paterson, N.J.
By this time, the record had already racked up close to 1 million streams on SoundCloud due to Fetty and his label, RGF Productions, pushing it via Facebook and word of mouth. “Instagram was just pictures back then. [On] Facebook we would get three or four shares a pop,” says RGF owner Nitt Da Gritt. “Instagram was the new kid on the block, so we promoted on there eventually. We pulled up to schools and we did free parties, printed up merch. That was basically the plan.”
Before “Trap Queen” took over pop radio, RGF Productions worked the song on the road, performing shows at small bars and clubs, baby showers, birthday parties and sweet sixteens, making real money in the process. “What independent artist you know making $10,000 to $16,000 a week?” Nitt asks after running down a laundry list of ways they were able to generate revenue while the song was going crazy locally. RGF member Monty confirmed this to Complex in 2015, saying, “From Paterson to New York, we were doing shows. We were already traveling and grinding off our mixtapes — we went everywhere. ‘Trap Queen’ didn’t go crazy yet, but Jersey and New York knew it.”
Fetty Wap (born Willie Junior Maxwell II) and Monty met around 2005 when they were just teenagers. They hung out, smoked weed all the time,…
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