The surprise release of Tyler, The Creator’s freestyle “Sag Harbor” on Christmas Day was a clear victory lap for his triumphant 2025. On the four-minute track, Tyler talks about shopping for estates in the Hamptons, turning his idols into rivals, and trying to land a $100 million record contract. “I’m on the road to doing stadiums next,” he raps. “But y’all keep counting me out, like what’s the cheat code?”
That level of success is a relatively new reality for the 34-year-old musician, producer and fashion entrepreneur, who was labeled early in his career as a “cult” artist because of the small, rabid fanbase he developed just outside of hip-hop’s mainstream. After selling an estimated $175 million in tickets to more than 90 sold-out arenas in North America, Europe and Asia while touring for his late 2024 Chromakopia album over the past year, Tyler became one of the biggest artists in the world. He released an additional mixtape mid-tour, Don’t Tap The Glass, which claimed its own No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts. Now both albums are nominated at this Sunday’s Grammy awards—Don’t Tap The Glass for Best Alternative Music Album and Chromakopia for Best Rap Album and, for the first time in his career, Album of the Year. And last November, Apple Music named him Artist of the Year.
From his music alone, Forbes estimates Tyler earned $53 million before taxes and fees in 2025, placing him at No. 13 on the list of highest-paid musicians in the world. And that doesn’t count his other entrepreneurial ventures, including the clothing brand Golf Wang and his music festival Camp Flog Gnaw, or his supporting role in the Timothée Chalamet-led movie Marty Supreme, which was recently nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
As much as Tyler has outgrown the “cult” label, so has the entire music industry. Every artist now looks to create viral moments and create personal connections with their fans. Whether it’s Beyoncé dropping a surprise album or Taylor Swift planting Easter eggs in her lyrics, now even the biggest artists are trying to develop a fanbase with cultlike fervor.
“The term, when it first got used, described people who were truly doing something different,” says Dan Runcie, founder of hip-hop focused research group Trapital. “Now it has become table stakes for anyone.”
Runcie says that Tyler’s career is following a blueprint for what he calls “the OutKast edge”—named for the 1990s hip-hop duo of André 3000 and Big Boi, who built a massive (and massively loyal) fanbase through their embrace of high fashion, Afrofuturism and of course their music.. Tyler has similarly created content for likeminded outsiders, built audiences on independent platforms and played the long game rather than chasing quick wins, supercharging his efforts with the social media tools OutKast never had.
Those skills have been apparent since his teenage years as the unofficial leader of Odd Future (short for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Em All), a Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective formed in 2007 that counted among its early members Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt and The Bear star Lionel Boyce. In addition to music, the group launched a prank show called Loiter Squad, produced by the company behind Jackass. Its shock value comedy and boundary-pushing lyrics made Odd Future controversial—including being banned, at times, from touring in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand—but also gave it an underground appeal to younger fanbases on nascent platforms like MySpace, Facebook and Tumblr.
Tyler brought the same provocative, chaotic self-expression into his solo career in 2009 with the mixtape Bastard, then broke into Billboard’s top five with his studio albums Goblin (2011), Wolf (2013) Cherry Bomb (2015) and Flower Boy (2017). He finally hit No. 1 with 2019’s Igor, and the following year, at 28, was recognized in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Music category. In addition to writing, arranging and producing almost all his music, Tyler creates a distinct visual style and wardrobe for each album—what would now be called “eras,” in a post-Eras Tour world—sporting everything from pastel-colored rugby shirts to fur Ushanka trapper hats to a blonde bob wig.
Marty Party: In December, Tyler celebrated his scene-stealing performance in ‘Marty Supreme’ with actor Timothee Chalamet, who earned an Oscar nomination in the title role.
ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images
That creative and entrepreneurial spirit led to the launch of Golf Wang (an anagram of Wolf Gang) in 2011, at just 20 years old. The apparel company sells premium-priced streetwear inspired by Tyler’s own loud fashion, collaborating with brands such as Converse, Lacoste, Louis Vuitton as well as non-clothing brands, including Jeni’s Ice Cream, Arizona Green Tea, and Super73 e-bikes, and often selling its products in exclusive, limited-time drops that capitalize on the internet’s collective FOMO. The company has never released financial figures, though in a 2019 freestyle Tyler bragged, “If they talking M’s, Golf did 17 in ‘18 m—-f—- and that’s just one season.”
In the fall of 2012, he was among the first artists to organize his own live event, bringing around 2,000 fans together for the inaugural “OFWGKTA Carnival” (named after the abbreviation for Odd Future’s full name) in the parking lot of a small venue in Downtown Los Angeles. Over time, the event has grown into the Camp Flog Gnaw Festival (its name spells Golf Wang in reverse), which sold out Dodger Stadium for two consecutive days in 2025. Forbes estimates last year’s event generated more than $25 million in ticket sales and sold millions more in merchandise. The Los Angeles Times reported that some festival-goers were purchasing $600 to $750 worth of apparel each.
Yet no matter how popular and mainstream Tyler becomes, his fans have maintained their outsider spirit. When Drake appeared as a surprise guest to perform at Camp Flog Gnaw in 2019, then arguably the biggest musician on the planet, fans booed him off the stage, having convinced each other online that the surprise was going to be ex-Odd Future member Frank Ocean.
“That always stood out to me as, Okay, he’s attracting a disparate fanbase,” says Runcie. “And that speaks to why his festival has lived on in a time where many festivals didn’t make it post-pandemic, or artists who have tried them and it didn’t quite work.”
From the stage at this year’s festival, Tyler took a moment from his performance to acknowledge that it’s the loyalty of those same fans that have pushed him to his new heights. “I’ve had such a super busy, super transitional, super crazy awesome year,” he told the crowd. “And it really all comes down to you n——s that’s supported me since day one—I appreciate each and every one of you.”