Here's a thing nobody tells you when you rap in Farsi from a city where most people don't: your audience was never going to be the people standing in front of you. It's scattered across a dozen time zones, and once you stop treating that as a problem, it turns into the best thing you've got.
The map is not the territory anymore
When I started, I kept picturing an audience the old way — a room, a neighborhood, a city that claims you. That model is built for musicians who share a physical space with their listeners. It does not fit a diaspora artist, and trying to force it just makes you feel small. There is no single Persian-speaking city big enough to hold a scene. What there is instead is a network: pockets of people in Montreal, sure, but also in cities across North America, Europe, the Gulf, Australia, and back home, all connected by the same language and a shared set of references.
The mental shift that changed everything for me was this: stop thinking of your listeners as a crowd in one place and start thinking of them as nodes on a map. You are not playing to a room. You are playing to a signal that hops from phone to phone across borders. Once I accepted that, the scattering stopped looking like a weakness. A crowd in one venue goes home and goes quiet. A network keeps passing the song around while you sleep, because somewhere it is always the right time of day to listen.
Language is the wall and the door
Rapping in Farsi is the most honest decision I make and also the one that supposedly limits me the most. People love to tell you to switch to English if you want to "grow." I understand the math behind that advice, and I ignore it, because the thing that makes the work land is the thing they are asking me to throw away. The specificity of the language — the way a single word carries a childhood, a joke, a grief — is not decoration. It is the point.
Here is the part that took me too long to learn: your language is not just what keeps outsiders out. It is what makes insiders feel found. A diaspora listener scrolling through an ocean of content in a language that is not theirs, who suddenly hears their own mother tongue used well, with wit, over a beat that respects them — that is not a small moment. That is somebody feeling seen from three thousand kilometers away. You cannot buy that kind of loyalty. You can only earn it by refusing to water yourself down.
That said, the door has hinges. You can let people in without changing the language:
- Translate or transliterate a few lines in your captions and video descriptions, so a curious non-speaker or a second-generation kid who reads better than they speak can follow along.
- Lean on the parts of music that need no translation — the pocket, the delivery, the mix, the visuals. A great flow is legible to anyone.
- Let the themes be universal even when the words are specific. Longing, ambition, feeling stuck between two places — you do not need a dictionary for any of that.
- Subtitle your videos. It is unglamorous and it quietly doubles who can share your work with the people in their life who don't speak the language.
Platforms are tools, not landlords
A scattered audience means you cannot rely on any one platform to reach all of them. The listener in one country lives on a video app; the one in another is on a messaging app where music gets forwarded in group chats; the one back home might be reaching you through a channel you never even posted to. If you build your whole presence on a single platform, you are handing a stranger the keys to your relationship with your own people. Algorithms change, apps get blocked in some regions, accounts get locked. Depend on one and you are one bad week from starting over.
So I treat platforms the way a touring musician treats venues — necessary, useful, and completely interchangeable. What I actually try to own is the connection itself. A few working principles:
- Be everywhere your people already are, even the platforms that feel unfashionable, and don't force them to migrate to your favorite one.
- Own at least one direct line — an email list, a broadcast channel, anything where you reach listeners without an algorithm deciding whether they hear from you.
- Post in a way that survives being forwarded. A clip shared into a family group chat with no context still has to make sense on its own.
- Read your streaming dashboard like a map, not a scoreboard. The interesting question is never how many, it's where — a cluster of listeners in a city you've never played tells you where a show could happen.
A scattered audience is a distribution network
This is the reframe I wish someone had handed me at the start. A local audience is a group of consumers. A diaspora audience is a group of distributors. Every person who finds your song is also the only bridge between you and a small community that you will probably never reach directly — their cousins, their roommates, the friends they grew up with who now live one more move away. When they share you, they are not just clicking a button. They are vouching for you inside a room you can't enter.
The practical consequence is that the goal is not to be heard by the most people. It is to be shared by the right ones. A thousand passive plays do less for you than fifty people who feel like they discovered something and have to tell someone. So make work that people want to be caught listening to — that says something about them when they pass it on. Reply to the person who translated your line for their friend. Show up when a small community in some far city organizes something. Treat the scattering not as distance to overcome but as reach you already have, waiting to be activated.
None of this is easier than having a hometown crowd. It is lonelier some nights, and the map can feel like a lot of empty space between the dots. But the dots are real, they are stubborn, and they are yours. A scattered audience, it turns out, is not a smaller version of a real one. Online, it might be the strongest kind there is.