producer
Instead of doing her homework one day after school, the multihyphenate born Atia Boggs used her time for a different assignment. She had just bought Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and recalls coming home, sitting down and writing all the lyrics on flash cards. “That’s when I realized how important a good song was and how substance matters,” says Boggs, now 37 and known as the songwriter–producer INK. “And that really inspired me in a whole new way… I learned how to create my own path.”
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She taught herself guitar and started street performing, walking “miles on miles” from downtown Atlanta to the residential Buckhead neighborhood “playing for pennies.” Without any music industry connections, INK sought a mentor online, searching for her favorite songwriters such as James Fauntleroy, with whom she became Facebook friends in the late 2000s. “He was a mentor for me in the very beginning,” she says. “That gave me the confidence to say, ‘I can do this.’ ” Her first big break came in 2019, after she had co-produced and co-written Chris Brown’s song “Don’t Check on Me,” which featured Justin Bieber — and Brown decided it should feature INK, too. “It gave me so much exposure and another boost of confidence to have a superstar say, ‘Hey, we’re going to introduce you to the world.’ That was one of the moments that led to the unstoppable train I’m on now.”
This year has proved to be INK’s biggest, and busiest, yet — but she teases 2025 will be even crazier, as she’s working on her own music and a documentary while continuing to collaborate with music’s upper echelon.
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Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter
“Beyoncé was definitely a catalyst for the freight train to keep going,” says INK, who started working with Bey before COVID-19 hit on Cowboy Carter tracks including “Ameriican Requiem” and “16 Carriages.” INK recalls how, in 2019, they met at Roc Nation’s Grammys week brunch: “We have an inside joke because I went up to her and said, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I’m going to be writing your next album.’ And she giggled and said, ‘What’s your name?’ We just hit it off.” Soon after, INK was working with producer Ricky Reed, who introduced her to Beyoncé’s A&R executives. “They said, ‘We would love to have you be on this journey with us from the start.’ And five years later, Cowboy Carter was delivered.”
INK was friends with Lopez’s A&R executive long before he had the gig. So when it was time to assemble a team for Lopez’s personal album This Is Me… Now, he told INK, “You’re the first person I thought of for this.” INK most loved how “there’s not a session that happens without [Lopez]… I remember one time, she was like, ‘Hey, pull up today, but I’m going to send you a different address.’ And it’s the movie set [for Atlas]. We’re recording parts from the album in her trailer, and she comes in covered in blood, wet, cuts, bruises all over her body. And then she’s on the mic recording the song that we just wrote in her trailer. I thought that was the coolest thing ever, and it just showed the work ethic.”
Latto, “Look What You Did”
INK has long worked with Latto’s producer, Go Grizzly, another Atlanta native, but she had yet to work with the “Big Energy” rapper herself until this year. As INK recalls, she and Grizzly were working in Paris when they “cooked up the beat” that became “Look What You Did,” off the rapper’s third full-length album, Sugar Honey Iced Tea. “We did a beat in the studio, and then he was like, ‘Yo, you already know we have to get Latto on this.’ She heard it, she loved it and snapped.” INK had previously worked with Mariah the Scientist, who featured on “Look What You Did,” earlier this year when she guested on 21 Savage’s American Dream album. “So the dots connected,” she says.
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
“People call it Brat Summer — it should be called ‘artist development summer,’ ” Jack Antonoff jokes on a mid-September afternoon, sitting on the rooftop of New York’s Electric Lady Studios and reflecting on the past few months in pop music. Charli XCX, whose brat album helped define the season, is an old friend of Antonoff’s — they co-headlined a 2015 tour called Charli and Jack Do America — and he points out that her 2024 success speaks to a larger movement of artists creating their own mainstream niches instead of latching on to trends.
“Sabrina [Carpenter], Charli and Chappell Roan — the three of them have had this shared experience of artists who have been crystallizing, and that’s where you get gems,” Antonoff says of a trio of pop talents who have dominated recent cultural discourse. “And that’s the story of being an artist. That’s true artist development. And it doesn’t matter where we are in tech or streaming or anything — the only way to win is to create your own language.”
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This year, Antonoff has had a direct hand in abetting artistic evolution at different levels of stardom — helping a longtime collaborator, Taylor Swift, shape-shift while staying on top of the pop world, as well as a rising artist, Carpenter, secure her place on the A-list. For the latter, Antonoff produced and co-wrote four songs on Carpenter’s new album, Short n’ Sweet — including her first Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper, “Please Please Please” — allowing the pop singer’s sardonic tics to shine on her way to arena-headliner status.
“No one deserves it more,” Antonoff says of the former Disney Channel star, who has released six albums by the age of 25. “Sabrina’s been quietly growing, and her albums have been getting more awesome, and she’s been honing her sound and performances. It’s not like she just popped onto the scene — this has been a decade of grinding toward it.”
During the week that Short n’ Sweet was released in August, Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department — on which Antonoff contributed to 16 songs across both of its volumes — spent its 15th week atop the Billboard 200, the longest run at No. 1 of any Swift project. Swift announced The Tortured Poets Department on the night of the 2024 Grammys, where previous full-length Midnights was awarded album of the year and she set the record for the most career wins in the category.
Amy Lombard
This year, Antonoff’s work with Swift and Carpenter — along with the self-titled fourth album from his long-running band, Bleachers, which arrived in March — could help him notch his sixth consecutive Grammy nomination for a producer of the year, non-classical, a category that he has won the past three years. If Antonoff takes home the trophy at the 2025 ceremony, he would set a record as the only four-peat in the 50-year history of the award.
“It would be a really [nice] resolve to a really special period,” says Antonoff’s manager, Jamie Oborne. “If it’s based on the work alone and the broad spectrum of work, I can’t imagine anyone else winning.”
Instead of functioning as a victory lap for Swift, The Tortured Poets Department was emotionally unguarded and knowingly messy, dividing critics and inspiring immediate fan devotion on its way to the biggest first-week debut of her career. “The best bodies of work are when people drill into the most personal, the most if-you-know-you-know kind of stuff,” Antonoff says. “I think the depth of [Tortured Poets Department] was surprising to people because I think people are constantly surprised when artists continue to be artists. You see so many people take the wrong turn and pander and become terrified of what they could lose. That’s the recipe for all the worst music, and I can only relate to people who don’t give a f–k. That next body of work — it doesn’t matter how big your audience is, it either comes from the depths of you or it doesn’t. And I love that album so much because the whole thing is so remarkably vulnerable.”
That ethos helps explain why, in the midst of a record-setting run as a pop studio whiz, Antonoff keeps pushing his creativity into unfamiliar areas. After producing the April soundtrack to the Apple TV+ fashion drama The New Look, which included Antonoff pals like Lana Del Rey and The 1975 covering early-20th-century songs, he also signed on to provide original music for a Broadway revival of Romeo + Juliet, which began previews in late September. More recently, he unveiled early plans for his Public Studios initiative, which, with the help of The Ally Coalition, will build studios in LGBTQ+ youth shelters and create a network of engineers to help train those interested in production — free of charge.
Jack Antonoff photographed September 10, 2024 at Electric Lady Studios in New York.
Amy Lombard
Antonoff also deconstructed the first Bleachers album, 2014’s Strange Desire, for a 10th-anniversary rework dubbed A Stranger Desired, released in September. And amid all of the projects, he foremost describes 2024 as “a touring year,” having led Bleachers on a global trek that will culminate with a headlining gig at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 4.
He admits that he gets asked about his schedule by the people around him — friends curious about his balancing act and why he hasn’t zeroed in on the more successful pieces of his artistry. “My hunger to make things hasn’t changed since I was like 14,” Antonoff says with a chuckle, “but the context for people has changed.” When asked about the idea of winning four consecutive Grammys for producer of the year, Antonoff returns to the idea of artist development — that even when he’s receiving what he describes as “a huge honor,” his priority remains “protecting that zone” that allows him to grow as an artist and person.
“I really don’t let anything get in the way of that,” Antonoff says. “I keep my head down and I go back to work.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
When Nico Baran was 10, he discovered the popular digital audio workstation FL Studio during a class presentation and started making dance tracks. “That helped me build up my skills for making loops,” says Baran, who soon transitioned to R&B and trap productions.
Seven years later, in 2020, the Houston-born, Madrid-based producer started DM’ing loops to members of the producer collective and record label Internet Money. One member, oktanner, played the beats for CEO Taz Taylor, who brought Baran onto the team that year. Taylor asked Baran to send him ideas ahead of his session with The Kid LAROI, which led to Baran scoring his first major placement on LAROI’s debut mixtape, F*ck Love, co-writing and co-producing “Tragic” featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again.
He has since compiled a genre-spanning résumé — and an impressive original loop library, which he often shares as sounds on TikTok — producing songs for rappers like Lil Tecca, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Shy Glizzy, as well as Latin artists like Bad Bunny with Young Miko, Eladio Carrión and Fuerza Regida. In June, when Baran posted a now-viral snippet titled “Love Is Gone” — a moody instrumental that has since amassed 1.8 million TikTok plays and 4.3 million official on-demand global streams, according to Luminate — Drake caught wind of the hype. “He reached out to me through Instagram,” Baran says. “I’m still sending him stuff to this day.”
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Wallace Joseph, SVP of A&R at Warner Chappell Music, calls the producer a “genius,” saying his talent is “purely natural. What he’s doing is next level; whether he’s playing keyboards, producing, or anything else, everything he touches goes viral.”
Ahead, Baran is hoping to make time for his own music as well, saying he “definitely” wants to release an album of his own — “kind of like Metro Boomin and DJ Khaled,” he says, “where I can bring artists into my own sound.”
¥$ (with Lil Wayne), “Lifestyle”
Last November, Baran wrote, “POV: Ty Dolla $ign & Kanye need beats for their next album,” over a TikTok featuring one of his loops. In December, when Ye previewed “Lifestyle” during an Instagram Live filmed at a private Las Vegas party teasing Vultures 2 (despite Vultures 1 not having dropped), Baran noticed a familiar beat: The song sampled “Love Is Gone.” As Baran recalls, “People were sending me screen recordings through Instagram like, ‘Kanye sampled you!’ ” One of the song’s producers, Australian duo FNZ, had sent Ty “Love Is Gone.” Baran says, “He liked it a lot. He showed it to Kanye, and Kanye loved it. It still feels unbelievable.”
Ice Spice & Central Cee, “Did It First”
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In 2023, songwriter-producer Lily Kaplan sent Baran a Dropbox link and asked him to tinker with her vocal tracks. He built a loop around one of them by chopping up the line “Baby, do you understand?” and adding synths before sending it to RIOTUSA, Ice Spice’s go-to producer. RIOT ultimately used it for Ice and Central Cee’s “Did It First,” one of the buzzier singles from her debut album, Y2K!, that dropped in July. “Ice Spice really loved that one loop, and it kind of went crazy,” says Baran of the track, which hit No. 10 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.
The Kid LAROI, TBA
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Four years after “Tragic,” one of LAROI’s producers reached out to Baran about sampling a loop that he had posted on TikTok to use on a track from the Australian artist’s forthcoming second album. (His debut, The First Time, arrived last November.) “That’s mainly what I’m focusing on right now,” Baran reveals. “I’m sending a lot of ideas to LAROI’s producers. Aside from that one song, hopefully more [will] come about.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the August 31, 2024 issue of Billboard.
Linda Perry is well aware of the qualities that have made her a world-class songwriter, producer and go-to studio magic-maker. But asked to define what she thinks her strong suits are, Perry tells Billboard that she is, “pretty tough, I’m aggressive, I’m a pretty powerful person,” but also, “very talented, I’m smart, I’m a great mom, I’m a great friend… I’m all these things, I’m a great songwriter, but sometimes you lose your way.”
That why, even with all those sparkling qualities, Perry said, sometimes you lose your way. That dichotomy is at the heart of Linda Perry: Let It Die Here, the documentary about Perry’s work and life that debuted at the Tribeca Festival in June. “In real time I kind of figured things out, I’m still putting the pieces together,” she says. “I don’t think, honestly, anybody truly knows who they are until they can be at one with everything. I guess I’m trying to get to that point where I don’t have a reaction. Because reactions are emotional.”
Perry opens up in the film about her journey from fronting early 1990’s band 4 Non Blondes — famous for their 1993 Billboard Hot 100 No. 14 hit “What’s Up” — to becoming an in-demand songwriter and producer for everyone from Adele and Christina Aguilera to Dolly Parton, P!nk, Miley Cyrus, Celine Dion, Ariana Grande and Alicia Keys. Director Don Hardy speaks to the singer, as well as her family, friends and colleagues in the 90-minute doc that also features new performance and recording footage.
“I didn’t even know we were making a documentary,” Perry says of the process of filming that took place as she was beginning to unpack some hard truths about her childhood and past trauma — which included mental, physical and emotional abuse — as well processing her mother’s dementia diagnosis and her own health issues. She’d met Hardy years ago when she scored his doc Citizen Penn, about actor Sean Penn’s efforts to help Haitians in the wake of 2010’s devastating 7.0 earthquake.
“One day he was like, ‘you’re so interesting. Do you mind if I’m like a fly on the wall in your studio?,” she recalls. As Hardy hung around, Perry says she began “unraveling,” and it wasn’t until the director came told her he’d shown a 30-minute edit of the footage to some people and they agreed there was a movie in there somewhere. She said go for it and gave them the green light to start the film, just as her and her mother were both hit with health crises.
“All of that was happening in real time,” she says. “It all makes sense now, like how I had to unravel in real time. If I would have thought about it, if I knew it would was gonna happen, never would have approved anything like this.”
The film has allowed Perry to let all of that go, which is why she wanted it to be called Let It Die Here; she wrote a song for her mother with that title. “I’m not a liar. I am about as honest as you will find on this planet,” Perry adds of her no-b.s. songwriting process and how everything she writes is true, even if it’s about another person.
At some point, though, she was having trouble writing songs for others because she couldn’t figure out how to tell her words through someone else’s experience. “It started to feel like a lie to me,” she says of her decision to focus on scoring film and TV. Watch the full interview with Perry above.
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Source: Rolling Stone / Getty
Diddy has more explaining to do. A former male producer is making some stunning claims that the mogul sexually assaulted him.
Variety Magazine is reporting that the Bad Boy Entertainment founder is now facing some new allegations regarding his behavior. On Monday, Feb. 26 producer Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones filed a lawsuit against Sean Combs stating the music executive made several sexual advances toward him during the recording of The Love Album: Off the Grid and was “subjected to unwanted advances by associates of Diddy at his direction.” Jones also faced “constant unsolicited and unauthorized groping and touching of his anus” and was even made to work in the bathroom while Diddy showered.
But wait it gets worse. Aside from the inappropriate advances Jones says that Combs frequently hired sex workers and offered them illegal drugs and laced alcoholic beverages. Additionally, the producer says he was also drugged and woke up on Feb. 2, 2023 in bed naked with Diddy and two sex workers. As expected lawyers for Combs have denied in a statement to Variety Magazine. “Lil Rod is nothing more than a liar who filed a $30 billion lawsuit shamelessly looking for an undeserved payday,” Shawn Holley said. “His reckless name-dropping about events that are pure fiction and simply did not happen is nothing more than a transparent attempt to garner headlines. We have overwhelming, indisputable proof that his claims are complete lies.”
This one of many lawsuits against Diddy with claims of sexual misconduct. According to HipHopDX on Friday, Feb. 23 his lawyer Jonathan Davis described him and former Bad Boy Records president Harve Pierre in a filing as “victims of the ‘cancel culture’ frenzy in the courts”. The two businessmen are defendants along with another unnamed individual are alleged to gang raping a 17-year-old girl back in 2003. Both have plead not guilty and have asked the suit to be dismissed.
As debate continues over contemporary hip-hop’s ability to top the charts, producer Sean Momberger reached into the past to help the genre regain its pop dominance — and score his first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1. “Lovin on Me,” which borrows from a 1990s Detroit hit, became Jack Harlow’s third Hot 100 leader, continuing the Louisville, Ky., rapper’s success […]
“Shellback was bored,” ILYA says, reflecting on how he and the Swedish hit-maker ended up working together for the first time — ultimately changing the course of his career. Having grown up in what he calls “the hood of Sweden,” ILYA’s discovery of music production was a bit of a surprise — quite literally, as he found a CD of the music-making program Dance eJay in a cereal box. From there, he says, he “fell in love with creating.”
By his late teens, in 2005, ILYA signed a publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music and remembers “grinding, grinding, grinding… with not a lot happening.” Several years later, he met Shellback (Britney Spears, P!nk, Taylor Swift), who eventually asked ILYA what he was working on, and later suggested to his close collaborator Max Martin that they should all team up. “Coming up to that point, I had a lot of almosts,” recalls ILYA, now 37. “I had songs with One Direction that just fell off and didn’t make the albums. All those years were so important to learn how to act in the room, how to deal with people’s emotions and all these things leading up to when I got the shot from Shellback and Max.”
Almost immediately, ILYA scored a major win as a co-producer and co-writer on Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea’s 2014 smash, “Problem,” which hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Every time I make music today, I try to channel the energy I had when we did ‘Problem,’ ” says ILYA, who has continued his relationship with Grande for a decade, leading into her current era. “Making that beat, it was like, ‘I’m just going to do me.’ And when that success finally happened… It was unbelievable.”
Ariana Grande, “Yes, And?”
“This whole song was her idea — she had a vision. I remember we were going through chords and she was like, ‘It needs to be more confident. It has to be more sassy.’ When Ari’s describing an emotion she wants to have, I instantly go, ‘What sounds can make that emotion come to life?’ And to me, the 909 drums are what that vibe is. In the bridge there are all these funny Mellotron sounds that are really ’60s, Beatles-esque, and a flute that Max played that I laugh at every time I hear it. Once we finished it, that’s when I fell in love with it.”
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Tate McRae, “Guilty Conscience”
“The first time I worked with [Tate] she seemed very unsure of everything. There was one song we did so many versions of because she couldn’t decide which one was the best. But I think growing up, she feels much more confident in what she likes, which helps me a lot. I’ve never finished a song as fast as this one… it was all her initiative. We wrote it and then had to turn it in that week or the week after. Everything [came] from whatever happened that day.”
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Conan Gray, “Never Ending Song”
“Conan started working with Max for a few days and they cracked this sonic direction, but not the details. And then Max came to me and was like, ‘Conan would love to work with you for this next round.’ Once the song was done, [Max and I] spent a lot of time running stuff through analog gear. Sometimes it’s cool if a song sounds like it’s made quickly — but the details and tasteful stuff that you can get from analog gear, you can’t beat that.”
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This story will appear in the Jan. 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
“S–t’s so beautiful,” Metro Boomin beamed during his Red Bull Symphonic concert at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theatre Thursday night (Oct. 26).
His one-night-only experience marks the West Coast premiere of the Red Bull Symphonic, which showcases a collaboration between a modern artist and a classical musical director, together with a full-scale symphonic orchestra. It made its U.S. debut last November, when Rick Ross teamed up with conductor Maestro Jason Rodgers and the 50-piece, all-Black Orchestra Noir in Atlanta.
But this time around, the hip-hop super-producer partnered with conductor Anthony Parnther (Encanto, Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Creed II, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) and the Symphonic Orchestra to reimagine many of his biggest hits, including Future‘s “Mask Off,” Migos and Lil Uzi Vert‘s “Bad and Boujee,” Post Malone and Quavo‘s “Congratulations,” Kanye West‘s “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1” and his own “Creepin’” alongside The Weeknd and 21 Savage. Considering his star-studded list of collaborators, Metro treated attendees with surprise guests John Legend, Swae Lee, Nav and Roisee to perform songs from his 2022 Billboard 200-topping album Heroes & Villains, and the 2023 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soundtrack he executive produced.
It’s rare to see Metro’s DJ controller not be the main instrument of his show, but the 45-piece ensemble elevated the cinematic, orchestral elements embedded in his production’s DNA. And while the Symphonic Orchestra adhered to every one of Parnther’s precise, nimble hand gestures, the black tux-clad hitmaker still ran the show from behind the booth (and sometimes from standing on top of it), his white-gloved hands waving through the air. Metro’s recent ascent into rarefied air as a producer-turned-superstar artist has allowed him to continue headlining major gigs and building out his own sonic, heroic world on new stages across the world.
“Tonight is a celebration. We celebrate music, we celebrate culture, we celebrate y’all for listening to this music and making it what it is,” Metro told his devout fans.
Check out Billboard‘s five biggest highlights from Metro Boomin’s Red Bull Symphonic concert below.
Metro’s Biggest Hits Sounded Larger Than Life
Metro Boomin stopped by Billboard News during his Billboard cover story shoot to talk about working alongside superstars like Future, 21 Savage and more. But the hitmaker encountered a slight hiccup when he was cooking up beats for Pluto, presumably for their highly anticipated joint album. “They was beats I was making for the next […]
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Source: Shareif Ziyadat / Getty
During a recent podcast appearance, legendary producer Jermaine Dupri opened up a little about his relationship with Janet Jackson, which lasted from 2002 to 2009, according to Complex.
Apparently, Dupri’s reluctance to produce for Janet caused issues in their dating life, which is wild because, of all the win-wins in the world, being able to date Janet Jackson and say you’re responsible for some of her music has to be among the win-winningest.
But during the episode of the Million Dollaz Worth of Game podcast, Dupri was asked how he was able to “pull” Jackson, which, frankly, a lot of people were asking throughout their relationship.
From Complex:
It was suggested that he got her in the studio to produce music, but he clarified that he didn’t want her to think he had some sort of agenda.
“It wasn’t about no music sh*t,” he explained. “I was just on some like hang out. I wasn’t on no music sh*t, though. I never wanted to produce her. We got in an argument about me not producing her because she was around me watching everybody else get hit records. I never wanted her to think that’s what my agenda was. ’Cause so many people was saying that… When Janet met me she got picked up from the airport in a [Bentley] Continental T. … It wasn’t never no situation where I wanted her to believe that I was trying to do this.”
Dupri admitted that he didn’t really know how to talk about the situation with her, and said he didn’t want to “be the person to mess it up.” At the time Janet Jackson was working with the likes of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, so ultimately Dupri believed that she didn’t even need him to work on great records to begin with. “You don’t need me, but in her eyes… It didn’t sound right,” he said. It caused “a little bit” of a rift throughout their relationship.
OK, I get Dupri wanting to make it clear that he wasn’t trying to finesse a studio session into a courtship with the Queen of Pop. But if you’re already in the relationship men all over the world are bound to be envious of—and Janet is clearly more offended by you not producing for her than any “agenda” one might perceive—I’m just saying, maybe the “Welcome to Atlanta” producer was trying to be a little to chivalrous for his own good.
Anyway, Dupri ultimately did end up putting in a lot of work on Jackson’s 2006 album 20 Y.O., but the relationship was still a wrap a few years later. So obviously, his initial refusal to produce for her wasn’t the only issue. It’s still weird that he allowed that to be an issue at all.
I mean, it’s Janet Jackson.
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