GRM Daily (Grime & Rap Music Daily), formerly Grime Daily, is a British urban music outlet and entertainment platform. As the name suggests, the platform is an outlet for UK rap and its various genres, such as

UK drill UK drill is a subgenre of drill music and road rap that originated in the South London district of Brixton from 2012 onwards. While being sonically distinct from Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous ...

, afroswing, trap, and

British hip hop UK rap, also known as British hip hop or UK hip hop or British rap, is a music genre and culture that covers a variety of styles of hip hop music made in the United Kingdom. The development of UK rap was shaped by a distinct set of regional inf ...

. The platform also serves electronic genres such as

UK garage UK garage, abbreviated as UKG, is a genre of electronic dance music which originated in England in the early to mid-1990s. The genre was most clearly inspired by garage house and jungle production methods, but also incorporates elements from ...

and grime. GRM Daily is the largest media outlet platform in the UK, followed by Link Up TV, SB.TV, Pressplay Media and Mixtape Madness.

History

In the early 2000s, pirate radio stations such as

Rinse FM Rinse FM is a London-based community radio station, licensed for "young people living and/or working within the central, east and south London areas". It plays garage, grime, dubstep, house, jungle, UK funky and other dance music genres po ...

and DvDs such as Risky Roadz and Lord of the Mics were the only major platforms that grime and UK rap artists could promote themselves through. This meant it was often difficult for an artist to find an audience. With this in mind, Jamal Edwards founded SB.TV in 2007, an online music platform that would be used to showcase artists and allow them an easy platform to release music through. This was followed by the founding of Link Up TV a year later, and finally Grime Daily in 2009, all based on the same concept. Collectively these platforms have served as the backbone to much of UK urban music and provided a large outlets for artists to gain popularity and fame. Grime Daily was formed in 2009 by founders Matt 'Sketchy' Thorne, Pierre Godson-Amamoo and Koby 'Posty' Hagan. The platform was created in order to create a space for UK urban artists to showcase themselves and release music. At the time, the platform was named 'Grime Daily', to denote its affiliation with the

grime music Grime is a genre of electronic dance music (EDM) that emerged in London in the early 2000s. It developed out of the earlier UK dance style UK garage, and draws influences from jungle, dancehall, and hip hop. The style is typified by rapid, sy ...

scene. For the first week, the website was used to upload old grime DvDs and videos, however they also wanted to film their own unique content. Initially, the plan was to have Jamal Edwards film content which would then be uploaded to Grime Daily, however Jamal instead filmed content for his own platform SB.TV. Posty instead decided to buy a camera and film content for Grime Daily himself. The "Daily" is a reference to the fact that the outlet originally intended to release grime related content every single day. Early on, one way this was done was by doing long interviews with artists, splitting the interview into parts, and releasing the parts from the interview throughout the week. An interview with grime artist J2K was Grime Daily's first ever interview. Co-founder Sketchy had previously built J2K's

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

page, which led to Posty asking Sketchy to build the Grime Daily website. In its early days, the website struggled with high traffic and would go down on occasion. Within the first year, they hit over a million views a month. In 2011, the original Grime Daily YouTube channel was taken down by YouTube, resulting in the loss of over 2000 videos. It was alleged that this was because a man had shown a knife on a music video for one of Scorcher's songs, however this was denied by both Scorcher and Grime Daily (the music video was still actually available on the artist's own channel). Posty also stated it was claimed the channel was terminated due to receiving 3 copyright strikes, however this was disputed by Posty and Sketchy. Posty also stated they were told someone had bought views for a video. Posty, one of GRM's founders, stated in a 2020 interview that he still did not know why the channel was originally taken down. The platform rebranded as GRM Daily in 2012, which stands for "Grime and Rap Music", and created a new YouTube channel (the one-year delay was due to a fear that the channel would be banned again if they returned too quickly). The new name was to clarify its expanded scope with not just grime, but also

and related genres. In 2012 Grime Daily joined with The BiG! Agency, now taking responsibility for the commercial operations of GRM Daily's website, and Silver Bullet Digital (SBD). In 2013, GRM Daily had over 40,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel. It took 7 years (from its founding) for GRM Daily to gain over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. The channel rapidly grew from there, earning over a million in 2018, and 5 million by 2022. In 2015, GRM created the ''Rated Awards'', an awards show dedicated to UK urban music. In 2020, GRM released a documentary entitled "Together We Rise", detailing the platforms history. The platform released "GRM 10", an album to celebrate the platforms 10 year anniversary. The album featured artists such as Aitch,

B Young Bertan Jafer (born 12 January 1995), known professionally as B Young, is a British rapper and singer and songwriter from Hackney, London, Hackney, London. Before becoming a rapper, B Young spent several years as a sound engineer during which he ...

, Unknown T,

D Double E Darren Jason Dixon (born 19 January 1980), known professionally as D Double E, is a British grime MC, DJ and record producer from Forest Gate, East London. He performs both as a solo artist and as a member of the grime duo Newham Generals. ...

, M Huncho, Dutchavelli, Not3s, Blade Brown, Nafe Smallz, Yxng Bane, and others.

"Daily Duppy"

"Daily Duppy" is a platform for freestyle releases. The platform was launched as a response to the success of Jamal Edwards' "Fresh 64" ("F64") release series on SB.TV, where artists rapped 64 bars of original ("fresh") content. , after more than a decade of releases, "Daily Duppy" singles have charted seven times on the UK Singles Chart and three of them, by Aitch,

J Hus Momodou Lamin Jallow (born 26 October 1996) known professionally as J Hus, is a British rapper and singer who has been credited with pioneering the genre Afroswing. He is currently signed to Black Butter Records. He gained popularity in 2015 f ...

, and Fredo, have been certified Silver by the

British Phonographic Industry BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited, trading as British Phonographic Industry (BPI), is the British recorded music industry's trade association. It runs the BRIT Awards; is home to the Mercury Prize; co-owns the Official Charts C ...

(BPI).

Singles

Legacy

By 2012, the Grime Daily website was taking in 70 million website hits and had over 50,000 daily visitors. The platform played a part in popularising artists such as Tinie Tempah,

Tinchy Stryder Kwasi Esono Danquah III ( ; born 14 September 1986), better known by his stage name Tinchy Stryder, is a British rapper, singer, songwriter, entrepreneur and investor. Stryder has released three solo studio albums, '' Star in the Hood'' (2007 ...

, and

Wretch 32 Jermaine Sinclaire Scott (born 9 March 1985), better known by his stage name Wretch 32, is a British rapper, singer and songwriter from Tottenham, North London. He was a member of the grime collective Combination Chain Gang, before forming The ...

in the early 2010s. GRM Daily has been very influential in propping up UK urban artists from various genres, such as grime, British hip hop, and Afroswing. The platform has been credited for bringing fame to artists such as Stormzy, Dave,

, Amelia Monét, Kojo Funds, Steel Banglez, Not3s, Mabel, and many others. GRM Daily, along with related platforms such as Link Up TV and Pressplay Media, have created an ecosystem that allows artists to easily record, produce, and release music to the masses without the need of support from traditional media or the

music industry The music industry are individuals and organizations that earn money by Songwriter, writing songs and musical compositions, creating and selling Sound recording and reproduction, recorded music and sheet music, presenting live music, concerts, ...

Controversies

In 2010, DJ Werewolf was hit in the chest and buttocks after an individual pulled out a Mac-10 submachine gun and fired rounds at a GRM Daily event, containing over 600 people, celebrating their anniversary. Another unidentified woman and man were also shot in the incident. Police claimed they were not informed the event was happening. Donatella Panayiotou, the presenter of the event, quit working for GRM Daily as a result of the shooting, and criticised them for their handling of the event. In 2018, British rapper Young Spray was stabbed at GRM Daily's Rated Awards event.

References