From Drake to Lil Baby, hip-hop arena shows are surging in Milwaukee. Here's why.

Seventeen years into one of the most successful and influential hip-hop careers of all time, Drake will play his first Milwaukee concert at Fiserv Forum this week.

Drake was scheduled to play Fiserv Forum Aug. 3, but the show was pushed back a day, Aug. 4, "due to the size of the production and in order to bring the entire production and the best version of the show to Milwaukee,” ticketholders were told via email on July 31.

Even delayed by a day, the Drake concert is a major event for local hip-hop fans. But it's just the beginning.

For the first time, a Milwaukee arena will host three hip-hop tours in the same month, with Lil Baby at Fiserv Forum on Aug. 18, then Moneybagg Yo on Aug. 27.

Then in September, the Bucks arena will host two more: Mexican rapper and singer Peso Pluma Sept. 14, then punk-rap duo $uicideboy$ Sept. 24.

That's quite a change for a city that went nine years without a hip-hop tour in its biggest arena — if you want to count a Black Eyed Peas Bradley Center show in 2010.

If you don't consider that pop-heavy act hip-hop, the city went 16 years without one — from 50 Cent, Jay Z and Snoop Dogg in 2003, to Travis Scott in 2019.

"It's huge," Tarik Moody, program director for local Urban Alternative radio station HYFIN, said about the surge of hip-hop arena shows in Milwaukee. "The biggest moneymaking genres are from Latin and Black culture right now, and these artists and these genres bring the most diverse crowds. Milwaukee needs that."

Hip-hop's growth means more big hip-hop shows

It's not like Milwaukee hasn't had hip-hop shows. The Rave has long been a reliable spot to see hip-hop of all styles, including future arena headliners like Baby and Scott. And in that gap between major hip-hop arena tours, Summerfest had some significant booking coups for its biggest stage, including Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and OutKast.

But Milwaukee is seeing more big hip-hop shows, largely because there are more big hip-hop shows.

"Touring is a natural byproduct of the fact that hip-hop as a genre has grown phenomenally in the past few years," said Scott Leslie, co-president of FPC Live, the Madison-based, Live Nation-backed promoter behind Drake's Fiserv Forum show. "With artists breaking on TikTok and other streaming services … new talent continues to keep developing, to a point where there are arena-level audiences for it."

Thanks to the rise of music consumption on Spotify, YouTube and other streaming services, hip-hop and R&B replaced rock as the most popular genre in 2017, according to Nielsen Music. It's still on top, making up 25.9% of all music consumption so far in 2023, according to a midyear report from Luminate, the name of the data company that Nielsen Music rolled into in 2020.

Fiserv Forum and the Bucks help, too

Another factor has helped boost Milwaukee's hip-hop offerings: the opening of Fiserv Forum in 2018.

In its first full year of operation in 2019, the Milwaukee Bucks' arena hosted 32 concerts, blowing away the Bradley Center's record of staging 18 concerts in 2008. Fiserv Forum again topped the Bradley Center record with 21 concerts last year; so far, 19 have been announced for 2023.

"The design of the facility with a larger lower bowl, better sightlines and acoustics give artists license to market the rate of ticket prices higher and drive higher grosses," said FPC Live co-president Charlie Goldstone.

The success of the Milwaukee Bucks, with two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo leading the team to its first championship win in 2021, also helps.

"The NBA overall really embraces hip-hop," HYFIN's Moody said, with Leslie suggesting that for some NBA-loving artists, playing Fiserv Forum has a similar cachet to playing Chicago's United Center during the Bulls' Michael Jordan era in the '90s.

And packed houses for Bucks games means greater marketing outreach for concerts, Goldstone said.

Travis Scott concert was a turning point

For hip-hop in Milwaukee, one of those successful concerts was Travis Scott's sold-out show in 2019.

"The success of Travis … definitely helped us lead the path to bring in more shows of that genre. That is one of the key factors for how we were able to obtain Drake," said Aurora Rodriguez, director of booking for Fiserv Forum. "Milwaukee has proven time and time again for … (Fiserv Forum shows with) Rod Wave, Kendrick Lamar, Future, Tyler, The Creator that there is obviously a demand for this particular genre."

Despite that growth, some hip-hop stars, like Doja Cat and Lil Durk, are skipping Milwaukee on their next arena tours. And Moody feels that if more hip-hop shows were booked in Milwaukee, and shows for genres dominated by Black artists, including R&B and Afrobeats, that people would show up.

"How does Minneapolis have the Afropunk festival and get all these Afrobeat artists with a population that is less diverse than us?" Moody asked. "I want to see Milwaukee be a great place for all types of live music. … I see (booking more Black and Latin artists) as another avenue to help Milwaukee become the city it wants to be … an opportunity to engage a lot of young Black and brown people that go to Chicago a lot and spend their money there."

But there seems to be some anxiety in the music industry that hip-hop, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, could be at a crossroads. So far this year, there have been no No. 1 hip-hop albums on the Billboard 200, and only one rapper has reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Latto, for a guest verse on BTS member Jung Kook's single "Seven").

Also, Lil Baby quietly canceled multiple dates, and The Kid Laroi is no longer playing select stops on that tour. No reason was given, but fans have speculated that low ticket sales were to blame. (The Milwaukee date is still on, although Ticketmaster and Fiserv Forum promoted ticket deals in June.)

"Coming out of COVID, the industry is still seeing lingering effects. … Artists are on their own timeline … and there's not a ton of coordination with which tours are going out," Goldstone said. "Certain shows may suffer here and there, but overall the business and market is healthy. We just had Summerfest in the market with over 600,000 people and Harley with 80,000 on the heels of that, and have a huge August with sold-out shows at the American Family Insurance Amphitheater and at Fiserv."

And that bodes well for a future with more big hip-hop shows in Milwaukee — and even bigger hip-hop shows.

"There are four sold-out shows at American Family Field this year," Goldstone said. "I'd love to see a hip-hop headliner there, and someday, I think that will happen."

Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: From Drake to Lil Baby, hip-hop arena shows are surging in Milwaukee