Benny Blanco

American record producer and songwriter Benny Blanco has collaborated on a slew of hits with many pop artists, including Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, and Maroon 5. An Interscope Records executive has called him “one of the most sought after hit makers in contemporary music.” He has earned 11 Grammy nominations for major categories and has won an award for young artists from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Early life and beginnings

Blanco was born Benjamin Joseph Levin and grew up in a northeastern Virginia urban community called Reston, in Fairfax county, one of the highest-income counties in the United States. He has told The New York Times that his father, Andrew Levin, worked in the “intimate apparel business,” and his mother, Sandra Beth Levin, worked in assisted living. “Ever since I was like a baby I was into music,” he said in a 2021 Augustman interview. “I would always like bang on the pots and pans.” He said that he started “making little songs” as early as age five or six, and at age nine he won a contest to record his first song in a music studio.

During high school Blanco used the school library to access the Internet and share his music with figures in the industry via Myspace. He also cold-called the offices of record producers such as Jimmy Iovine and Polow Da Don (Jamal Jones), telling their secretaries he was an attorney. “They would pass me through and I would be like, ‘Please let me play you my demo,’ ” he told Vibe in 2012. At first Blanco aspired to become a rapper, but as a teenager he decided to focus instead on making beats and producing music. One weekend he went to New York City and slept in a McDonald’s at Times Square between trying to get meetings with figures in the industry. He landed his first professional achievement when he was 14 or 15, making a beat that was used in an adult film. Blanco graduated from South Lakes High School in Reston in 2006 and shortly after interned for Disco D (David Shayman), who had produced 50 Cent’s song “Ski Mask Way.” In the early months of the internship Blanco took a bus every weekend to Disco D’s studio in New York. Eventually, he enrolled at the Institute of Audio Research, in Greenwich Village, that has since closed.

Breakthrough and rise in the industry

Through Disco D, Blanco met and formed a duo with the rapper Spank Rock (Naeem Juwan). They released an EP (extended play; a recording that contains more tracks than a single but fewer than a full musical album) that caught the attention of the songwriters-producers Łukasz Sebastian Gottwald (popularly known as Dr. Luke) and Max Martin, who had produced Kelly Clarkson’s single “Since U Been Gone.” Dr. Luke and Martin became Blanco’s mentors for the next four years. In 2008 Blanco collaborated with them to produce Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl” and Britney Spears’s song “Circus,” both of which went multiplatinum. “Luke and Max Martin—like Timbaland and a Pharrell—paved the way for me,” Blanco told Variety in 2021. “Sitting in a room working with Max and Luke was like learning how to shoot hoops with Michael Jordan and LeBron James.”

Over the next several years, Blanco wrote or produced many other chart-topping hits, including Maroon 5’s “Moves like Jagger,” Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite,” Ed Sheeran’s “Don’t,” and several singles by Kesha, including “Tik Tok,” “Your Love Is My Drug,” and “Die Young.” By 2013 he had been involved in making 13 singles that reached the Billboard Top 10, including six number one hits.

Blanco prefers to use traditional instruments and cheap keyboards, instead of composing music on computers. Early in his career one of his favorite instruments was a small Yamaha keyboard that he bought for $25 at a yard sale.

Blanco has said that almost all of his producing gigs come from personal referrals. “I don’t place songs through record labels—everything’s really organic,” he told The New York Times in 2018. “I think maybe once or twice in my career, maybe, I’ve done a song with someone who’s not my friend.” He has downplayed his skills as an instrumentalist and has often said that he works by instinct, making artists feel comfortable and letting music emerge naturally out of the time they spend together. “I think, more than anything I’m like a therapist,” he told Augustman. Describing these sessions, he said, “We’ll laugh, we might cry, we might go and eat some food and before you know it—our hands are moving and we’re like making a song and you never even know, and now we have a song done.”

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Later career and other ventures

Since 2014, Blanco has launched two record labels of his own, Mad Love Records and Friends Keep Secrets, in collaboration with Interscope Records. He has also released albums as a lead artist, including Friends Keep Secrets in 2018, Friends Keep Secrets 2 in 2021, and I Said I Love You First in March 2025, the last of which he produced with Selena Gomez, whom he’d become engaged to the previous year.

Blanco has often been noted for his vivid social media presence. With the chef Matty Matheson, he has hosted two cooking shows on his YouTube channel. Blanco also authored (with Jess Damuck) a cookbook, Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends, published by HarperCollins in 2024. He has said that if he weren’t a musician, he’d like to be a chef and open his own restaurant.