The 23-year-old rapper who refuses to sign a record deal and is tearing up Grammy history

Chance the Rapper (Getty)

Chance the Rapper is the most talented rapper of his generation and a pioneer in the music industry. His latest album, "Coloring Book," released in May, is one of the the year's best-reviewed albums. It's the first streaming-only album to chart on Billboard's ranking.

This year, the Grammys made streaming-only albums available for awards consideration for the first time. Chance, whose real name is Chancellor Bennett, made history again as "Coloring Book" received several nominations, including one for Best Rap Album. It's the first streaming-only album to be nominated in any category.

Miraculously, Chance has done all of this without a label supporting him. He's turned down record deals from numerous labels, and depends on word-of-mouth and his SoundCloud account for distribution.

Meet the most successful fully-independent musician of our era:

Chance the Rapper calls his albums "mixtapes." He recorded his first one in his senior year of high school.

Chance the Rapper performing at Brixton Academy, London (Rex)

He formally kicked off his career with the song "Windows." It got him some attention in Chicago's hip hop scene, and Chance spent another eight months tinkering with the rest of the album. His first album — 10 Day — gave Chance a cult following. The album was released in 2012 got over 400,000 downloads on the music-sharing site DatPiff and got Chance a cult following. It's called 10 Day because he wrote it during a 10-day suspension from high school.

A few months later, Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) featured him on his song "They Don't Like Me."

Childish Gambino: “I haven’t paid for an album in years. No one does. It’s silly to make albums” (Getty)

Listen to it here.

A year later, Chance instantly became a star with his album Acid Rap, which was downloaded over a million times.

Acid Rap got on a bunch of best-of-2013 lists. The most popular song on the album on SoundCloud, "Favorite Song," features Childish Gambino. Chance also collaborated with Vic Mensa on the hit song "Cocoa Butter Kisses."

But Chance didn't keep doing the same thing over and over again. He joined a band and made uplifting Christian rock.

In 2015, Chance joined a band called Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, a collective of Chicago-based musicians, for a quirky album called Surf. The music was a stylistic departure for Chance. His vocal performance was still rap, but it's not really a rap album. The whole thing takes a jazzy and explicitly Christian tone. The highlight is a track called "Sunday Candy." Chance co-directed the music video.

Performing on "Saturday Night Live" was a career landmark.

Chance performed "Sunday Candy" and "Paradise" from "Surf" on "Saturday Night Live" on December 15, 2015. He was the first unsigned artist to do so.

Then he made five tracks with Kanye West.

Kanye West performs during his Yeezy Season 3 show earlier this year

In 2014, Chance worked on five songs for Kanye West's 2016 album The Life of Pablo.

He provided guest vocals for "Ultralight Beam," rapping "I met Kanye West, I'm never going to fail/He said let's do a good ass job with Chance three/I hear you gotta sell it to snatch the Grammy/Let's make it so free and the bars so hard/That there ain't one gosh darn part you can't tweet." He and Kanye appeared together on "SNL" the night The Life of Pablo dropped. The two performed "Ultralight Beam" together.

In 2016, Chance released the album Coloring Book and rapped about how much he hates record labels.

His song "No Problem" is about how much Chance wants to keep record labels far, far away from his music. The album is widely considered to be one of the best of the year. Kanye also appears on the upbeat opening track, "All We Got," and Lil Wayne, T-Pain, Justin Bieber, and Future drop verses on other songs on the album. Despite being streaming-only, it became a top-10 Billboard hit. It hit #8 in its peak position, the first streaming-exclusive album to get on the chart.

He briefly became a meme at the MTV Video Music Awards.

In the middle of a backstage interview with MTV, Chance was interrupted by Beyoncé sneaking up behind him. He, quite understandably, freaked out.

Then the Grammys changed their rules for him.

(Rex Features) ((Rex Features))

Now that he's BFFs with Kanye and Coloring Book is a success, the music industry has to accept Chance whether they want to or not. Given the success of Coloring Book, the Grammys changed their rules in June to allow streaming-only titles to be nominated.Now with seven nominations, he might snatch the Grammy. CBS unveiled its 2017 Grammy nominations on December 6, and Chance is up for seven of them.

Coloring Book is nominated in the Best Rap Album category, up against albums from Drake, DJ Khaled, De La Soul, Schoolboy Q, and his mentor Kanye West. He's also nominated for Best New Artist, for Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song with his single "No Problem," and for performing on Kanye's "Ultralight Beam."

Chance the Rapper is only 23, and he's running out of barriers to break.

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