How Connor Price Built a Global Following of Millions with His Friends & Family

As Connor Price scrolled through his social media one recent day, he noticed a DM that nearly made him drop his phone.

“Unsolicited advice,” the message said. “Stay independent.”

The message was from Russ, one of his favourite all-time artists and a role model for his career.

“He's created the blueprint for independent rappers,” says Price. “So that was a crazy moment for me.”

For Price, it was more than just advice – it was a validation. In just a few years, the Markham, Ontario-born rapper and actor has built a global audience and over 2 billion streams entirely on his own terms.

“Staying independent means ownership, creative control and being able to do things my own way,” says Price. “I can put out music when I want. I can say what I want. I can work with who I want. I can market it how I want. I don't have to wait for a label.”

That mindset has already helped him carve out a career many would envy. Using social media, online savvy and some help from his family and friends, Price has found a way to reach a wide fanbase all over the world. It’s a 21st century DIY rise. Build the fanbase first, then go out on the road. Release 110 songs, then record your debut album.

Before making music for hundreds of millions, Connor Price was creating it for just one person: himself.

“I always had a passion for music,” Price says on set at his Billboard Canada cover shoot. “I loved hip-hop music, I loved rap music, I loved freestyling with friends. It was a skill I knew I had but I never really put myself out there.”

Though his music career started later, Price wasn't a late bloomer when it comes to performing.

Before music, he had a steady career as an actor. He started when he was just six years old, filming commercials. In 2005, when he was 10, he landed a role in the Depression-era boxing movie Cinderella Man, which was filming entirely in Toronto. Price played the son of Russell Crowe’s character, a substantial role for a budding child actor. It got him an agent, and a trip to Los Angeles for the premiere. Two years later, he had another big movie role as the younger version of Dane Cook in Good Luck Chuck, this time showing off his comedy chops.

He worked steadily through his child and teen years, well into his twenties. Music was something he did on the side, on his own. It was something he kept to himself – for the most part.

“Prior to me putting out music under my name, Connor Price, I actually used to upload songs on YouTube using an anonymous name. And I would enter YouTube rap contests,” he reveals. “I didn't tell anyone – not my family, my friends. No one knew I was doing it. That was just something I was doing for me.”

Price celebrated privately when, in a contest of 100 people, he placed first. “I remember being in my room, and I just freaked out,” he remembers.

It was a lightbulb moment, when he realized maybe this is something he’s actually good at and that people would want to hear. Still, music was mostly a hobby on the side of his acting career.

Then, COVID hit. Movie and TV productions were halted, and acting parts completely dried up. Sitting at home with a lot of free time on his hands, Price began recording songs, and his wife, Breanna, encouraged him to start sharing his music online, especially on TikTok.

"Everyone was on their phones. TikTok was blowing up," he says. "I started filming these skits to promote my songs, and those were really connecting."

He created a series of characters that he plays online and in videos that he screens as part of his show: the producer, the weird brother, a version of himself. Eventually, fans started to get to know the real characters in his life too: his wife Breanna (now his music manager), his adorable son Jude, his friends and collaborators Nic D and GRAHAM. It was light-hearted and funny, but left plenty to obsess over – a whole world for fans to get immersed in, and eventually participate in.

"The response I was getting and the feedback I was getting, it was overwhelming," he explains. "A lot of these skits were going viral, and then I would see on Spotify that the next day the song streams were going up."

In 2022, he posted a TikTok with a simple concept: spin a globe, pick a random country, and find a rapper there to collaborate with.

He landed on Zambia, researched the country and its music scene, found an independent rapper he liked named Killa, and played a snippet of the dexterous verse he recorded over the minimal, hard-hitting beat created by GRAHAM.

I woke up the next morning and it was at, like, 7 million views," he remembers. "And I was like 'What is going on?'"

The resulting song, "Violet," is still his a fan favourite and one of his most popular tracks. The song's beat-switching structure was originally created to soundtrack a bank heist action scene in the Fast & Furious movie Fast X. Price had already recorded the first verse and chorus when he found out the movie wasn't going to use the song. He was already talking to Killa when Breanna came up with the Spin The Globe concept to give something for fans to latch onto. It worked even better than either of them could have predicted.

At the time, Price remembers, Killa had only 180 monthly listeners on Spotify.

"That's one-eight-zero," he emphasizes. "And then at the peak of the song, he had 2 million."

Suddenly, Killa was getting radio play and interview requests in his home city of Lusaka. Price looked at his stats, and saw a surge of listeners coming from Africa.

The same thing happened with his next international collab, "Spinnin" with the rapper Bens from the Netherlands. Price's first-ever show was opening for Hoodie Allen in Amsterdam, and the fans all rapped along in Dutch.

"The hometown love for that song is a whole different experience," says Price.

And it's like that everywhere. When he pulls up the analytics page for "Customs," his song with teenage Punjabi rapper Harsh Likhari, he can see the streams surging across India.

The night before our shoot, Connor Price played his biggest hometown show yet at Rebel. He brought out a special guest: Haviah Mighty, the Polaris Prize-winning rapper who represented Canada in the Spin The Globe series. Price had been a fan of hers for years, and first reached out to collab at the very beginning of his music career.

"Fast forward to last year, and we reach back out to her team," he recounts. "We have a song called 'Trendsetter.' I send it to her. She crushes her verse."

The song became a major hit for both Price and Mighty, becoming the theme song for the Toronto Blue Jays' "night mode" jersey campaign. Price even threw out the first pitch at a game last year, and brought up the Blue Jays' mascot, Ace, at his recent concert.

"And now that song, in the span of a year, has close to 60 million streams. It just went gold in Canada."

He commemorated the full circle moment by presenting Haviah the gold plaque onstage at Rebel.

The success of the song and the series is a proof of concept for Price. It's a platform for independent artists from around the world, elevating them outside of the typical music industry machinery.

"Once that project started popping off, we would have [major labels] reaching out to say 'hey, we'd love to get our artist on Spin The Globe. We'll pay this amount,'" he reveals. "But that's not the point of this. We only want to be putting on independent artists who wouldn't have the spotlight with a label."

Price knows the achievements hit harder when you're doing it yourself, because that's how he operates too.

It's partly a reaction to his acting career, a field where very little is in your control.

"The perfect role has to be written. The producer has to like me. The casting director has to like me. I have to do a good audition once, twice, three times, four times. If I'm a love interest, I have to be taller than the other actor. All these stars have to align just to eventually maybe [get the part]. And then one network executive might still say 'I want the actor with blue eyes,' which has happened to me."

In his music career, almost everything is in his own hands. Anything that he doesn't touch directly is in the hands of the people he trusts most: his friends and family. His brother-in-law, Christian, mixes and masters his music. His other brother-in-law, Seth, works the merch table. GRAHAM is his best friend and producer. His other friends, Tegan Matea and Kevin Euerle, make graphics and film content.

And Breanna is more than his wife – she's his manager. When his music started taking off, she quit her job as a creative director at a pet company making products for Dachshunds and went into business with her husband. They're a creative powerhouse, handling both creative and business decisions literally in-house.

At the Billboard Canada photoshoot, his mother helps with childcare while Breanna weighs in on wardrobe, prompts his memory from just off camera, and handles requests on the fly. The St. Louis Cardinals emailed, she announces to him at one point, and they want him to throw out the first pitch at a game. (Naturally, the opportunity also became a piece of content.)

"Being on the independent side and working so closely with my wife, I have to know how the business side works," he says. "Some artists might be in a label situation with a big team where all they have to do is focus on the music, which is great, all the power to them. But I actually have a lot of pride and enjoyment in both the business side and the creative side."

In many ways, they're hard to separate. He's extremely hands-on, conceptualizing content and often editing videos himself. For some artists, that work might be classified as marketing or promotion, but for Price it's often a major part of the product itself.

"I love the analytics, I love looking at the data," he admits. "I like to see why my content works and why it might not work. I love to see, when I post a video, what is the retention it? When did people stop watching? I get excited when a song streams better than others, and thinking, why is that?"

For new artists, short-form content on TikTok and YouTube shorts can be a blessing and a curse. It's a major avenue for breaking new music, and labels are investing heavily in the platform trying to make their artists go viral. But organic social media success is hard to engineer and even harder to predict, and labels are often seeding multiple new acts at once hoping one out of five or 10 will hit. When a song does start doing numbers, artists can also have a hard time capitalizing or translating popularity to streams, sales and concerts. There's a piece of conventional wisdom that artists don't go viral, songs do.

"It was really scary doing my first headlining tour last year because I had always heard these stories of all these artists that blow up on social media, that they don't sell hard tickets," Price admits.

As a test, Price did two "pop-up" shows in Chicago and Toronto in 2023. The Toronto show, scheduled for Opera House, sold out in 48 hours. It moved to the 2,500-capacity History, a venue more than double the size, and eventually that sold out too.

His Friends & Family Tour was his second headlining tour, and ran from March until April 2025. Unlike many artists, who have a contextless hit take off on TikTok and then struggle to connect it to a real-life environment, Price brought the relatable persona and viral content to the stage. He not only incorporated his skits at shows, but filmed new ones with the whole audience playing along.

GRAHAM and Nic D are along for every show, and his crew of (made up of real friends and family) travels with him on the tour bus – where he often edits content, and sometimes writes and records music. At meet and greets and before and after shows, fans are excited to meet not just Price, but everyone.

His songs, which are all clean and catchy, attract a wide demographic.

"I've seen kids like as young as six and seven up to 60s, and it's awesome to see families come together," he says. "I've had parents that have told me that they bond with their son or daughter because they listen to my music on the way to hockey practice or school, and then I'm performing and they both know the words. It's really special to see."

After focusing on music consistently for the last few years, Price now has a large body of work all ready to stream. It's been a purposeful choice to put out singles consistently – often every week or two. Along with the posts on TikTok, YouTube and other social media, that keeps a stream of content always flowing. Working independently means he can do that at his own pace and maintain his momentum.

"I've found that the process of putting out singles consistently is really important when you're trying to grow that initial fanbase," he explains. "The more at-bats, more darts thrown, the more you're able to get in front of people... And also, it was a great way to learn. Every time I made a new song, I was figuring something out about my voice or my cadence, what worked and what didn't work. The more music I was creating and the more I was putting out, the more I was getting the feedback and seeing what people were liking, the more I was about to quickly improve at my craft."

Focusing on collaborations has also put his music in front of a variety of listeners all over the world and all over the genre map. "Spinnin" and "Trendsetter" have charted on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop and Rap Digital Song Sales charts as well as the TikTok Billboard Top 50, while "Up!" and "I Need Help," his collaborations with faith-based acts Forrest Frank and Maverick City Music, have brought him to Christian charts including Hot Christian Songs and Christian Streaming Songs. That categorization brought him to No. 3 on the Year-End Top New Christian Artists for 2024, though Price doesn't label himself a Christian artist.

He's talked about it on TikTok, how religion is an element of his identity but not in a way that defines him.

"The chart success is really cool, especially without any extra label help or push and without paid ads or campaigns," he explains. "I've never paid for a feature, I've never charged for a feature. These are always organic collabs because we want to work together...If it's a Christian artist, cool. If it's a country artist and we're doing something more country, awesome. If it's just pure hip hop, awesome...It’s been fun jumping into different genres and sectors and trying out different sounds and styles. I enjoy being versatile, and a lot of my favourite artists are like that too."

Though Spotify classifies Spin The Globe 1 and 2 and Till Next Time, his collaborative 2023 mixtape with Nic D, as "albums" because they're more than 8 songs, Price says he hasn't officially released an album yet. And so, after 110 songs, he's finally ready introduce himself with his debut. His next project will be a sequel to his Nic D collaboration, and then the first full-length Connor Price album before the end of 2025.

"It's kind of scary and exciting, and I know it's something a lot of my supporters want to hear from me," he says. "My singles are all feel-good and fun, but now I'm thinking about the fans I have now and getting deeper with them into who I am what my life is like, what I think about and what my value system is. I think they're hungry for that."

When it comes to friends and family, it's clear that includes Connor Price fans as well. He doesn't want to pander to them, he clarifies, but grow with them and deliver something that will feel real and reward their relationship with him.

"At the end of the day, as long as it's authentic and true, that's what's important."