Rap-Up: Devin Lazerine's Hip-Hop Magazine, From Teen Website to Industry Staple
Rap-Up, at rap-up.com, is an American hip-hop and R&B publication founded in 2001 by Devin Lazerine, who started it as a teenager in California. What began as an after-school website collecting hip-hop news, gossip and top-ten lists became a national glossy print magazine — distributed at its peak across the United States and Canada with a circulation of 200,000, and sold in more than twenty countries — and, in its enduring form, a digital publication covering rap music news, new releases, videos and artist interviews for a global online audience. The batch listing for this profile places it in Los Angeles, California, where Lazerine is based.
Rap-Up's story is inseparable from its founder's: a fifteen-year-old who, unable to sing or rap himself, decided to chronicle the music he loved, pitched publishers days after launching his website, and within two years was interviewing some of the biggest stars in music. The publication he built has now covered hip-hop across more than two decades of the genre's commercial and cultural dominance.
Overview
Rap-Up covers the hip-hop and R&B side of the music industry. In its print form it was a quarterly, full-colour glossy magazine focused predominantly on interviews with artists, actors and other entertainers, aimed initially at readers aged fourteen to twenty-eight — a demographic that aged with the publication. Online, rap-up.com publishes the daily currency of music media: breaking news, new songs and videos, album announcements, tour news and exclusive interviews and premieres.
Devin Lazerine has served throughout as founder, publisher and editor-in-chief — an unusual continuity in music media, where titles usually outlive or discard their founders. His brother Cameron Lazerine worked with him on the magazine from its earliest issues. The publication's authority derives from that continuity and from the access it built early: artists who spoke to Rap-Up as rising stars returned as superstars, and other magazines have frequently referenced its interviews and reporting.
History and Founding
The founding story has been retold often because of its improbability. Lazerine fell for hip-hop after hearing Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Brain" at age ten; wanting a place in the music industry but not as a performer, he launched Rap-Up.com at fifteen as an after-school hobby, an online compendium of hip-hop news, gossip and top-ten lists. Several days after launching the website, he decided to pitch a magazine version to select publishers — and the next day, a publisher at H&S Media expressed interest.
The first issue of Rap-Up magazine was published by H&S Media in July 2001 and sold 200,000 copies, but the company went bankrupt shortly afterwards, leaving the title's future in doubt. The story might have ended there; instead, Rap-Up was resurrected in 2003 by Total Media Group as an insert in the magazine Urban Teen Scene. The insert drew mainstream media attention — in USA Today and the Los Angeles Times among others — driven substantially by the novelty and appeal of the Lazerine brothers' youth and their outsider path into a genre whose media was then dominated by established titles such as The Source and Vibe.
Print Era and Growth
Rap-Up restarted standalone publication in 2005, when it sold enough copies to ensure future releases, and settled into a quarterly rhythm. Fast Company, profiling Devin Lazerine in its Fast 50 in 2003, described a nationwide hip-hop and R&B print magazine distributed by Time Warner, with a companion television show, website and a nonprofit devoted to getting teens involved in media. Writers who had contributed to Rolling Stone, Vibe, The Source, XXL and other titles contributed to the magazine, and Lazerine's early interviews included P. Diddy, Destiny's Child, Fabolous and others.
Covers charted the era's stars — the summer 2008 issue, for example, featured Teyana Taylor, Keri Hilson and Solange Knowles, and was redesigned to cater for the publication's ageing demographic, a telling sign of a title growing up with its first readers. The magazine was sold in more than twenty countries, was nominated for two awards, and expanded into reference publishing with "Rap-Up: The Ultimate Guide to Hip-Hop and R&B," a handbook chronicling the history of hip-hop. In print, Rap-Up occupied a distinct niche: younger and more pop-facing than The Source or XXL, and fan-enthusiastic rather than critical in posture.
Coverage and Content
The magazine's stock in trade was the interview — artists, actors and entertainers across hip-hop and R&B, presented in a glossy, photo-led format for a young readership. Online, the coverage broadened into the full news cycle of contemporary music media: new music premieres, music videos, album and single announcements, beefs and reconciliations, award shows, tours and festivals, and the social-media moments that now drive music news between releases.
Rap-Up's digital operation also leans on exclusives — first listens, behind-the-scenes material and interviews that other outlets then pick up, a pattern established in its print years when its interviews were often referenced by other magazines. Its catalogue amounts to a running chronicle of mainstream hip-hop and R&B from 2001 onward: the genre's biggest commercial era, covered continuously by a single editorial hand.
Audience and Reach
The print magazine targeted readers from fourteen to twenty-eight, sold on newsstands and in retail stores across the United States and Canada, and reached more than twenty countries — an international footprint unusual for an independently founded American music title. Its circulation of 200,000 for early issues, sold through major distribution, put it in the same retail conversation as far older competitors.
Online, the audience became the global, search-and-social music audience: fans following favourite artists, who arrive for a premiere or interview and stay for the news stream. Rap-Up's longevity gives it archival search value — two decades of artist coverage indexed under one brand — while its social presence carries new music and news clips to followers daily. The demographic, as the magazine itself acknowledged in its 2008 redesign, has grown older over time, mirroring hip-hop's own first mass generation of fans.
Editorial Voice
Rap-Up's voice is that of the enthusiastic insider-fan: celebratory rather than adversarial, focused on access, exclusives and the music itself. Where some hip-hop media built reputations on criticism and ratings, Rap-Up built its on relationships — artists speaking to a publisher who had championed them early and whose publication asked about the work, the plans and the story rather than the score. That posture suited both its young print readership and, later, the premiere-driven economy of online music news, in which labels and artists reward friendly, high-reach outlets with exclusives.
Consistency is the other signature. Founder, publisher and editor-in-chief have been the same person since 2001, giving the title a stable taste and identity across the print-to-digital transition that killed many contemporaries. Rap-Up never became a conglomerate brand with rotating editors; it remained, recognisably, Devin Lazerine's magazine.
Notable People
Devin Lazerine is the central figure: founder at fifteen, editor-in-chief and publisher, and the interviewer whose early conversations with stars such as P. Diddy and Destiny's Child established the title's credibility while he was still a teenager. Fast Company's 2003 Fast 50 profile captured him at nineteen, running a national magazine from Calabasas, California, alongside the website, a television project and a youth media nonprofit. Cameron Lazerine, his brother, was his collaborator in creating the magazine and shared the media attention of the early years.
The roster of contributors and subjects is the other people story: writers drawn from Rolling Stone, Vibe, The Source and XXL in the print era, and a cover and interview archive spanning generations of hip-hop and R&B stars, from Destiny's Child in the first years to the streaming-era artists the website covers today.
Digital Presence and Transition
Rap-Up began as a website before it was a magazine, so its digital transition was in a sense a homecoming. As print music publishing contracted industry-wide, rap-up.com became the publication's centre of gravity: a daily news and video destination carrying the brand's interviews and premieres to an audience no longer bounded by newsstand distribution. The print magazine's quarterly, interview-led identity survives in the site's longer features and exclusives, while the daily stream handles the speed of contemporary music news.
The brand's assets online are depth and recognition: a domain and name known to artists, publicists and fans since 2001, and an archive that documents hip-hop's commercial peak years. In an era when newer music sites launch and vanish quickly, Rap-Up's quarter-century continuity is itself a distinguishing digital asset.
Recent Developments
In its current form Rap-Up operates as a digital publication, publishing hip-hop and R&B news, new releases and interviews at rap-up.com under Lazerine's continued leadership. Its coverage follows the contemporary genre — album cycles, surprise drops, tours, award seasons and viral moments — for the audience the brand has aggregated since the CD era.
The publication's arc — teen website, glossy national magazine sold in twenty countries, pioneer-era survivor as an online title — makes it a notable case in music media history: a brand founded on one teenager's enthusiasm that outlasted the print business model, the blog era and the social era alike, still doing the job it defined for itself in 2001: wrapping up the world of hip-hop and R&B for the fans who live in it.
