ATSIC Season 5 Recap

Season 6 of ATSIC starts today, but I wanted to take a minute to look back at the past year worth of finding and playing the best Canadian Hip Hop. I’m once again proud of the growth we’ve had audience wise, and of the continued quality of the product we create each week to represent the scene. Big shout out to DJ Dice for holding me down with his well practiced turntablist skills, and a huge thank you to everyone who supports the show, shares, likes and comments, and of course I’m eternally grateful of all the artists who send music and call in for interviews for Fly in Formation! It’s been a great year and I’m looking forward to many more to come.

People can find the full mixes over on my Mixcloud for free listening, where we put together an hour of the best indie rap from across the map every week. There are also some playlists I wanted to show people, even though we all dislike Spotify. I still highly encourage people to go listen on Mixcloud, where the platform allows free users to listen at higher sound quality than on Spotify - plus the episodes are arranged to make sense sonically, with cuts and juggles from Dice and yours truly on the mic hosting! Mixcloud also pays artist for the streams, but on top of that, you can listen knowing that I’ve personally given artists a dollar to purchase each track on the show, which earns them about the same as streaming it 75 times on Spotify would (and that’s only if that song has more than 1000 plays already, the pay out threshold for artists to meet before they make a single cent).

Anyways, here’s some infographics I whipped up for social media that I might as well reuse here to share some of the stats from this year:

You can find the full list of interviews from Fly in Formation over on Youtube - leave a comment or hit like to help tell the algo to show them to more people and help me get the numbers up. Subs over there mean a lot too, so hit that if you haven’t!

Here’s the upcoming Fly In Formation schedule for January and February as well. I’m looking forward to talking with all these artists and plenty more throughout the year, but this is a great lineup to kick off Season 4:

Now onto those Spotify playlists I mentioned earlier. I hope anyone relying on Spotify for music is also going above and beyond to help these artists survive, because no one is paying their bills solely from streaming pay outs.

Every week I listen to probably 7 hours of new release Canadian Hip Hop, on average. While I’ve been doing that, I do my best to organize some playlists that I think the country ought to have somewhere:

To start with a wide lens, I put together a list of albums that caught my attention, embedded below. I'm not saying all of these are good albums - just that they were made in 2024 by Canadian Hip Hop artists. I don't know how many albums are included, but its 115 hours of music for you to peruse.

Each week I make a new "ATSIC Radar" playlist with everything new that caught my eye. That's the 7 average hours of music I listen through. Below is the "ATSIC Radar Picks" list for 2024 - songs I heard and actually liked. About half of these songs were bought and played on ATSIC. I buy everything we play, because supporting indie artists means more than just streaming their music, but I’m not made of money.

And finally, below is a playlist I created of *everything* played this past year on the show. There are a lot of artists who hate Spotify so they boycott it and their music never hits streaming, so I also watch and buy music from Bandcamp. Often times we're airing music that isn't online yet because artists send me early exclusives. On top of those reasons, some music has also been struck down from Spotify due to people using Distrokid and being banned for bogus botted playlists (another way Spotify manages to weasel out of paying artists fairly), so the actual mixes have more music than this playlist does. That said, this is still a really solid who’s who of Canadian Hip Hop that plays pretty well on shuffle.

Thanks for checking all this out and for rocking with me season after season. We’re going to keep the wheels moving and maintain momentum, barring unforeseen catastrophes. I love Hip Hop and there’s so much coming out every year in this country that gets shamelessly slept on. There are heads across the country I see complaining about the mainstream being garbage, and I hope that #ATSIC can provide them a spot to come through and find new artists to follow and appreciate. The entire mission statement of both my shows is and has always been to unite the scene and it’s scattered fan bases, and help artists network and become aware of one another, because an interconnected scene is a stronger scene than a fractured one, and a rising tide raises all ships.

Here’s to that rising tide, and to its continued swell.

Tell a friend about the show, that’s the biggest help you can give. Share this page with your homies or with artists you know who should be included in the mix - I’m always open to artists (or anyone else) msging me on the various socials.

Stay Up.