How Tory Lanez & Quarantine Radio took lockdown by storm

From being sent to ‘Instagram prison’ for letting them listen to his album The New Toronto 3 early, to being dubbed an essential worker, Tory Lanez has been one of those to take social media by storm during this lockdown. 

As marketing strategies for an album go, you will be hard pushed to find one to create more noise than Tory Lanez and his infamous Instagram Live sessions - known as Quarantine Radio. For those of you who are out of the loop, let us fill you in…

The Canadian rapper’s Instagram Live streams broke all previous records - not once, but 3 days in a row, with over 375,000 people tuning in at one point. In the early days of Quarantine Radio, a lot of his success came from featuring some of the music industries biggest names - including, Drake, Justin Beiber and Megan The Stallion.

In the weeks since then, his creativity in recreating a club scene and charisma on his karaoke mic (plus a little help from whoever is making those adlibs) have taken Quarantine Radio to another level. Many of the celebrities are still tuning into Tory’s virtual club, and he will shout them out and even bring out bottles of Ciroc complete with sparklers for the “VIPs in the building.”

The imaginative effort behind the project seems to have gone somewhat downhill though, as the live stream now mainly consists of (very attractive) women being invited on to twerk. As the shows have gone on, these personal-but-public shows have got more and more creative and explicit. Tory even encourages participants to poor liquids over themselves, his favourite being the flavoured milk (cue the ‘calcium’ adlib). 

People have really pushed the limits here to get noticed, with some Instagram accounts going up 2 million + followers after appearing on the live stream. Tory has now had to implement strict ‘no nudity’ guidelines after a certain over-zealous participant took the opportunity for fame a little too far by leaving nothing to the imagination - putting a gummy bear dildo the size of a small child’s leg down her throat. Wild…

Like it or not, it’s fair to say that Tory has caused quite a stir online and has massively elevated his profile - providing an accessible (albeit sometimes seedy) form of lockdown entertainment, which includes taking shots and a fair bit of nakedness for good measure. With everyone at home, there is a huge pool of potential participants, also taken advantage of by UK rapper (and previous special guest performer at S&C) Swarmz.

Swarmz did his thing with the views too, amassing over 100k Instagram Live watchers one particularly raucous night in April. His following grew to over 1 million and he was plastered all over the usual UK meme pages, just as he dropped ‘Houdini’ with KSI and Tion Wayne. Good timing right? Coincidence, we think not…

However, Swarmz didn't seem to have as much respect for the Instagram police, as he encouraged participants to “F**k the Guidelines.” His show therefore swiftly turned into what can only be described as porn, which led to the rapper facing some quite severe punishment - which was probably duly deserved.

Initially he was put under a similar ban as Tory was and given a date when he could return back to live streaming. However with some further investigation, Instagram have decided to disable his account completely for violating their terms. His new account has just less than 5000 followers on. Hard times… 

Last weekend, Tory was back with his first Quarantine Radio for a few weeks and gave the people what they wanted. This time, that consisted of special guest appearances from the likes of Ray J and show-stopping performances from participants - featuring chocolate milk, chocolate sauce and a whole lot of flexibility. 

Hopefully Swarmz gets his account back but will respect the guidelines going forward. The jury is probably out on that one though.

Are we all going just a bit mad during lockdown? Think that’s also up for debate…