Ryan's love for hip hop and data inspired her to create ProTag. She grew up listening to 90s West Coast rap and considers this an ode her 14 year old self, who was often punished growing up for rapping the explicit lyrics of her favorite rap songs.

In middle school, she developed a stan-like interest in the music by Pharrell Williams. Through her research of Williams, Ryan learned he was one-half of the production duo, The Neptunes, who, by 2003, produced 43% of the songs played on US radio. This got her interested in learning about the beat makers of her other favorite songs to see how they compared to The Neptunes. There was a wealth of information on the web about a song's performers, but, unfortunately, not much about its producers, and certainly not in a digestible format.

She appreciated Genius' (formerly Rap Genius) documentation of producers and thus chose their API for ProTag. Her goal is to shed more light on the people behind the scenes of her favorite genre of music and mesh her interests and experiences data analyzing and modeling as a former Financial Data Analyst and Economics grad to visualize the ever-tangling web of the hip-hop music industry.

Ryan hopes to share ProTag with The Neptunes and every producer she features on her site and expand it to visualize the production data of other genres of music.


Want to learn more about ProTag or Ryan, leave feedback, request a feature of your favorite producer, or introduce her to a music producer?! Contact her!