Kid Cudi Opens Up a Beat for Fans to Rap Over and Starts Building a New Group

Kid Cudi is turning his fanbase into a talent pool, and he’s doing it by putting one of his beats into the wild. On Aug. 5, he floated the idea of forming a trippy rap group built from artists he discovers through submissions, then moved quickly to make the plan real.

“What if I made a beat, put it on SoundCloud, let u guys rap/sing on it and then I choose the illest versions and make a group?” he wrote on X, adding that he would sign the strongest entries to his Mad Solar label and “f**k up the world together.”

At first, Cudi set the bar high, asking for 100,000 likes and 20,000 reposts before he would follow through. He backed that down almost immediately to 2,000 likes, and confirmed the beat would land on SoundCloud. From there, he laid out the terms with a fairly blunt warning: he would be “very critical.” What he was after, he said, were polished, original artists with “a story and something to say.” He also gave participants a week to finish their submissions and told them not to manipulate the beat.

He then finished the track two days later and put it out early so fans could start working on their versions, promising to add more instructions on how to submit completed tracks later.

But the process did not wait for the full rollout. Before the formal submission details were in place, fans were already finding ways in. Cleveland musician Dave Zup shared his version with Cudi on X on Tuesday (Aug. 11), and Cudi appeared to approve, replying by telling Dave to check his DMs.

Elsewhere, the experiment has already started to look less like a casual social post and more like a real A&R test run, with Cudi inviting listeners to try their hand at something that could turn into an actual group.