“You gotta keep going with the hottest thing coming down the pipe.” He didn’t have that problem, so he kept pushing “That’s on Me,” and it kept climbing slowly, even if it didn’t earn a “most-added” distinction. “A lot of time with the major labels, because you have so much product, they don’t have time to stick with records,” the promoter says. But Ridenour had the luxury of persistence. It’s never an easy time to break a record at radio, but this summer was particularly challenging - between April and September, nearly every major hip-hop-adjacent artist of note put out an album, from Post Malone to Kanye West to Jay-Z and Beyoncé to Drake to Travis Scott to Eminem. Soon “That’s on Me” was being played in those markets as well. “You put this thing on 20, 25 times in a seven-day period, the Shazams started showing up.” When Ridenour brought those numbers to program directors in Atlanta, Charlotte and Memphis, they took note. “The Shazam aspect of it was a big key to this record,” he continues. “If it could do the kind of researching and connecting with the audience that it did in Dallas, which is a major market, then there really shouldn’t be a reason why we couldn’t duplicate the same kind of excitement across the country,” Ridenour says. He’s done that before - with Rich Homie Quan’s Number One “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh)” - and he had a simple game plan to help Beezy’s single grow. Ridenour was tasked with making “That’s on Me” a coast-to-coast hit. “I wanted to be bigger than where I was,” Beezy says. Many young artists today dismiss labels, but these institutions can still help turn a local story into a national one. was sitting on money, and it was enough to get Beezy out of the deal and still get a deal himself.” “I started telling : Joie Manda and Larry Khan at Interscope, Kevin Lyles at 300 Entertainment, Juliette Jones at Atlantic, and of course Lionel. So the veteran program director decided to start spreading Beezy’s story outside of Dallas. If you don’t take advantage of that momentum, you may lose your window.” “ He was being developed, but not as quickly as he would have liked,” Cook explains. Meanwhile, Beezy was facing another hurdle.
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At the same time, “any time you hear what sounds like a hit record coming out of your hometown, you try to showcase those.” A week later, the second instinct won out, and KBFB became the first station to put “That’s on Me” into full rotation. “To give up a slot on a radio station is a pretty big deal,” he says. McCray was partially torn between two impulses. Initially, program director Mark McCray put “That’s on Me” into late-night mix-show rotation, which is like a soft opening for a restaurant - a way to test a new song without committing much to it. On March 20, Beezy’s single was also picked up by a cross-town competitor, 97.9 The Beat (KBFB). KKDA started playing “That’s on Me” November 26, and the single soon earned support from five different new-music-focused shows on the station. “It’s not like anybody says, that record sounds like such and such right now.” “It’s distinctive, that’s one of the things I love about ,” adds Terri Thomas, who put Beezy into rotation on Houston’s 97.9 the Box after it got major play in Dallas. It doesn’t follow the template of popular SoundCloud rap or mimic the latest exports from Atlanta.
“My team - DJ Steve Nice, DJ Duffey and particularly Bay Bay - said, ‘hey, we need to embrace this, it’s something special.'”Īnd it is: “That’s on Me” is stolid yet scornful, punctuated by a viscous bass line and shrieking sound effects. “ Bay Bay’s always been a great friend and a great advisor to Beezy,” says George “Geo” Cook, who is director of operations, brand manager and program director for KKDA and its sister station, KRNB.
It also reached the ears of DJ Bay Bay, who helms the 3 – 7 p.m. It grew in the streets, the strip clubs.” “I knew it went hard.” Still, he was surprised when “everybody was jamming it. “It was just something I was playing with,” the rapper says, speaking while also chewing on a Twizzler during the speediest of interviews squeezed between stops at SiriusXM and Tidal in New York City.
The instrumental came from his go-to producer Shun on da Beat. Beezy released “That’s on Me” in October 2017 during the run-up to November’s Lite Work 2 mixtape.