Rollie Pemberton was barely a teenager when he started rapping. His hometown, Edmonton, didn’t have much of a hip-hop scene in the early aughts, so he honed his craft online. He plugged an old-school microphone into his mom’s desktop computer, recorded a few verses, later turned them into tracks, and sent them out into the burgeoning music blogosphere. Within a few years, he’d adopted the emcee name Cadence Weapon and earned a reputation as a shrewd critic and sharp lyricist.
This work didn’t pay—until, all of a sudden, it did. In 2003, while Pemberton was in university, the American music magazine Pitchfork began paying him to write album reviews. Then Edmonton radio stations started spinning “Oliver Square,” a Cadence Weapon song stuffed with choppy synths and hyper-local references.
A Toronto-based indie label called Upper Class Recordings took notice and offered Pemberton recording, publishing, and management contracts. The so-called 360 deal came with a $1,000 advance, barely enough for him to record his first full-length album, and it entitled the label to take a cut of all his future revenue streams, including album, ticket, and merch sales. Even at nineteen, Pemberton knew the terms weren’t ideal. But in 2006, he signed the deal, reasoning that it could be his only shot at stardom.
And Pemberton’s star did rise. His debut album, Breaking Kayfabe, earned him a cover story in Exclaim! magazine and a nomination for the Polaris Prize, which recognizes the best Canadian album of the year. He released more music, played the legendary Glastonbury and Lollapalooza festivals, DJ’d Sacha Trudeau’s birthday party, and performed for Queen Elizabeth II at the 2010 Canada Day festivities on Parliament Hill. By then, Edmonton had selected Pemberton as the city’s poet laureate, and the CBC had picked him to sit on the panel of its battle-of-the-books show, Canada Reads. He was everywhere. From the outside looking in, it seemed that Pemberton had made it, and then some.
Behind the scenes, however, he was scraping by, living off earnings from freelance writing gigs, informal DJ sets, seasonal retail shifts, and $11,130 worth of additional advances that Upper Class paid him for his second and third albums. All the other money he made was being collected by Upper Class; per Pemberton’s contract, the label was entitled to collect his portion of revenues (20 to 50 percent, depending on the source) until they’d fully recouped his advances as well as tens of thousands of dollars the label had invested in recording, marketing, and touring, including covering the costs of Pemberton’s flights, car rentals, and hotels. As a result, he was playing hundreds of shows a year yet making no money.
Pemberton calculated that between signing in 2006 and 2015, he’d made Upper Class more than $250,000. The label had collected the $25,000 he earned on the Breaking Kayfabe tour, his $10,000 poet laureate fee, and six figures worth of grants—that he knows of. Apart from the $12,130 in advances he’d received from Upper Class, he’d seen only a tiny sliver of royalties.
Pemberton pushed back: When would he begin making money? Dozens of emails to the label went unanswered. “I was starting to suspect that my career was built on a house of cards,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir, Bedroom Rapper. By then, the label was essentially defunct. In a statement to The Walrus, Upper Class claimed it “never recouped its investment [in Cadence Weapon] and remains out of pocket” and that “all expenses were borne by the label and any earnings were reinvested toward his development as an artist.” The label continued: “We too were disappointed that despite our shared ambition, things didn’t unfold as hoped. The sad reality is that most musicians in this country do not make money. This is also true for most independent record labels.”
In 2021, finally free from Upper Class, Pemberton released Parallel World, which won the $50,000 Polaris Prize. Fortunately, his new label, MNRK Music Group, let him keep it.
By then, fans had almost entirely migrated from vinyl records and CDs—formats that once earned artists roughly 10 percent of profits—to streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, which were paying at most half a penny per listen. On streaming platforms, only a handful of Pemberton’s songs earned more than a few hundred dollars. Even his most commercially successful single, “Connor McDavid,” a pump-up anthem that’s been streamed more than a million times, has earned him less than $3,000 over seven years.
Before COVID-19, Pemberton could rely on live-performance revenues to offset the decline in physical media sales. But for a time after the pandemic, touring became just another way to lose money. In 2021, Pemberton played twelve American cities in support of Parallel World. It was a lean operation—no tour manager, no road crew, no backing musicians. He did his own PR, sold his own merch, and drove his own tour van. Still, with inflation driving up the price of gas, food, and accommodations, Pemberton ended up $2,100 in the red. “If you try to do a headlining tour as a middle-class act nowadays—unless you have a really good team and a lot of solid planning and a [group of artists] you’re rolling with—it’s a fool’s errand,” Pemberton told me. “The margins are getting thinner and thinner.”
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