Million Dollar Baby — Tommy Richman (2024)

Why this song

Count the chords. There are three, and there are never any more — and yet the chart catalogue files this one as advanced level, which is not a typo.

Now go back to the first two seconds: that low, dragging voice is not Tommy Richman, it is a fragment one of his producers pulled out of a sample pack he found on Reddit.

Historical context

Tommy Richman is from Woodbridge, Virginia, and moved to Los Angeles in 2022. In 2023 the singer Brent Faiyaz signed him as the first artist on his label, ISO Supremacy. Before this song he had never appeared on a sales chart.

Fotograma de una entrevista a Tommy Richman en 2025. Foto: Industry Plants, CC BY 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

What went viral was not the song. It was footage of the song being recorded. On 22 April 2024 Richman started posting clips of the studio sessions shot to look like VHS tape. In under a week the snippet passed 9.5 million views on TikTok. The song itself came out on the 26th.

It took 4.6 million US streams on release day and entered the Billboard Hot 100 straight at number 2, from an artist who had never been on that chart at all. It went to number one in New Zealand and Australia, and spent ten straight weeks on top of the TikTok chart — the longest run that chart has ever had.

Musical characteristics

The first thing in is that slowed-down, almost spoken voice, with a synth bass bouncing underneath it. The hi-hats come in short, fast taps: that part is trap.

The rest comes from somewhere else and some other decade. The cowbell, the staccato synths and the falsetto are eighties funk and R&B procedures — Stereogum called it "the Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis cowbell", after the two producers who filled eighties radio with that sound.

Now the harmony, which is where the trouble starts. Four bars on a loop, one chord per bar: F sharp minor, G sharp minor, B minor, back to F sharp minor. Three different chords, and there are no others anywhere in the song.

Acorde de La sostenido menor con ceja en guitarra clásica. Foto: Lucian Popescu, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

The song is in F sharp minor, which carries three sharps in the key signature: F, C and G. For a classroom guitar that means one very concrete thing. None of the three chords can be played with open strings. All three need a barre — the index finger laid flat across all six strings, doing the job the nut does in other keys. On the band chart they sit at frets 2, 4 and 2: three barres, and you have to move them around the neck.

There is a way out, and it is not cheating. Put a capo on the second fret and, without a single sounding note changing, the shapes become E minor shapes: open E minor, open A minor, and one shape in between. That is exactly what the guitar tutorial below does.

Careful with the other option. You can transpose the song into E minor for real, and then it plays itself — but you can no longer play along with the record, because you would be a whole tone below it. Playing along and playing comfortably are two different things, and the capo is the only thing that gives you both.

That leaves the G sharp minor, which is the chord doing the colouring. In a textbook F sharp minor that second degree would be a diminished chord, tense and passing. Here it is a plain G sharp minor, and that smuggles in a D sharp that does not belong to the scale. It is why the loop never quite settles into sad.

One last oddity, this one on the clock. The published figure for the track is 138 beats per minute, but tap your foot and you get half that, which is why some catalogues file it at 70. Both numbers describe the same music: the strong drum hits land at half the rate of the hi-hats. That is called half-time.

Hard facts: F sharp minor (three sharps), 4/4, 138 BPM (70 counted in half-time), 2:35, chords i–ii–iv–i. The form is intro, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus. The chorus arrives before the verse, which is what you want when the first thing anyone hears is fifteen loose seconds.

Trivia and curiosities

• Nobody sang the hook for this song. Kavi, one of the five credited producers, was going through a sample pack by Canadian producer DJ Smokey that he had found on Reddit, and pulled the low, pitched-down vocal from it. "I was just like, 'Oh, this is sort of hard!'", he told Billboard. "And Tommy agreed." The thing that identifies the whole record was never recorded for it.

• The promotional material was the making-of, not the video. The clips that set the song off are shots of the recording session filmed to look like VHS tape. The object being promoted has stopped being the finished song.

• Afterwards Richman released an official mix called "VHS" that imitates the sound of the TikTok teaser, with a more blown-out bass. The rough copy of his own teaser became something you can buy.

• Three chords and advanced level at once. The difficulty is not in the harmony, it is in where those three chords sit on the neck. A chart catalogue measures what something costs to play, not what it costs to understand.

Classroom activities

• Play: capo on the second fret, then E minor and A minor shapes plus the one in between. With the record underneath it has to line up in tune. The guitar tutorial gives all three fingerings.

• Transpose: write the loop as it is (F#m – G#m – Bm – F#m) and then transposed to E minor. Closed question: why does the E minor version not work with the record, and what do you have to do to make it work without changing it?

• Analyse: tap the pulse through the chorus and count how many hi-hat taps fit between two strong drum hits. Use that number to explain why some charts say 70 BPM and others say 138.

• Create: take three chords from a key with sharps, loop them, and record fifteen seconds that work on their own with no introduction in front. Steal the procedure, not the song.

Key vocabulary

• Sample — sample: un trozo de sonido ya grabado reutilizado en otra canción
• Key signature — armadura
• Barre — ceja (el índice tumbado sobre todas las cuerdas)
• Capo — cejilla de pinza
• Half-time — medio tiempo (los golpes fuertes cada dos tiempos)

Resources

Where it is explained — this song is studied in ¿Por qué las canciones ya no te hacen esperar?, from the modern music history book.

Official video

Guitar tutorial — BMartinSounds. Gives the fingerings with a capo on the second fret, which is the version a class can actually play.

Piano tutorial — PHianonize, easy version with the notes falling on screen.

Bass tutorial — RezaBass, with the tab on screen. This is the line the whole song leans on.

Drums — Steve Howard. He plays the groove up to speed and then takes it apart section by section; it is two bars on repeat.

• Full band chart — https://jamzone.musicwill.org/songs/million-dollar-baby
• Tab — attached below; the button opens it in Songsterr