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Chance the Rapper premieres prerecorded video for Same Drugs on Facebook Live

Chance the Rapper premieres prerecorded video for Same Drugs on Facebook Live

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Chance the Rapper just released a new video for “Same Drugs,” a track off last year’s Coloring Book. As he is known to do, Chance tried to switch up the industry standard by premiering the video on Facebook Live — except it wasn’t exactly live. The video, a strange, woozy, puppet-filled thing, was prerecorded and then streamed directly from Facebook in high-def before moving over to YouTube.

For an artist like Chance the Rapper, who has a relatively young following, Facebook (your parents’ social media platform of choice) seemed like a strange choice for a premiere partner. But according to Chance, he had attempted to premiere the video on other platforms before falling back on Facebook as a last resort.

About 10 minutes before the “Same Drugs” video premiered, Chance tweeted a different video in which he called out Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat for not allowing him to premiere the video live directly from their platforms. He says the companies told him to take a video of his computer screen using his phone, and premiere the video that way, which would have resulted in a clunkier viewing experience.

Then, his pre-video-video basically became a commercial for Facebook Live, as he singled out the company for agreeing to host his video.

“That’s Facebook Live holding me down with a countdown to an HD premiere,” he says in the Twitter video. “What I want you to do is log off [Twitter], get on Facebook, and watch this motherfucking video.”

The producer Klingande was the first musician to shoot and stream a video on Facebook Live last year, but Facebook is not the only platform that has made itself available to artists.

log off Twitter

Snapchat has previously premiered a video for Madonna, Twitter has hosted a posthumous Michael Jackson video release, and Jason Derulo has premiered a music video on Instagram Stories, so it’s not clear why exactly the companies all passed on Chance’s offer, if what he says is true. At its peak, the “Same Drugs” video attracted more than 33,000 eyeballs — not too shabby for a video premiered will very little advance notice.

The Verge has reached out to Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat for comment, and will update if more information becomes available.