The first signing to PULSE Records was Tommy Richman, who has just climbed to #1 on the Billboard Global 200 Chart with his new song “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”. It’s a notable achievement for an artist with no prior history on the chart: since the beginning of the Hot 100 in 1958, only five other artists have achieved this.

PULSE Music Group was established 15 years ago as a publishing company, but around a year and a few months ago the team decided to grow into the recordings business as well. Scott Cutler explains: “We just decided it was time to start the label in a venture with Concord Music Group, who is our publishing venture partner. We started hiring people specifically for the label: A&R, marketing folks, a salesperson, an art department person. And one of the first signings, if not the first signing, was Tommy. And the Tommy signing story is colourful and interesting. Bel brought Tommy to the label and deserves a shout out for that particular move: Tommy didn’t have a ton going on in terms of numbers or anything, it was just what Bel saw.”

Bel Mesbahi describes Richman’s potential: “I kept hearing about him from different people. I kept seeing him around and the music I’ve been a fan of. I thought I might as well just have him come and do some sessions. I was really impressed by him in the studio.” He recalls, ““He’s been making music for a long time. And it was always just really different alternative R&B music… stuff that I played in the car and a lot of my friends really loved. I feel like a lot of industry people kind of knew about it but didn’t necessarily take it all the way seriously. It wasn’t until I saw him work in the studio and how he is a person that I thought ‘oh, there could be something actually really big here’.”

After the studio sessions, the Pulse team went to see Tommy play at the Echo in L.A. Ashley Calhoun recalls: “There was always a scene around him… it seemed like everyone in that venue was there to see Tommy. So he’s definitely been doing the work and laying the foundation for a while.” Mesbahi agrees. “We were all really impressed—he killed it on stage. Interestingly, Brent [Faiyaz] was there too, and I asked my good friend Zhu, who is now Tommy’s manager, ‘why is Brent here? What’s going on?’ He explained that Brent also wanted to sign him. So I suggested we figure out a way to do it together because Brent was a publishing client. That’s how the idea of the partnership started. It wasn’t easy because Brent had just started his venture with UnitedMasters and initially wanted to do it without us. But we … emphasised that we needed to do this together. We had the resources and a new label that believed in this kid, and Brent had the experience and reputation to make it a perfect pairing.”

Says Sara Ahmed, “it’s a very scary thing to be an artist. And it’s very brave to do what they do, especially if it’s your livelihood. The moment we started working with Tommy, there was a lot of building a relationship with him and really understanding the nuts and bolts of his goals and his north-stars.” About two weeks after he got signed, he told them he was going to go on tour with Brent Faiyaz, as the only support act. While this was a huge opportunity, it also meant that the Pulse team wouldn’t have much access to the artist, so they had to get started quickly. Ahmed recalls: “At the time, he didn’t have a manager, so I was serving as a pseudo-manager as we were getting things done.”

Scott Cutler remembers how one day, after they had put out an EP together, the artist came in and wanted to play them an album: “He had made an album. And it was a finished album. And it’s spectacular. So we’re all sitting in a room and he plays us a 12 song album. After we all heard the album, I think the next thing was “Oh, shit. He wants to put it out now. And what do we do to prepare the ground for it? What do we do to set up the record? ” We had a conversation about maybe Tommy giving us a couple of songs that we can put out one by one. One of those songs was “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”. We wanted to make sure there was a big enough audience waiting for it.”

According to the Pulse team, Tommy was accumulating around 175k-200k streams per week at this point and had around 2m monthly listeners on Spotify. These numbers had been achieved via the release of his EP “Rush” in September 2023, and from Tommy featuring on a Brent Faiyaz track which was released in October last year. Ahmed remembers that, “once we released the “Rush EP”, prior to any Brent features or anything, he was up at a million after that alone.”

The team recalls how in order to prepare the album for maximum success, they wanted to have three great singles to lead in with. The track “SELFISH” they liked, but the other option didn’t work for the label – so Tommy continued to work on new music. One day, he came back from the studio in Nashville – and he had made “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”. Ahmed says that Richman was eager to get it out to the world. “We were in the rollout for “SELFISH” as the first single. Tommy posted this clip [of the new song] on TikTok on April 13. Day over day it was growing so I realised that something was happening. After then it moved over to Twitter, where things really combusted. I think Twitter is really where the fandom and actual tastemakers really come together and allow things to be a real thing versus just living on TikTok.”

From there, the team decided to start teasing out the whole project and creative universe, Ahmed says. “I think one or two days after Tommy posted the video, it was at 10,000 views. And he wanted to release the track now. So, I asked him to get me everything by the end of the day and he and his friends worked very hard to finish the record over the weekend. They turned it in on 1am on Monday. Everyone had to work their asses off to pitch DSPs, partners, and making sure all the press was aligned. We got it up in time. And then the next day, we were noticing that fans were really engaging with the bass in that VHS version.” The VHS version is the video Tommy originally put on TikTok, and was shot using a video camera, giving it a distinctive audio distortion.

Cutler explains the excitement: “Bel was running in and out of the room, calling Zhu and Tommy, to turn the bass back up. The fact that it was distorted and everything was just the nature of TikTok.”

Richman was fine with this approach as long as both versions went up, says Cutler: “He wanted his clean, well-made version, and then the other one. So that was a decision that happened pretty quickly in a buzzy moment. And the rest of this is just breezy now… because it’s the number two most-added at Top 40 this week, and it’s the fourth week! That’s not normal. So it’s pretty exciting.”

The track has made an impact globally, with a 50/50 split between his domestic market, the US, and other strong markets such as the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Germany, markets across Southeast Asia, as well as France.

Since the virality of Tommy’s TikTok video and the swift release of the track, the team has invested in various marketing efforts to keep growing the success of the track and Tommy as an artist. They have run ad campaigns across Meta and TikTok to further spread awareness, a Spotify advertising campaign to drive people to his full catalogue, and a TikTok influencer campaign to assist in spreading the usage of the sound.

Currently, a dance trend and photo carousel trend are leading the charge as creatives under the sound. Besides the Official Vizualiser and Official Lyric Video for the track, there is also an Official Music Video dropping soon which Tommy has started teasing out, while he is already dropping some new unreleased teasers on his socials.

Sara Ahmed says that their focus now is to bring more people into his community. “He’s someone that wants to remain mysterious. So we’re working on breaking that shell a bit so he can come a bit more into the limelight. What’s honestly been really exciting, though, is seeing his entire catalogue lift. The conversation is about Tommy and him actually being an artist that has good music, which is an incredible marker for an artist that’s meant to have a career in this, especially in terms of longevity.”