Fake Shore Drive

Fake Shore Drive is a Chicago-based music blog and media company founded in October of 2007. Its primary focus is showcasing Chicago’s hip-hop and R&B scene, but its scope has since expanded to cover the entire midwest urban music scene (as of February 2013). The company was created by Andrew Barber in 2007, who saw a void in Chicago music and artists getting national coverage on blogs and websites. “We really just want to get people to see local talent” Barber told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2013. “I felt like there were a lot of missing parts to the Chicago hip-hop scene — there was a whole story not being told.” Fake Shore Drive has been instrumental in the recent rise of Chicago's hip-hop scene, having helped cultivate the careers of stars such as Chance The Rapper, Chief Keef, Lil Durk, Vic Mensa, Tink and Mick Jenkins --- many of whom have secured major label record deals and have earned millions of dollars in revenue. Fake Shore Drive’s goal and main focus was to bring national attention to and unite the midwest’s music scene. In 2014 he told Groupon: “In my opinion, the Midwest is way more underserved and has had way less of a movement than any other region. Less than the West Coast, less than the East Coast, and definitely less than the South, [which] has been running radio for the past 10–12 years...” I always wanted to work in the [hip-hop] business in some capacity, but being in Chicago—being in the Midwest—there’s not a lot of opportunity. So with Fake Shore Drive, I wanted to create an outlet for what was happening locally." Source