After college, Leslie moved back in with his parents and convinced his dad to buy him $15,000 worth of recording equipment on credit. He scored one of his first placements, New Edition’s “Hot 2Nite,” while interning with a producer who worked for Diddy. He landed more high-profile gigs after signing to Tommy Mottola’s Universal imprint, Casablanca, in 2003, producing filler cuts for mega-stars like Britney Spears, Beyoncé, and LL Cool J. His own planned first album got shelved, but Leslie had already found the artist who’d help him fulfill his mogul dreams. He met Cassie, then an 18-year-old model, at a nightclub in 2004, and they struck up both a working and personal relationship, which was initially kept under wraps.
As the music industry scrambled to understand social media’s potential, Leslie adapted. He used MySpace as a digital billboard, attracting followers with photos and videos of Cassie—and, eventually, a song. That online popularity helped catapult her bubbly 2006 breakout “Me & U” (which Leslie produced) to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, creating a new blueprint. Artists like Cassie and, later, Soulja Boy (whose 2007 sensation “Crank That” broke on YouTube) proved how quickly an unknown musician could turn internet notoriety into offline fame. “Ryan launched and promoted a completely unknown artist who went to No. 1 for seven weeks as a result of a viral experience. Normally, I would think that would be a mountain too high to climb,” Mottola told The Boston Globe in 2008, citing the U.S. Airplay chart. Leslie, he said, was “very plugged into the new technology that’s going to be a critical piece of how music is made and distributed.”
“I’m at 100,000 friends on MySpace and 14,000 plays a day on my little music player,” Leslie told the Globe in the same article, months before his debut’s release. His digital-first approach signaled where the music business was headed, with social media as a primary metric. “I’d love to be at 60,000 plays and half a million friends,” he continued. “In the meantime I can be making records, continuing to be really strongly entrenched in the online video community, releasing behind-the-scenes stuff. And when there’s an insane, incredible demand for my album that cannot be contained anymore, I can put it out tomorrow.”
Diddy noticed the success of “Me & U,” too. He signed Cassie to Bad Boy, calling Leslie the “new-age Teddy Riley.” It was the partnership that nourished a thousand gossip blogs, fueled by rumors that Cassie had dropped Leslie as both a producer and boyfriend and entered a relationship with Diddy. Unlike Usher, who’d drawn on his own messy celebrity dating life for 2004’s career-making Confessions, Leslie didn’t attempt to capitalize on the ensuing love triangle in his music. But he has said his split with Cassie quietly inspired records like “Diamond Girl” and “Out of the Blue,” where he reflexively blames both parties for a breakup over a spiraling ringtone of a beat. “I should’ve been a better friend,” Leslie suggests, then wonders, “What would you do?/If I left you out of the blue?/Would you fight back tears while your heart gets torn to pieces?”
