Grammy Award-Winning Music Producer and Dallas Native Justin Rhodes Drops Industry Gems Ahead of New Book Release

In his upcoming book These Dreams Ain’t Free, Dallas native and Grammy Award-winning music producer Justin “J Rhodes” Rhodes reflects on his career, throughout which, he has produced tracks for some of the biggest names in the game.

The book serves as a follow-up to his 2015 book These Beats Ain’t Free, in which he shares secrets on how artists can turn their musical passions into a paycheck. But in the almost 10 years since publishing his first book, Rhodes has acquired more wisdom within the music industry — from experiencing what he describes as “highs and lows,” to adding to his collection of plaques, and ultimately earning his first Grammy.

PaperCity catches up with Rhodes via Zoom as he is in the middle of a school week in Boston, Massachusetts — where he is an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music.

How Justin Rhodes Became a Grammy Award-Winning Music Producer

Rhodes spends a lot of time flying back and forth between Boston and Dallas, the latter of which is where his love of music flourished. Some of his fondest childhood memories include going on family road trips, with car rides soundtracked by Tupac, TLC, and Too $hort. It was when Rhodes was a student at Oak Cliff’s Carter High School that he decided he wanted to pursue music as a career.

“In high school, I was an artist, and I didn’t want to do too much music production,” Rhodes recalls. “My homie was the music producer.” He explains that it was a different day and age, and the technology wasn’t where it is today. “If you wanted to be a music producer, you had to buy some kind of hardware,” he says. “One day, my homie was trying to make a beat, and I didn’t like it that much, so I just dabbled with it, then came up with a cool beat.”

Around his sophomore year of college at the University of North Texas, Rhodes began to explore the production side. One of the first software he used was Reason Studios 1.5. “If anybody knows that software, I’m dating myself,” he says, laughing. “That was a long time ago.”

By locking in on the production side and honing his sonic craft, Rhodes became a go-to in the industry. To date, Rhodes has earned production on co-writing credits for songs by artists like Lecrae, Slim Thug, Talib Kweli, Rick Ross, Ab-Soul, and more.

Earlier this year, Rhodes won a Grammy Award for his work on Killer Mike’s Michael album, which won the Grammy for Best Rap Album.

A Look Inside the Music Industry

But despite his many accomplishments, Rhodes says that “funny money” is still a pressing issue among artists and producers.

“I make more money from sync, which is when the music that I’ve been blessed to create gets placed in film and TV,” Rhodes says. “That’s not ‘funny money,’ it’s a straight contract. It’s like a cool, tangible way for the music that you create to get actual dollars, and everything is written in stone.”

Rhodes notes that while independent artists often get taken advantage of through streaming and the minimal payouts that come from platforms like Spotify, they can have their benefits if artists know how to promote properly. Tricky contracts are mainly what’s pushing artists away from the major label system, Rhodes says.

“As far as [label] advances, they’re bad loans,” Rhodes says, “and just being a professor and seeing and ushering students out into the world, I try to break down how you really can get paid in this industry.”

He explains that streaming can be great for some artists. “I don’t think Taylor Swift is complaining about streaming,” he says. “But there’s a finite amount of people who really can eat off of that. You can make more money from selling 100 albums than you can get from streaming [the album] a million times. We’ve got to get to the root of really valuing our art. I think that’s the biggest part — up-and-coming artists believing and knowing that they can make a viable career from this because art has been devalued in a lot of ways.”

Music Producer, Filmmaker, and Author

Music nerds and hip-hop heads can look forward to Rhodes dropping more gems in These Dreams Ain’t Free. At the time of our conversation, Rhodes is still putting the finishing touches on the book but is eyeing a release in the first quarter of 2025.

This book is seven years in the making — a time in which Rhodes says he learned many lessons.

“I’ve done so many more things in my career,” Rhodes says. “I’m deep into films now —  writing, directing, and editing them.”

Rhodes recently directed a post-apocalyptic movie titled King of Dallas set in Dallas in 2097. In the movie, people of African descent are the lone survivors of a global plague that killed 99.9 percent of the world’s population. In addition to directing, Rhodes gave a spin at acting as the film’s lead, Octavius.

“I’m blessed to be a professor at Berklee,” he says. “[I’m] still talking a lot about music, but with the changes in the industry, and the changes in art, and all the different changes within the nine or 10-year span, it’s more expansive. It took a lot of living life, a lot of wins, a lot of losses, and a lot of things had to take place in the interim for me to actually have something else to write about. But I’m loving the book.”