Beachcrimes

From other people's hits to their own name

Beachcrimes is a Los Angeles pair, Ryan McMahon and Tia Tia, who worked for roughly eight years as professional songwriter-producers before attaching their own name to a record. McMahon came out of the production trio Captain Cuts, which was signed to Epic Records, and holds credits with Halsey, The Chainsmokers and Bebe Rexha, along with Walk The Moon's 'Shut Up & Dance'. Tia Tia has written for Justin Bieber, Ava Max and Anitta, and puts out pop music under her own name. By the time they started Beachcrimes, both had a decade of service work behind them and a working knowledge of how a major-label single actually gets made.

The project began in early 2023, and the reasoning they gave for it was less about creative frustration than ownership. Writing for other artists meant handing over the upside; building an audience of their own, from the first week, meant the people who turned up early could share in whatever the project became. That framing shaped the mechanics of the launch more than it shaped the music.

A song every fortnight, split AM and PM

The opening plan was unusually specific: 24 songs across 48 weeks, one new track every two weeks, each minted as an NFT on Sound.xyz. The catalogue was divided into two lanes from the start. The AM material was the brighter, radio-leaning side; the PM material was built for a club. The split was not a marketing conceit so much as an admission that the duo write in two registers and did not want to pick one.

The first four releases under that system — 'Let's Play House', 'Do It Better', 'One Step' and 'Melody (In My Head)' — all sold out. Within six months they had widened the plan to a dozen releases and were pushing the cadence closer to weekly. The output was later gathered into two 2023 albums, AM and PM, which remain the spine of the catalogue: 'Drive (All Day All Night)' sits on the former, 'Elevator' on the latter, and both are still among the most-played tracks under the name.

Making the records in public

The distribution half of Beachcrimes has always been as deliberate as the writing. The duo built the audience through hour-long TikTok live sessions in which they write and finish four complete tracks in 15-minute blocks, taking a prompt and turning it into something playable while people watch. The sessions double as raw material: the footage gets cut up and redistributed across platforms so there is something posted daily without a separate shoot.

The numbers moved quickly on the back of it. Within about nine months of launching, the project was reporting 700,000 monthly listeners on Spotify — a figure that had taken neither of them that long with other artists' records, but which neither had ever owned outright. Both eventually moved onto the project full-time rather than fitting it around session work.

The method has a cost that is visible in the catalogue: a very large number of singles, released fast, with no long gaps in which to build a conventional campaign. Beachcrimes have essentially traded the album cycle for a continuous feed.

2026: the year the labels came in

The current phase has been a slow move from fully self-released drops towards outside imprints. 'Hola' and 'Don't Stop The Music' arrived in 2025, followed through 2026 by 'Baile Juice', 'Good Energy', 'Wanna Be' and 'This & That'.

The clearest marker of standing came on 2 July 2026, when 'Angel City' — a collaboration with the British production duo Punctual — was released through Monstercat Instinct. It runs 2 minutes 43 seconds, which is short even by current house standards, and it is the first Beachcrimes record to come out through an established dance independent rather than their own channels. For a project that spent three years proving it did not need a label to reach an audience, it reads less like a signing than a swap of distribution for reach.

The most recent release is 'I'm About It', out on 18 September 2026. As of early October 2026 it is the newest thing in the catalogue, and the fortnightly rhythm of the early years has settled into something closer to a single every four to six weeks.

The circuit: clubs and pool decks, not festival fields

Beachcrimes tour as a DJ pair, and the booking pattern reflects where the music works rather than where the prestige is. Recent and upcoming dates sit squarely in the American club and day-party circuit: Marquee New York on 8 August 2026, Clarendon Ballroom's nightclub and rooftop in Arlington, Virginia on 10 October 2026, and HQ2 Nightclub and Beachclub at the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City on 30 October 2026. These are 21-and-over rooms with a late start, not stages with set times printed on a lanyard.

The schedule is thin by touring-act standards — a handful of dates listed at any one time, often a month or more apart — which fits a project whose primary venue is still a phone screen. Ticket listings put the average resale price at around 47 dollars, and support acts are generally not billed; the duo are the booking, with the venue's resident DJs filling the hours either side.

What has not yet happened is a festival-scale move. There is no verified main-stage or large-festival booking in the public record for 2026, and no announced headline tour with its own name and routing. On present evidence Beachcrimes remain a studio-first project that plays out, rather than a touring act that records between runs.