This morning we and our mates used Snapchat to communicate our choices of coffee and share our disappointment with another Monday – pretty standard practice. It would seem, however, that Australia’s hip-hop community has a different idea for the application.

Sydney rapper Tuka of Thundamentals fame has been making use of the app to detail the creation of a new beat, which will no doubt form the basis of a new track, showing off the end result via his Facebook page stating, ‘Today I wrote an entire beat from start to finish on Snapchat, it’s rough as shit but it was as fun as hell. Here’s the main idea of it…’

Meanwhile in Melbourne, rapper Ryland Rose has used his time on the social media platform to shoot an entire music video for his track ‘Almost Famous & Broke’, which shows off the rapper’s sweet drawing skills and just how perfectly Leonardo DiCaprio’s face fits over his own – clearly making use of the app and some of its more ridiculous features.

The clip, which is basically a Harambe meme short of being ‘peak internet’, has proven to be a smart move – the video has racked up 137 thousand views on Facebook in the space of a week. It’s these inventive uses of new social media that are proving why emerging artists may want to think about moving away from the ‘chuck it up on YouTube’ model in favour of hitting a more engaged audience.

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