Kenny Beats: “We gave this young man $20,000 in studio equipment – then he started going live with strippers for 6 hours a day on insta”
Beats gifted the equipment to a boy named Ray in 2020 after a photo of him recording in a makeshift set up went viral.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 11: Kenny Beats performs during the 2023 Governors Ball Music Festival at Flushing Meadows Corona Park on June 11, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/WireImage)
Kenny Beats has recounted the strange outcome of him gifting a young musician $20,000 worth of studio equipment in 2020.
The producer got in touch with the boy named Ray, after a photo of him recording a verse of a song in a makeshift studio set-up in his bedroom during the pandemic went viral on social media.
“He supposed to be cleaning the room not in the damn studio,” the caption of the viral post reads.
Within days of the photo going viral, Beats gifted Ray an entire home studio to help him level up his production skills. Nearly four years later, Beats offered an update on the strange turn of events that followed after a follower on X/Twitter asked what became of the boy.
“We gave this young man $20,000 in studio equipment,” he tweeted on Sunday (7th January). “He got 40,000 followers in minutes. Then he started going live with strippers for 6 hours a day on insta. Seems like it all worked out.”
We gave this young man $20,000 in studio equipment
He got 40,000 followers in minutes
Then he started going live with strippers for 6 hours a day on insta
Seems like it all worked out https://t.co/Mzu0jPDgT9
— kennybeats (@kennybeats) January 7, 2024
❤️🙏 pic.twitter.com/7ybfS21gTX
— ₱.$ 🦂 (@p_londres) June 10, 2020
Ray is hardly the only person who’s benefitted from Beats’ generosity. In a subsequent post responding to a commenter who suggested it “would have been smarter to help multiple people with lower costing equipment”, the producer said he had given away “over $300,000 in products and gear and cash to different producers on twitch over 3 years”.
https://twitter.com/Pedakin/status/1744285917433807284
he supposed to be cleaning the room not in the damn studio 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/098XJoxzQF
— zac (@zactaviss) June 5, 2020
Meanwhile, Beats also recently revealed how he learned swing in his drums, saying “I grew up with visual music.”
In a recent podcast with Rick Rubin, the musician says that he never learned swing in his drums from jamming away on an MPC, but rather visually from a grid.
“For me, bounce, swing, groove, any feel – when you grew up making beats on a laptop versus recording music to tape… I see, swing and bounce visually. Yeah, I grew up with a grid, I grew up with visual music.”
