With over 40,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and a listener base in over 92 countries on Apple Music and YouTube, Indian American rapper and music producer Nivo has had an interesting journey so far. It started during an English class in standard tenth. After he rapped a poem during that class, he was invited by his musician friend Sobhhï (now the leading hip hop and RnB artiste in Dubai) to his house to work on a song together because he liked the way Nivo rapped. The track they made was appreciated by their school and that’s when Nivo got into music production.
Today, he’s an established rapper and he loves the genre. Explaining what he loves about rap, he says it lets you communicate directly with people’s emotions. He feels rap is great because it’s a direct way of communicating as opposed to singing. It lets you say more than you otherwise would if you were singing, so you can really pack a lot of details in there.
While several rappers across the world inspire Nivo, he also enjoys listening to Indian rappers. He says, “Guys like Raftaar and AP Dhillon have started creating some waves and it’s hard not to notice even being primarily from an English background.” Nivo says he listens to a lot of English artists that are Indian such as NAV, but he recently started taking notice of the Hindi and Punjabi rappers, too. He feels they’ve taken the western sound that’s become popular today but made it super relatable to the Hindi and Punjabi-speaking crowds.
Interestingly, Nivo is also a software engineer and he’s glad that his engineering skills come in handy for him even as a musician. He likes software because he feels there is a creative aspect to it. Even now, as an independent artist trying to maintain his music business, his skills as a software engineer come to use when he tries to use digital marketing and even wants to develop music-related tools to get his music out there or gather analytics about what’s actually hot these days.
While he has had many releases, his biggest solo song is Workin and his biggest joint song with Sobhhï is Roll Thru. Nivo’s latest solo song ‘Bad One’ has been growing fast and is likely to become his biggest song.