Lil Nas X – Old Town Road

He Bought the Beat for $30, Recorded the Vocal for $20, and Released It Before He Knew It Contained a Nine Inch Nails Sample

The arithmetic at the start of “Old Town Road” is almost too clean to be believed. In October 2018, a 19-year-old in Atlanta named Montero Lamar Hill found a beat online from a Dutch producer named Kiowa Roukema — working as YoungKio — and bought it anonymously through the music marketplace BeatStars for $30. YoungKio had built the beat around a banjo loop sampled from a Nine Inch Nails instrumental called “34 Ghosts IV,” a track from the band’s 2008 release that YoungKio had encountered through a YouTube algorithm suggestion. He had never heard of Nine Inch Nails. He nearly didn’t upload the beat at all — it seemed too strange to sell. Lil Nas X, working under a different calculation entirely, heard the banjo and started thinking about cowboys. He recorded “Old Town Road” on December 2, 2018 at a studio in Atlanta that offered a weekly reduced rate — $20 Tuesdays — and released it the next day on SoundCloud. He had no idea there was an uncleared sample in the track until months later. By the time he found out, it barely mattered.

What happened next moved faster than any single release mechanism was designed to handle. In late December 2018, “Old Town Road” became the engine behind the “Yeehaw Challenge” on TikTok, a meme in which users dressed as cowboys and cut to the beat. Radio stations, unable to get official files, downloaded the audio from YouTube. The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 83 on the strength of streaming alone, without label infrastructure, without a publicist, without a video. It had also, briefly, charted simultaneously on the Hot Country Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts — a genuinely rare feat. Then, in March 2019, Billboard removed it from the country chart, ruling that it was not country enough to qualify. The decision handed Lil Nas X the kind of controversy that money cannot buy: a debate about genre, race, and gatekeeping that ran through every corner of music media for weeks and turned a TikTok meme into a genuine cultural argument.

The Phone Call That Changed the Chart

On December 4, 2018 — the day after the song’s release — Lil Nas X had tweeted that he wanted Billy Ray Cyrus on a remix. Cyrus was, at the time, the only country artist Lil Nas X knew by name, familiar to him through his role on the Disney Channel series Hannah Montana rather than through “Achy Breaky Heart.” The Columbia Records executive Ron Perry reached out to Cyrus’s wife Tish, and on the morning of March 16, 2019, Cyrus heard the song over coffee. He later said he connected it immediately to the Old Town Bridge in Argillite, Kentucky, where he had played as a child. He went into The Record Plant in Los Angeles the same day. Billy Ray’s verse was written by songwriter Jozzy, who laid down a reference vocal in roughly twenty minutes. Cyrus did around ten takes, initially concerned that he sounded out of place on the track — until Jozzy told him that Lil Nas X was essentially doing an impression of an artist exactly like him. The final vocal mix, assembled by vocal producer and mixer Andrew “VoxGod” Bolooki over ten days without a break, ran to 108 Pro Tools tracks and an estimated 300-plus plug-ins. When Cyrus messed around and whistled a melody at the end of the session, Bolooki kept it and moved it to the outro. On a track as minimal as “Old Town Road”, that whistle changes the emotional texture of the whole ending.

The remix was released on April 5, 2019, by Columbia Records. Lil Nas X had signed to the label on March 22 — a deal that came through while the song was already climbing the Hot 100 without them. The remix entered the chart at number one in the week ending April 13, 2019, which happened to be Lil Nas X’s twentieth birthday. It stayed there for nineteen weeks, breaking the all-time Hot 100 record previously shared by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” and Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito.” The original version of the song, at one minute and fifty-three seconds, had already become the shortest number-one single since Herman’s Hermits in 1965. Trent Reznor, who received a panicked call from Lil Nas X’s manager about the uncleared sample around the time it was going viral, cleared it without argument. He later told Rolling Stone he found the song “undeniably hooky” — and noted it had been stuck in his head.

The official video — directed by Calmatic and released on May 17, 2019 — casts Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus as Old West outlaws who get teleported from 1889 to 2019, where they encounter a baffled contemporary neighbourhood. It features Chris Rock, Vince Staples, Rico Nasty, Diplo, Jozzy, and YoungKio himself. The extended cut, titled the “Official Movie,” won the Grammy Award for Best Music Video at the 62nd Grammy Awards — the first Grammy win for both Lil Nas X and Cyrus. The remix also won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and took the CMA Award for Musical Event of the Year, making Trent Reznor the unlikely recipient of a Country Music Association award. The song was RIAA Diamond-certified in October 2019, the fastest any song had ever reached that milestone, and by January 2021 had accumulated 14 times platinum status in the United States — at the time the highest certification of any song in RIAA history.