Nia Rain had never released a song before.
She had a SoundCloud account with forty-seven followers, most of them bots. She had sung backup on a local Detroit commercial for a car dealership in 2019. She had a part-time job at a coffee shop on Woodward Avenue and a vocal coach who told her she was "promising" without ever specifying what the promise was. When Darius Cole called her into the Meridian offices and told her she was getting a single — a real single, with real money behind it — she cried in his bathroom for twenty minutes before she could sign the paperwork.
