Iggy Azalea explains why she’s gone all in on crypto

Rapper and entrepreneur Iggy Azalea’s crypto token $MOTHER isn’t just another “pump and dump” celebrity crypto play—it’s her next act. As Azalea reveals why she retired from music and pivoted into cryptocurrency, she also shares strategies for navigating a male-dominated space, and explains what she expects from the crypto industry after the re-election of Donald Trump.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

You retired from music last year. Why is that? What does it mean to retire versus just taking a break?

I’m glad that you asked because a lot of people are confused. I did take a break from music actually for about two years when I had my son and wanted to see if I felt like I wanted to come back to music. I did, and I did a really amazing co-headline tour with Pitbull, and we sold out every show two years in a row, and it was awesome. But doing that, as much as I loved it, made me realize that it had become monotonous for me.

I think it was a bit creatively limiting. I’d already started angel investing and taking some smaller creative roles in developing companies, and I just felt so much more fulfillment and excitement in that.

I didn’t renew my record contract. I don’t have an active record contract or publishing contract. I have sold all of my masters. I’m free of any responsibility.

And I just feel excited to get up in the day and pursue these ideas. For some people, it may seem boring. For me, it’s the challenge of the puzzle of figuring out how to connect brand with audience and what the identity of that brand is. I love the puzzle of that. Music is a puzzle in that way too, to me. And so I feel much happier doing this.

I don’t think a lot of people would have predicted that one of your ventures would be cryptocurrency. How did you first become interested? How did you get into it? Are you now a crypto expert?

I don’t dare to say I’m an expert, Bob, because everyone will come for my head, but I think I’m quite knowledgeable. I got into it through my brother, actually.

My brother is younger than me, and he came to live with me over the summer. I had my brushes with crypto, especially during 2021 when NFTs really exploded.

I’ve been approached by a lot of people wanting me to endorse things, but I didn’t really understand what the cultural side of crypto was for or what it had to offer. I actually likened it a lot to Beanie Babies and felt like it was a bubble that would burst and it wasn’t real.

When my brother came to stay with me, he started to show me more about meme coins, the communities he’s involved in, and how it all works. I really started to learn about that and felt very interested.

You’ve said that $MOTHER is more of a traditional meme coin than a celebrity coin. Can you explain what you mean by that?

I think celebrity, like we’d call it meta, doesn’t have much value in its traditional sense. I don’t think the roadmap to what we in crypto know as celebrity meta really works. I think of myself as a hybrid.

It’s like a meme coin or maybe an alt token. It has real use, real-world utility that I think is important to integrate. But when you use the word utility in crypto, everyone’s like, “Ew, it’s a dirty, boring word.” I want the fun of a meme token and try to have that, the community of that, and the chaos of that combined with some real-world usage and utility.

Traditional celebrity token is just, “I am John Doe. I’m super famous. I launched a coin. It’s based on John Doe. That’s the concept: me.” And what do you get out of this? Nothing. Me. “Do you believe in me? Do you like me? Buy me.” And I don’t think that’s very valuable.

What is valuable that celebrities have or could utilize if they were interested in crypto is that they are good at developing communities and fostering that sort of thing. It needs to be something that I think is bigger than yourself. Yes, the celebrity can lead it, the same way they can an album concept that people buy into. I think Charli XCX is someone who did a really great job of that this summer with Brat. Now Brat is in the dictionary as the Oxford word of the year, right? So she had a great theme behind her album.

For me, thematically, I chose mother. I think it’s a very memeable theme. It speaks to me as well, being a mother. I think mothers can have a broad-spanning interpretation of how deranged or traditional that can be.

That’s why I liken what I’m doing more to a traditional meme coin in that regard of community. It’s thematics; it’s semantics at the end of the day.

Since Donald Trump won the election, crypto prices have climbed. Do you think about the potential of $MOTHER differently?

Who was going to win the election has been a big talking point in crypto all year. Because people felt a certain way about the Biden administration or they associate Kamala with that administration and the way the SEC has interacted with crypto or the lack of transparency about what the rules really are.

It created a lot of hesitancy in the market, and I knew what the potential was, or is, if it was going to be a Trump administration for crypto, because people were going to be very bullish on that.

And if it was going to be a Kamala administration, then people were probably going to be very bearish about that. I knew that. I mean, I’m happy to see the market pumping. I don’t like to get into politics. I can’t vote. I’m not an American; I’m an Australian, and I care about Australian politics. But I’ve geared up my fourth quarter and my first quarter of next year under the assumption that it was going to be a Republican president and that we would see this bull run that’s now started about a week ago, and I’m happy I did it that way because that’s how it ended up.

Some of the music genres you’ve been in, have typically been male-dominated. That hasn’t deterred you. I wonder if you have any lessons for women who sort of feel like they’re struggling to get ahead in male-dominated industries or workplaces.

Here’s one thing I will say, even though you’re probably the only woman in a sea full of men, just try not to mention it. It’s messed up, but it’s true. What you want to do is you want to find points of commonality, right?

The truth is, whatever industry you’re in, when you’re a woman, once you’re at the top of it, it’s probably male-dominated. That’s a fact. It’s not of value to you in any capacity to make necessarily a focal point of the thing that makes you different to your political peers that you need to gain favor from in order to operate.

You want to find things when you’re doing business with people that you have in common and make friendships. To come in the door, which I think a lot of women kind of make the mistake of doing coming into this business, and say, “Well, a woman, only woman here, here I am, other women come to me.” It kind of doesn’t seem to work that way.

I think it’s something that maybe you want to make a focal point of once you’re in a position of power that can’t really be taken away. It’s unfair, but it’s true because you have to establish what you have in common with people first. And you have to make those friendships first and make those connections first by focusing on what you do have in the space that you can relate to with these guys.

Allow them to create some attachment. Allow them to want to go hard for you. And then when you’re where you need to be, remind everybody of how hard it was and their impact on what you overcame. Because you have to be smart. I’m not saying that it’s fair. It’s not fair. It’s always unfair to be a successful woman. But if you want to immediately play the game with the landscape as it is, then that’s what I think works the best.