Before the tag had a name
The count-in · The Neptunes
Pharrell Williams’ most recognizable signature has no words. On many Neptunes records the first beat loops four times (play: Genius: Pharrell’s signature four-count start) before the song begins, from SWV’s 1993 “Right Here (Human Nature Remix)” to Pharrell’s own “Happy.” The blog Discopop made the pattern hard to miss in 2014 by stitching the intros into one mix, Stereogum reported.[2] Pharrell told Vulture’s Craig Jenkins in 2019 that it began as a practical habit: “Sometimes you put a count in so you can start on a beat versus just doing a metronome. If you want to sing at the top of the song, sometimes you just end up leaving it in the song.” He hadn’t noticed the pattern until someone pointed it out.[3]
But I never meant to.
“Darkchild, nine-nine” · Rodney Jerkins
R&B had tags before trap made them routine. Rodney Jerkins, who took the name Darkchild as a teenager in the mid-1990s, stamped his run at the turn of the century with “Darkchild, nine-nine,” (play: Rodney Jerkins on his tag, Okayplayer, 2024) which echoes at the top of Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name.” Grantland’s Justin Charity called it his “most well-known beat-maker credit.”[4]
Jerkins told Okayplayer in 2024 that the tag became part of the song: hear it, and you know “Say My Name” is coming. When he got tired of saying it, the artists said it for him. Whitney Houston, he said, said it the moment she walked into the booth.[5]
“Just Blaze” · Just Blaze
Just Blaze found the template in 2002, when he put Cam’ron saying his name in the silent gap at the top of “Oh Boy.” (play: Cam’ron, “Oh Boy,” official video) He later voiced the tag himself, and explained why at a 2006 Red Bull Music Academy lecture: he wasn’t rapping or dancing in videos, so he had to “do something to kind of brand myself.”[6]
Atlanta’s assembly line
By the late 2000s, Atlanta’s producers were feeding beats to a mixtape scene that rarely said who made them. In 2016, three of them, Zaytoven, Sonny Digital and Metro Boomin, shared a couch at Red Bull Music Academy’s New York festival and talked about what a tag had done for each of them.[7]
“Zaytoven” · Zaytoven
Zaytoven, who produced most of Gucci Mane’s 2006 album Hard to Kill[8], said his own name (play: Zaytoven’s original tag) for that album’s intro and had a friend process the take. He barely used it after that, he said at the 2016 session, until he started hearing beats that copied his sound: “Wait a minute, that ain’t me. I didn’t do that.” Then rappers buying his beats started asking for the tag. Before that, he joked, Gucci Mane was his tag, because Gucci said his name on every song.[7]
“Sonny Digital” · Sonny Digital
Sonny Digital’s tag is the digitized voice (play: Sonny Digital’s tag) that cuts in at the start of songs like iLoveMakonnen’s “Tuesday” and Future’s “Same Damn Time,” as Noisey described it.[9] It is missing from one of his most popular records, 2 Chainz and Kanye West’s “Birthday Song”: the tag came off because of the way the song starts, he said at the RBMA session. “I missed a lot of clout on that one.”[7] He told Nylon in 2017, “I couldn’t let y’all know that I produced ‘Birthday Song.’”[10]
VTG vocalist Jaye Neutron recorded a version of Sonny Digital’s tag. You can hear the version credited in our client reel on Don Toliver’s “After Party” (play: Sonny Digital’s tag on Don Toliver’s “After Party,” voiced by Jaye Neutron).
“Mike WiLL Made-It” · Mike WiLL Made-It
Mike WiLL was just Mike Will until Gucci Mane rapped “Mike Will made it, Gucci Mane slayed it” on “Star Status,” a freestyle from the same sessions as Gucci’s No Pad, No Pencil that came out on the Guapaholics mixtape. “Everybody in the streets was just running up to me like, ‘Yo, Mike Will made it,’” he told a Red Bull Music Academy audience in 2016, so he kept the name.[11][12]
He wanted a tag for a practical reason. He had songs out with Gucci, OJ da Juiceman, Shawty Lo, Soulja Boy and 2 Chainz, “but nobody knows how to point it back to me.” He asked a songwriter friend to say the name, shelved the result because it sounded “like a McDonald’s commercial,” then pulled it up again in a friend’s basement and kept stacking effects until it sounded hard: “Mike WiLL Made-It.” (play: Mike WiLL Made-It’s tag) The first record most people heard it on, he said, was by 2 Chainz.[11]
Nobody knows how to point it back to me.
Two tags · Metro Boomin
Metro Boomin has two famous tags, and neither is his voice. “If Young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gon’ shoot you” (play: Metro Boomin’s tag, in Future’s voice) is Future, from an alternate take tied to Uncle Murda’s “Right Now.”[13] And “Metro Boomin want some more” (play: Metro Boomin’s tag, in Young Thug’s voice) is Young Thug, cut from Thug’s song “Some More” by the engineer Alex Tumay.[14]
“Wheezy outta here” · Wheezy
Wheezy told Splice in 2020 how Lil Wayne’s favorite tag happened. Late in a session, with everyone else asleep, Future started rapping over one of his beats and said “Wheezy outta here” on a song that was never released. Wheezy had the engineer clip the line and send it over, and he put it on his beats that same night. A tag, he said, is “your signature.”[15]
Two voices · London on da Track
London on da Track’s first name really is London; his mother, a model, named him for a London fashion show she was supposed to attend. He has used more than one tag. Revolt credits them to Young Thug (play: London on da Track’s tag, “We got London on da Track”) and to Kodak Black, whose “I’m in London, got my beat from London” (play: London on da Track’s tag, in Kodak Black’s voice) turns the producer’s name into a pun,[16] and Complex picked Kodak’s as the better of the two.[17]
Everybody gets a tag
Outside Atlanta, producers also found signatures in other people’s voices.
“Mustard on the beat, ho” · Mustard
Mustard’s tag is YG’s voice (play: Mustard’s tag, in YG’s voice), lifted from the end of an early YG song, “I’m Good,” while Mustard was remaking the beat in YG’s bedroom studio in Inglewood. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” Mustard told Billboard News in 2024.[18] That May it opened Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Mustard’s first No. 1 as a producer.[19]
“Murda on the beat so it’s not nice” · Murda Beatz
Murda Beatz’s “Murda on the beat so it’s not nice” tag came from Baka Not Nice, the Toronto rapper who once worked security for Drake.[17] Murda was recording him at the time, and on one song Baka said the line (play: Murda Beatz’s tag, in Baka Not Nice’s voice), Murda told Atlanta’s Hot 107.9 in 2022. Sonny Digital happened to be visiting Canada; when Murda asked whether he should use it, Sonny told him to try. Then Drake told him to keep it on every beat he sent.[20]
Anyone who has seen Travis Scott, Drake or Migos live has probably heard a crowd chant it as loudly as any lyric, Splice noted in 2020.[21]
Murda has used other tag recordings too. VTG’s Jaye Neutron recorded the Murda Beatz tag credited in our client reel on Migos’ “MotorSport” (play: Murda Beatz’s tag on Migos’ “MotorSport,” voiced by Jaye Neutron).
“Yo Pi’erre, you wanna come out here?” · Pi’erre Bourne
Pi’erre Bourne’s tag (play: Pi’erre Bourne’s tag) comes from the first season of The Jamie Foxx Show, according to Complex,[17] and spread with his beats for Playboi Carti’s 2017 debut mixtape. He told The FADER it “really changed my life.”[22]
Two tags · Tay Keith
Tay Keith’s first tag was polite: “Tay Keith produced this,” on BlocBoy JB’s “Goons Coming.” The one that took over, an expletive-laden command (play: Tay Keith’s tag (explicit)) in the voice of the Clarksville, Tennessee, rapper Lil Juice, opened records from “Look Alive” to Sexyy Red’s “Pound Town,” Complex reported.[23]
The Memphis producer earned four No. 1 hits, including Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” and Drake’s “First Person Shooter.” He was found dead in his Nashville apartment on June 18, 2026. He was 29.[24]
“Hit-Boy” · Hit-Boy
Hit-Boy is the cautionary tale. He gave away beats for years without a tag and watched tagged producers get booked to DJ festivals because their names were on radio hits, he told Song Exploder. “Imagine if ‘N****s in Paris’ had ‘Hit-Boy’ in the beginning,” he said. He has used one since about 2018.[25]
Hear them back to back
Tags are meant to be heard in the first seconds of a record, which is also the easiest way to learn them. V1T0, one of the vocalists at VoiceTagGods, which publishes this blog, put together a Spotify playlist of famous ones.
Lil Wayne, for the record, knows now that Wheezy’s tag isn’t about him. It was still his favorite.