Producer tags list: the 100 most popular tags, ranked

How we counted

When producers order a tag from us, they often send someone else’s as a reference, with a note that amounts to “this, with my name.” The one we get most is “Maybach Music.” (play: The Maybach Music drop at the top of Rick Ross’s “Stay Schemin’”) Future saying Metro Boomin’s name, YG’s “Mustard on the beat, ho” and “Run that back, Turbo” come up a lot too.^[9] Nobody outside the company can check that, though, so the chart runs on numbers anyone can look up.

Those numbers come from Genius. Its contributors write tags into the lyrics, usually in parentheses before the first verse, and every lyric page shows how many times it’s been read. We searched each tag’s exact words and kept the songs where the matching line really carries the tag. When the search hid a song’s view count, we read it off the song’s own page, then added everything up.^[1] Spellings follow Genius’s Producer Tags Directory, and a producer with more than one tag gets a row for each.^[10] Mustard’s tag comes out on top with 68.6 million views across 556 songs, and about a quarter of those views come from Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”

The views are people reading lyrics, which isn’t the same as people playing songs, and a tag only counts where someone on Genius wrote it down. Older songs have an edge, since a 2015 hit has had a decade to rack up views. A producer’s own Genius page will show bigger numbers than ours, too, because it adds up everything they’ve made.

A plus sign means the real total is higher: Genius’s search stops at 600 results, and for Don Cannon and Pyrex Whippa we only checked their most-read credited songs. One-word tags are hard to search, so for those we went through the producer’s Genius credits instead. That’s how Wraith9’s “Okay,” the “OK” and gasp at the start of EsDeeKid songs,^[11] turned up on 39 of his 63 credited songs; Don Cannon, Aviator Keyyz and Pyrex Whippa got the same treatment. Tags that are just a name, like “808 Mafia” or “Zaytoven,” only count when the name stands on its own, so a verse that name-drops the producer doesn’t. And a song counts for every tag on it: DaBaby’s “Suge,” which opens with Pooh Beatz’s tag and then Jetsonmade’s, counts for both.