IGGY AZALEA: What is your brand? You have to lean into that in an aggressive way.

There’s nothing memorable in pop culture that doesn’t swing the pendulum. The middle is forgettable. There is a big risk in that regard, but I think that you want to be essentially polarizing.

Trying to be too likable, trying to say, “Well, I want all the audience. I want to be as big as I can.” It cannot be that way, and it doesn’t need to be that way. You need to have a message so that those people want to go out and fully support you. You just want to magnify that emotion, that energy, that belief.

“I was sitting here thinking the same thing, but yeah, you stood up and said it.” And so I want to go and I want to ride for that too. So you can’t be afraid that some people are not going to like that.

And you’ll get a lot more customers that way, actually, by being unafraid, which I think is very important.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s rap star and celebrity Iggy Azalea. I was intrigued to talk to Iggy because, after a successful career in music, she’s actually turned her attention to cryptocurrency, which has been on fire since Donald Trump’s re-election. But our conversation goes beyond tokens and memes, with insights about how to build a fan base, the pressures of entrepreneurship, and more. It’s a sparky, in-your-face session — Iggy even throws some shade at Ryan Reynolds. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Iggy Azalea, the chart-topping rapper and musician, and now creator of the cryptocurrency $MOTHER. She’s also a co-founder of the new digital gifting platform, DreamVault, and creative director of the relaunched telecom company, Unreal Mobile. So Iggy, thanks for joining us.

AZALEA: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited actually to get to talk about so many of the projects I’ve been doing.

Why Iggy Azalea retired from music

SAFIAN: You retired from music last year. Why is that? What does it mean to retire versus just taking a break?

AZALEA: I’m glad that you asked because a lot of people are confused. I did take a break from music actually for about two years when I had my son and wanted to see if I felt like I wanted to come back to music. I did, and I did a really amazing co-headline tour with Pitbull, and we sold out every show two years in a row, and it was awesome. But doing that, as much as I loved it, made me realize that it had become monotonous for me.

I think it was a bit creatively limiting. I’d already started angel investing and taking some smaller creative roles in developing companies, and I just felt so much more fulfillment and excitement in that.

I didn’t renew my record contract. I don’t have an active record contract or publishing contract. I have sold all of my masters. I’m free of any responsibility.

And I just feel excited to get up in the day and pursue these ideas. For some people, it may seem boring. Why do you want to do creative for a telecommunication company? For me, it’s the challenge of the puzzle of figuring out how to connect brand with audience and what the identity of that brand is. I love the puzzle of that. Music is a puzzle in that way too, to me. And so I feel much happier doing this.

How Iggy Azalea got into the world of cryptocurrency

SAFIAN: I don’t think a lot of people would have predicted that one of your ventures would be cryptocurrency. How did you first become interested? How did you get into it? Are you now a crypto expert?

AZALEA: I don’t dare to say I’m an expert, Bob, because everyone will come for my head, but I think I’m quite knowledgeable. I got into it through my brother, actually.

My brother is younger than me, and he came to live with me over the summer. I had my brushes with crypto, especially during 2021 when NFTs really exploded.

I’ve been approached by a lot of people wanting me to endorse things, but I didn’t really understand what the cultural side of crypto was for or what it had to offer. I actually likened it a lot to Beanie Babies and felt like it was a bubble that would burst and it wasn’t real.

SAFIAN: It’s just a fad that’s going to go.

AZALEA: Yeah, I’m not very interested in partaking in that. I don’t see myself in that space. When my brother came to stay with me, he started to show me more about meme coins, the communities he’s involved in, and how it all works. I really started to learn about that and felt very interested.

Inside Iggy’s crypto coin $MOTHER

SAFIAN: You’ve said that $MOTHER is more of a traditional meme coin than a celebrity coin. Can you explain what you mean by that?

AZALEA: I think celebrity, like we’d call it meta, doesn’t have much value in its traditional sense. I don’t think the roadmap to what we in crypto know as celebrity meta really works. I think of myself as a hybrid. It’s like a meme coin or maybe an alt token. It has real use, real-world utility that I think is important to integrate. But when you use the word utility in crypto, everyone’s like, “Ew, it’s a dirty, boring word.” I want the fun of a meme token and try to have that, the community of that, and the chaos of that combined with some real-world usage and utility.

Traditional celebrity token is just, “I am John Doe. I’m super famous. I launched a coin. It’s based on John Doe. That’s the concept: me.” And what do you get out of this? Nothing. Me. “Do you believe in me? Do you like me? Buy me.” And I don’t think that’s very valuable.

What is valuable that celebrities have or could utilize if they were interested in crypto is that they are good at developing communities and fostering that sort of thing. It needs to be something that I think is bigger than yourself. Yes, the celebrity can lead it, the same way they can an album concept that people buy into. I think Charli XCX is someone who did a really great job of that this summer with Brat. Now Brat is in the dictionary as the Oxford word of the year, right? So she had a great theme behind her album.

For me, thematically, I chose mother. I think it’s a very memeable theme. It speaks to me as well, being a mother. I think mothers can have a broad-spanning interpretation of how deranged or traditional that can be.

That’s why I liken what I’m doing more to a traditional meme coin in that regard of community. It’s thematics; it’s semantics at the end of the day.

Navigating the volatility of crypto markets

SAFIAN: Do you think about $MOTHER as an investment? It reached a high level in June and then goes down. Is it stressful to be part of a volatile market? Is it fun, or do you not really think about it in investment terms?

AZALEA: Market cap matters, and it’s a measure of success. I’m at six months now of being in crypto, having launched this token, right?

I think it’s more about not letting the immediate day-to-day value of what the market cap as an investment is, or getting too focused on that. I used to look at deck screener, to look at my market cap on a 10-minute chart, and was really quite addicted, I will say, to that in the beginning. But now I really zoom out when I look at it, and I’m planning kind of in quarters, more traditionally the way that I would a web2 business. Of course, there’s pressure regarding investment, but I don’t feel that pressure for it to always be “green, green, green,” or “I need to get back to this all-time high right now.” I don’t feel that pressure, but I do feel pressure to make sure that I’m always thinking ahead. A lot of meme coins just peak, dump, and then the developer will start a new project within four to six months, and that coin is abandoned, and that’s really not my approach. I want something long-lasting here.

How the U.S. presidential election impacts crypto

SAFIAN: Since Donald Trump won the election, crypto prices have climbed. Do you think about the potential of $MOTHER differently?

AZALEA: Who was going to win the election has been a big talking point in crypto all year, right? Because, people felt a certain way about the Biden administration or they associate Kamala with that administration and the way the SEC has interacted with crypto or the lack of transparency about what the rules really are.

It created a lot of hesitancy in the market, and I knew what the potential was, or is, if it was going to be a Trump administration for crypto, because people were going to be very bullish on that.

And if it was going to be a Kamala administration, then people were probably going to be very bearish about that. Right, sir. I knew that. I mean, I’m happy to see the market pumping. I don’t like to get into politics. I can’t vote. I’m not an American; I’m an Australian, and I care about Australian politics. But I’ve geared up my fourth quarter and my first quarter of next year under the assumption that it was going to be a Republican president and that we would see this bull run that’s now started about a week ago, and I’m happy I did it that way because that’s how it’s ended up.

Dissecting the differences in music fandom and crypto communities

SAFIAN: For your community of fans and the folks that are part of the $MOTHER community, it’s like for music, you could be a fan and sort of drop it and come back to it and sort of go up and down in the same way that the value of a crypto coin can go up and down. But in some ways, you have a different kind of responsibility because your fans could lose money on this, right?

AZALEA: Honestly, I have some music fans that are in the $MOTHER community.

But I was shocked to see that a lot of day traders and traditional Wall Street traders are in $MOTHER. When you’re in, say, a musical fan, there are some who can say that you drop it and then you come back, but I would argue that’s really a casual listener.

And then in what would be called a stan community, where we all know and love super fans, you don’t drop in music. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You spend, and you spend, and you spend. You’re going to spend money on having an emotional experience at a concert that might be between you paying your light bill and your college that year, because these are young people or you’re going to this experience. To be a hardcore member of any fan base, it does come with some monetary commitment for the most part, right?

It’s up to me in both those scenarios to foster something beyond the investment of your money going up or down, because I would hope that you wouldn’t over-leverage yourself in either of those scenarios. Whether it’s that you can buy a concert ticket for a hundred dollars or you want to put a hundred dollars on your favorite meme coin, right? Yes, I want to see the market cap rise. I’d love for you to have a monetary thing that you can showcase. But secondary to that, it’s important for me in either of those scenarios that you have enjoyment regardless so that you feel there’s something else, intangible of value that you get out of this.

With celebrity coins, there’s often not true engagement with the community, right? I did my paid post, I told you to come and buy this token. But buy this token, why are you getting proximity to the person that you like in a chat room? And that’s what the value is. Are you getting an in-real-life experience? Is there merchandising? Is there utility where you can get something at a discount like I have with Unreal Mobile and $MOTHER or like what I’m doing with DreamVault? You can buy anything on the internet on DreamVault and you can get it at a 10 percent discount if you choose to buy in the crypto token $MOTHER.

That’s something that’s value beyond the chart.

When you talk about your fan community and the most engaged subset of stands, for a lot of entrepreneurs, they’re trying to build that kind of stan community around their business. Do you have any advice for them about how to do that? You’ve talked about a sticky unit of culture, but for those looking for something sticky, how do they find it? How do they figure out what that is?

Everybody won’t have one. I have to say. Everybody won’t have one. It’s like that with memes too, where it’s like, you can plan it all you want, but at the end of the day, you don’t know what culture is going to grab onto or not, right? Like, who would have thought that the hippo was gonna go nuts. You can’t predict these things. That’s the fun of pop culture in general, not just crypto culture or brands. But I think what it is is just that you want to lean into whatever your organic identity is, and you want to be essentially polarizing in that and very unapologetic about what that is that you’re honing in on. And I don’t think it’s something that you necessarily just make up or say, “Well, pop culture likes hippos right now, so I’ll go with hippos.” Like, no, it doesn’t work that way. What is your brand? What are you? If you’re the face of it, you have to lean into that in an aggressive way. There’s nothing memorable in pop culture that doesn’t swing the pendulum. The middle is forgettable. And we can’t aim for that. There is a big risk in that regard, but I think you just have to, and know that people will connect with that. People will aggressively see themselves in that or not. And if they don’t, it’s still just as good because they will talk about it.

The power of polarization in branding

SAFIAN: A lot of businesses try to be everything for everyone.

AZALEA: And you cannot, that is the biggest mistake, I feel, in marketing yourself or your business. Trying to be too likable, trying to say, “Well, I want all the audience. I want to be as big as I can. So my idea is that I want the whole audience. I want every fruit on this tree to be mine.” It cannot be that way. You need to have a message that is somewhat unafraid to be polarizing so that those people want to go out and fully support you because they believe in that. They believe in the brand. They see themselves in it. They see themselves in you. Like a magnifying glass on their own belief. You just want to magnify that emotion, that energy, that belief, and make them say, “Oh yeah, I want to go in and I want to do this too.”

“I was sitting here thinking the same thing, but yeah, you stood up and said it. And so I want to go and I want to ride for that too.” So you can’t be afraid that some people are not going to like that, but those people are of value to you as well.

Those people are going to talk about how much they dislike it. And it was always a key part of my success in music. Talk about how much you dislike it. I want you to because that’s going to spark other people’s curiosity to say, “What’s so bad about this thing? What’s causing this reaction?” People love to watch a car crash.

SAFIAN: Maybe they think that that sounds like something they’d hate too. But guess what? They’re gonna go and look at it. And some may decide that they like it. And you’ll get a lot more customers that way, actually, by being unafraid. Because that’s the way you get the spotlight to come your way. There’s so much noise out there.

AZALEA: You have to have an aggressive viewpoint, and we all do. That’s something that we all have. Will the way that you market it connect or not? I don’t know. It depends on you and the way culture is and if that’s a message that’s connecting in culture at that moment, and that changes all the time. But what I can say is nobody wants to be friends with the person that everybody’s friends with. It’s not organic; it’s not real. We all have our extreme opinion about something, and you just have to lean into whatever that belief is you have so strongly. Probably other people share that same strong emotion about that thing. So you got to be unafraid about what you’re doing.

SAFIAN: Iggy is certainly unafraid to be herself. It’s a bit bracing to lean into our most aggressive, strongest emotions that may not always be the best part of ourselves. But practically speaking, you have to say that she’s right and admire her for calling it out so plainly. So, how does this practically play into a business strategy? Iggy shares her experiences from telecom to GoFundMe to OnlyFans after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Revamping the telecommunications industry

Before the break, we heard musician Iggy Azalea talk about why she’s embraced cryptocurrency. Now she compares her new telecom venture to Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile, plus her take on GoFundMe, OnlyFans, and how she deals with pressure. Let’s jump back in.

SAFIAN: I have to ask you about Unreal Mobile because telecom is not traditionally like the sexiest business, you know?

AZALEA: That’s why I’m here to make it sexy.

SAFIAN: Were you inspired by Ryan Reynolds’ success at Mint Mobile? Why telecom?

AZALEA: We all can be a little inspired by what he’s done because he’s kind of done the impossible with it, honestly. I mean, he’s quite good, I will say. What happened actually is that I have this company, DreamVault, and somebody came in and wanted to be part of my round, but it had closed. Joshua is the original founder who bought the company. He called me up and said, “Listen, do you have any other projects that I could invest in? Do you have any other ideas?” And I said, “Well, what have you got going on over there? Do you have something that you own that’s not working?” And he had bought this company, Unreal Mobile, and he showed it to me and said, “I have these ideas. I want it to be for younger people. I don’t know how to connect with them. My team doesn’t understand it. Would you be interested in telecommunication?” And I thought actually I would because it’s a utility that every young person needs, but it’s hard to make it cool. It’s hard to make utility cool. Ryan Reynolds, I think, has done a great job at making it make sense financially, but I don’t think Mint Mobile is cool.

SAFIAN: And maybe that’s not the way — isn’t necessarily trying to be…

AZALEA: I don’t think it is. I don’t think that’s its pitch point or what it’s trying to be. But for me, I’m like, I want to try to make something that younger people can identify with, that can get young people off having to be on their family plan with their mom when they’re 24 years old because they can’t afford it.

I think there’s a lot of independence in that, and I want to make it fun. The puzzle of trying to make that product fun to me is so vastly appealing.

My first campaign that I did with them was Unreal Mobile for Unreal Creatures, and it’s got mermaids and vampires. It’s ridiculous and stupid, and it fared quite well on social media, and now customer acquisition costs went way down for us. I was very proud of that. It feels like building your career in music. Like every campaign is a little album, and for me, I just felt like what else could connect with youth more than this?

SAFIAN: What you’re saying, if I’m hearing you right, is that the product itself is the messaging; it’s the community because any phone service can get you to make that call, right?

AZALEA: Here’s why I think it should be cool. Here’s why I think it’s important to be cool.

As a young person, you’re not fully, you don’t fully always own your identity. You do care about perception. You do care about perception among peers, and it can navigate what you buy and what you don’t buy. Right? Look at Stanley cups. It’s a cup, and you could have the same cup with a different brand on it that does the same function, but that one’s not cool. You don’t want to buy it. You don’t want to interact with it. And I think it is actually the same with phone plans and always has been. The amount of times when I was younger that someone looks at your phone and sees a little thing in the corner and says, “Oh, you’re with them. Ew.” Being budget-friendly, actually to young people, can be a bad thing. They don’t want that. So why does it matter to be cool?

It matters to be cool because young people care about that. And you want something that is budget-friendly but that can crack the knot of still being cool.

It’s trying to get rid of the, I guess you could call it shame—that may be extreme, but it is a little bit of, “I have a contractless phone plan. I’m not on one of the big guys.” Why is that the culture? It always has been; it should change. It’s stupid.

Creating the DreamVault platform

SAFIAN: You mentioned DreamVault earlier. Can you explain what DreamVault is? It sounds like kind of a cross between Venmo and Kickstarter and social media with $MOTHER as a currency.

AZALEA: What it is, essentially, is a gifting platform, a marketplace, and a crowdfunding all kind of like mashed together. I spent time on OnlyFans, and I would chat to actually a lot more traditional fans than people may realize on that platform. A lot of them would want to buy me gifts, and I was like, “Well, I don’t really want a gift, but thank you.” But I just kind of got in this world when I was on OnlyFans that I felt like I see a gap in the market where there are a lot of creators that don’t necessarily want to be on a site like that but maybe do want the help of their community, essentially.

Maybe they want a gift, or maybe they want equipment, or maybe they want funding to make an album. Do you want to be on GoFundMe? No. Why? Because GoFundMe is something that happens when you want charity, and that is, again, not cool.

So there were kind of all these little elements of things that I saw and felt like I see something here that we could do. I think we could have a gifting platform that has a social media element where you can go and chat with your community with each other. You can have proximity to the person that you like and talk to them.

When I had a dream, which was to be a musician, there were a lot of things that I needed help with to make that happen. I needed accommodation. I needed equipment. I needed a microphone. I needed tickets to get places, and I did it. I was successful, but my community helped me to be able to become successful.

And I want a place where people can go and utilize their community, whether you’re an influencer or maybe it’s just that you’re having a baby shower and you don’t want to have Amazon be the limit of your gift list or Target. Can everybody I know in my wedding party just come here and donate to this one thing so I can have my big shebang dream? You can do things like that with this platform.

And then afterwards, because there’s a social media element, you can post your videos and keep people updated. I’m a big supporter of GoFundMe. I’ll donate to stuff that I see and believe in, and I don’t really get updates about what became of that, and sometimes you wonder. I think it’s cool to have a space where that’s possible too.

SAFIAN: It’s an interesting mashup because some of the things you talk about — I might do that on Kickstarter. But GoFundMe, I might do over here. They’re like in different places. You’re pulling it all together.

AZALEA: Just bringing an experience where, whether it’s fan or community or whatever you want to call it, you have more proximity and more access to say, “Hey, you know what? I see Sarah is my biggest supporter. Man, thank you. Let me get a relationship.” Sarah likes that. That’s the most valuable thing that Sarah could be getting out of this. And then you have something valuable too, because you have a real fan that you have direct access and engagement to. A lot of, I would say, successful celebrities at engaging communities, me being one of them, all know, they are all in group chats with their core fandom on Instagram, on Twitter, showing them stuff before it comes out. “What do you like? Do you like this? Do you like this one or this one? What color?” This is all getting asked already. This engagement already happens under the radar for people that are good at what they’re doing.

Why not put it somewhere that’s more rewarding and accessible to everyone? So I just like it as a concept.

Thriving in male-dominated industries

SAFIAN: You alluded to this earlier: crypto, like some of the music genres you’ve been in, have typically been male-dominated. That hasn’t deterred you. I wonder if you have any lessons for women who sort of feel like they’re struggling to get ahead in male-dominated industries or workplaces.

AZALEA: Here’s one thing I will say, even though you’re probably the only woman in a sea full of men, just try not to mention it. It’s messed up, but it’s true. What you want to do is you want to find points of commonality, right?

The truth is, whatever industry you’re in, when you’re a woman, once you’re at the top of it, it’s probably male-dominated. That’s a fact. It’s not of value to you in any capacity to make necessarily a focal point of the thing that makes you different to your political peers that you need to gain favor from in order to operate.

You want to find things when you’re doing business with people that you have in common and make friendships. To come in the door, which I think a lot of women kind of make the mistake of doing this in business, and say like, “Well, a woman, only woman here, here I am, other women come to me.” It kind of doesn’t seem to work that way.

I think it’s something that maybe you want to make a focal point of once you’re in a position of power that can’t really be taken away. It’s unfair, but it’s true because you have to establish what you have in common with people first. And you have to make those friendships first and make those connections first by focusing on what you do have in the space that you can relate to with these guys.

Allow them to create some attachment. Allow them to want to go hard for you. And then when you’re where you need to be, remind everybody of how hard it was and their impact on what you overcame. Because you have to be smart. I’m not saying that it’s fair. It’s not fair. It’s always unfair to be a successful woman. But if you want to immediately play the game with the landscape as it is, then that’s what I think works the best.

What’s at stake for Iggy Azalea?

SAFIAN: So what’s at stake for you as an entrepreneur right now?

AZALEA: I think here’s what I always say. Your name is your name, and you only get one, right? You can change your project and start something new, but it’s attached to your one good name that you have. And so for me, I feel like I have so much at stake because I only have one name. And in that regard, I think of myself as having only one shot, and I just cannot fail.

I have to deliver what I’ve promised myself. I have to deliver what I’ve promised the people directly investing in me. And I have to deliver to the people that are in my community, who believe in me, whether it’s emotional, time, or financial. It’s my life on the line, really. That’s how I think of it. That’s how much pressure I have, and I like that. I like to put the pressure on myself because it makes me get up in the morning and say, “From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, what am I doing to see these businesses move forward? What have I got checked off my list? What’s next for it?” And for me, that’s the drive. That’s what makes me happy in life.

So I really feel like I have absolutely everything betted on what I’m doing as an entrepreneur right now.

SAFIAN: The risk that you talk about to your name, to your brand, in going into business, it almost makes it feel like, well, why bother?

AZALEA: Because I’m a psycho. I need the risk. I’ll be honest with you. It’s like, mate, I think I might be a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I am. I am.

I moved to America when I was 16 to decide to be a rapper. You couldn’t have a bigger risk. I stayed awake all night the night before I caught that plane and thought, “Am I getting myself set up to get kidnapped and murdered? I don’t know where I’m going or how I’m going to make this happen.” But there’s something about that that makes me feel alive and that I can’t put down. That’s the thing that I’m addicted to. It’s not making music. That wasn’t what kept me going for so long. And a lot of adversity sometimes in that arena or facing a lot of criticism.

There’s something about that pressure that is a driver for me. And that reward when you overcome it is unlike anything. And I will be honest, maybe I would need a lot of therapy to be able to live without that. I may have quit music, but I haven’t quit that.

I can’t quit that. That is what internally drives me as a person. It’s probably why I have no love life or personal life. It’s just this all the time, because this is my thing. This is my reward. And so why bet so much on it? Maybe because I’m addicted to it.

That’s the honest truth.

SAFIAN: Well, Iggy, I thank you for being so candid and sharing all this with us. I really appreciate it.

AZALEA: I appreciate it so much. Hopefully we can talk again in six months and be talking about everything that went right. That’s my hope.

SAFIAN: Listening to Izzy, what I’m struck by most is her unfiltered clarity: about what drives brand success, about how she deals with unfairness as a woman in business, about the interplay between pressure and ambition. Iggy’s ventures and her cryptocurrency may take off or may not, but she’s unlikely to slow down. As for her encouragement for brands to embrace alienating some people, I’m both drawn to it and repelled. For the biggest businesses, the idea of cutting yourself off from prospective customers can seem foolhardy. Especially as we consider the business world’s response to U.S. politics, the idea of alienating consumers in favor of catering to a subsect of rabid supporters is something many businesses are debating internally. Maybe this conversation was the motivation you needed to take a risk — even if it goes terribly wrong, I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.