A viral hit can emerge from a global network of anonymous online beat marketplaces

Evidence

The Dutch musician Kiowa Roukema caught the entrepreneurial bug as a teenager. He made his first pocket money selling custom backgrounds to YouTubers. Then a friend noticed his knack for computers and gave him a copy of the music-production software FL Studio. Over the next four months, Roukema taught himself how to make hip-hop beats, selling his creations on YouTube under the alias YoungKio. A few early successes allowed him to open a formal account on the beat marketplace BeatStars, where his business took off. … One day, looking to challenge himself creatively, Roukema experimented with an unlikely sample: “Ghosts IV–34,” a 2008 track from industrial pop group Nine Inch Nails. Roukema had never heard of them. Ignoring warnings from friends against using this folky banjo hook, he added a trap beat under it and uploaded the result to BeatStars as a “Future Type Beat,” in reference to the Atlanta trap star Future. … Weeks later in Atlanta, nineteen-year-old Montero Lamar Hill, who ran a Nicki Minaj stan account on Twitter and recorded as Lil Nas X, purchased Roukema’s beat for thirty dollars. He spent an additional twenty at a local studio to record a country-inflected, singsong rap over it. A month later Lil Nas X released it as “Old Town Road.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 621

Categorization

• CANDY: “Old Town Road” began as a $30 beat from a Dutch teen who’d never heard Nine Inch Nails — great elevator fact.