Lil Nas X’s road to chart gold

Remixing and streaming have created the market for original performers to be joined by others to extend their song’s life and sales.

Lil Nas X at Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles in May.

Music manager Danny Kang received the call late last Wednesday. It was 10pm in Nashville but Ron Perry, the head of Columbia Records, had a ­request: could his client, Mason Ramsey, record a verse for a remix of the country-rap hit Old Town Road — that night?

The 12-year-old — known as the “Walmart yodelling kid”, thanks to a popular online video of him singing Hank Williams’s Lovesick Blues in one of the superstores — was awakened at his family’s home. Producer Joey Moi, who had just returned home from a full day in the studio, turned his car around, and by 11pm they were at work.

“If you ain’t got no giddy up then giddy out my way,” croons Ramsey on the latest version of Old Town Road, which was ­released the next day, less than 24 hours after the hastily assembled recording session. Rapper Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road has had a historic run atop the Billboard Hot 100 and Australian ARIA chart thanks to memes, a brush with controversy over whether it should even be considered a country song — and now a string of remixes.

The twangy, trap-beat hit has spent 13 weeks at No 1 in the ARIA singles chart; it has spent 16 weeks at the top in the US and now shares the record for the most time spent at the top of the US chart. The last song to hit that mark was Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s Despacito in 2017, which also benefited from a remix, featuring Justin Bieber.

While remixes aren’t new, they’ve become an increasingly powerful strategy in the age of streaming. They frequently are ­employed to freshen up later singles on an album. The original and any remixes chart as one song, so all sales and streams of a new version are added to those of the original. Adding Kendrick Lamar to Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood seven months after its initial ­release helped the track to No 1 in one of the largest such jumps in Billboard history.

Billy Ray Cyrus, Lil Nas X and Keith Urban at the 2019 CMA Music Festival last month.

Streaming, the most popular way people listen to music, has ­become the make-or-break metric for hits, which can rake in ­upwards of 100 million streams a week.

“If you have something that big and put out a new version, there’s already a built-in audience,” says Gary Trust, who oversees Billboard’s charts. “So many people already love it and are streaming it. It’s almost guaranteed to have a huge audience.”

Old Town Road bubbled up on social video-sharing app TikTok and gained national attention in March after Billboard’s controversial decision to remove it from the country charts. That helped propel the song to No 1 on the Hot 100, whose rankings rely on a mix of sales, streams and radio play. Billy Ray Cyrus joined for a remix, which has helped it stay on top since.

Billy Ray Cyrus, left, and Lil Nas X perform at the 2019 BET awards last month.

After 14 straight weeks at No 1 in the US, the song’s numbers were strong, but waning in the second week of this month. Old Town Road had fended off competition for the top spot from Swift, Ed Sheeran and Bieber, Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello. But pressure was mounting on rumours that Bieber would soon join pop star Billie Eilish for a remix of her song, Bad Guy, which had been lingering at No 2 or No 3 for several weeks. It is still at No 3 on the ARIA charts.

The Bad Guy remix arrived on July 11, just hours before the new Old Town Road remix, which includes rapper Young Thug along with Cyrus and Ramsey.

“The momentum was going down on Old Town Road and a lot of good music came out that week,” says Daniel Awad, one of Ramsey’s managers. “We knew the sense of urgency.”