London on da Track

• 1. Introduction

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  London on da Track was downloading beats for 99 cents off SoundClick when he realized there had to be a better way. Born London Tyler Holmes on the 27th of March, 1991, in Memphis, he had something most producers his age did not: years of piano and keyboard training picked up in church. When exclusive rights to those cheap online beats ran as high as $100, Holmes started making his own. That practical decision would eventually put him in rooms with Young Thug, Ariana Grande, Gucci Mane, and Nicki Minaj. But the journey from a 99-cent beat download to a number-one Billboard Hot 100 debut involved a string of choices that this documentary will follow closely. How does a self-taught beatmaker from Atlanta climb to the top of the charts? And what does it cost along the way?

• 2. Church Keys and SoundClick

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  Holmes moved from Memphis to Atlanta as a child and grew up playing piano and keyboards at church. That training was not, at first, aimed at hip-hop production. He finished high school and briefly enrolled at Full Sail University in Florida, though he never graduated. The pull back to music was too strong. He started rapping at sixteen with a crew called Dem Guyz. The group pooled whatever small funds they had to license beats online, but the economics were discouraging: tracks on SoundClick could cost just 99 cents to lease, yet exclusive rights ran to $100 each. Holmes turned his church keyboard skills toward solving that budget problem. With online software and the harmonic instincts he had built playing hymns and gospel arrangements, he began crafting beats instead of buying them. What started as frugality became the foundation of a career.

• 3. Rich Kidz and the First Break

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  Local acclaim came when Holmes started producing for the Rich Kidz, an Atlanta group whose street visibility gave his beats a wider audience. Early in that run he made a calculated choice: he gave beats away for free. The reasoning was straightforward. Connections and publicity were worth more than per-track fees to a producer still building a name. The gamble paid off when "Pieon," a Rich Kidz track he produced, received radio play. Hearing one of his beats on the air was the confirmation Holmes needed to keep going. He recorded his first collaboration with Young Thug in 2011, a song called "Curtains." That session was the start of a partnership that would define both men's careers. Complex put Holmes on their 2013 list of "25 New Producers To Watch For," a recognition that arrived just before his biggest commercial breakthrough to that point.

• 4. Cash Money and the Hot 100

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  Young Thug's association with Rich Gang, a spin-off project of Cash Money Records, opened a direct path for Holmes. By 2014 he had signed with the label as an in-house producer. That April, he received a production credit on Tyga's single "Hookah," which became the first track Holmes produced to enter the Billboard Hot 100. A few months later, in August, the scale of his reach became visible in a single chart snapshot: three songs he produced charted on the Hot 100 simultaneously. Rich Gang's "Lifestyle" sat at number 16. T.I.'s "About the Money" landed at 42. Tyga's "Hookah" was at 85. That same month, Birdman, the rapper and label boss whose full name is Bryan Williams, publicly called Holmes "the best producer in the business, as we speak today." Young Thug went further, telling interviewers that Holmes was his favorite producer to work with and would go down as "the greatest producer ever."

• 5. Building a Roster

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  The discography that accumulated after 2014 reads like a catalog of hip-hop's commercial center. Holmes produced or co-produced charting records for Kodak Black, whose "Roll in Peace" reached number 31 on the Hot 100 in 2017. A Boogie wit da Hoodie's "Swervin," featuring 6ix9ine, peaked at 38. Roddy Ricch's "Die Young" climbed to 99. Saweetie's "My Type" hit 21 in 2019. Summer Walker's "Playing Games," with Bryson Tiller, rose to number 16 on the Hot 100, and "Come Thru," her duet with Usher, reached 42. Holmes also appeared on screen during this period, turning up in Black Ink Crew: Chicago in 2018, and serving as a production advisor on the Netflix competition series Rhythm + Flow in 2019. Spotify added him to its Secret Genius Ambassador's list in 2018, a recognition of his sustained output rather than any single hit.

• 6. Positions and the Peak

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  In March 2020, Holmes produced and co-wrote a single for Ariana Grande. The track, "Positions," debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It also topped the Billboard Global 200 and the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart simultaneously. Those three simultaneous chart positions represented the commercial ceiling of Holmes' production career to that point, a number-one debut across the domestic and international rankings on a single release. The song appeared on Grande's album of the same name. For a producer who had learned to make beats partly to avoid paying $100 for exclusive rights on SoundClick, a simultaneous global chart-topper marked how far the calculation had shifted. Holmes has four children, including a daughter with Summer Walker, one of the artists whose chart success he helped build, born in 2021.