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XO Records Co-Founder La Mar Taylor Becomes Billboard Canada's Inaugural 40 Under 40 Visionary: Interview
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“Everything that I’ve learned, everything that I’ve done, all the mistakes I’ve made and the triumphs I’ve achieved — I feel like it was leading up to this moment,” he reflects to Billboard Canada.
“That, I think, is the best show we’ve done on the whole tour, because of that story — just some kids coming out of Scarborough, no name, no identity, no nothing, selling out six shows in Toronto. It’s mindblowing. It shows people from Toronto that there’s no limitations. You can be whoever, whatever you want to be.”
That tour, which has sold out hundreds of stadiums throughout the world since it started in 2023, has toppled records and become the biggest R&B tour in history, according to Billboard Box Score. It’s the latest achievement in a career marked by them: handfuls of chart records for The Weeknd, including the longest-reigning Hot 100 No. 1 ever in “Blinding Lights,” a thriving empire of music, film and fashion, an incubator helping the next generation of creatives, and even a Super Bowl halftime show.
It’s a list of achievements many would look back on fondly when they retire. But for the 35-year-old Taylor and his creative collaborators, there are still many years yet to come.
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“When you think about what we've done, an artist usually does those things towards the end of their career,” he says. “But we did it in the middle of ours, and we still have so much more space to grow. We’ll be on this journey a long time. God willing, it never stops.”
When Taylor first met Abel Tesfaye, the man behind The Weeknd persona, they were both students at Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute, a high school in the former Toronto suburb of Scarborough. According to their oft-told origin story, the two friends dropped out of school together to pursue their parallel dreams of a career in the arts — Tesfaye with music, Taylor with film photography.
At the time, Tesfaye was working on an R&B mixtape and needed an album cover, so he asked Taylor to help shoot it. His eerie black-and-white photo of a young woman with her face obscured by a pack of balloons perfectly fit the project’s moody, debaucherous R&B sound, and it quickly became the cover of his era-defining 2011 debut as The Weeknd, House of Balloons.
“We launched that project and it just went into the stratosphere,” he remembers.
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La Mar TaylorCourtesy Photo
That breakout moment sent them on a trajectory few could have predicted. Long before they were conceiving high-concept album trilogies, collaborating with producers like Max Martin and Daft Punk and producing feature films set in their world, they were a group of ambitious young artists figuring out how to execute their big ideas.
Their shared do-it-yourself spirit launched XO Records, but it was born out of necessity. Looking back at those creatively fertile years in the early 2010s from Los Angeles, where he lives between Miami and Toronto, Taylor recalls a different creative landscape in Canada.
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"When we were coming up, there was no creative community like the one that exists today," he says.
The city was brimming with talented people with fruitful ideas, he explains, but there weren’t easily accessible collectives of artists to collaborate with, or an infrastructure or industry to support them.
"One of Canada’s biggest exports is creativity,” Taylor argues. “But we don’t have a functioning creative economy to really sustain the creative talent that we have.”
It’s getting better, he says, but there are still many barriers. In a big American city like L.A. or New York, you’re surrounded by opportunities, funding and mentorship, he explains, but it’s rarer in Canada. As recent studies have shown, that’s especially true for young Black voices, who contribute significant value to the Canadian music industry, but often face systemic racism, underrepresentation and other obstacles.
“That was one of the biggest challenges and it’s one of the reasons why my partners and I created HXOUSE, was to create that equal place, to bring the world to Toronto,” he says.
HXOUSE is the creative incubator Taylor started with Tesfaye and Ahmed Ismail in 2018 to give studio and workspace, as well as mentorship and opportunity, to Toronto’s budding creative community and entrepreneurs.
It’s become a hotbed of talent, launching the careers of “tenants” including Mr. Saturday (fashion designer and creative director in residence at Roots), Patricia Roque (a global creative concept design director at Jordan Brand), among many musicians and artists.
HXOUSE has offered programming and space, as well as networking opportunities and inspiration from major speakers and mentors like superstar producer Metro Boomin, filmmakers The Safdie Brothers, artist and stage director Es Devlin and more.
“We've built up an amazing Rolodex of some of the brightest, most talented minds,” Taylor says. “I think we’ve uplifted the spirits of whoever was there. A five-to-10 minute conversation, even a 60 second conversation, can change someone's whole trajectory — even just by telling them to keep going. ‘You’ve got it. Whatever it is, you’re going to figure it out if you just keep going.’ It shows them that they matter and can achieve whatever their ambitions are.”
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That’s the philosophy of Taylor, who has his motto and now company name “No More Dreams” tattooed on his neck: treat your ambitions as achievable goals, not far-off pipe dreams.
It’s what’s guided his own career, which falls somewhere between music, art, fashion, film and entrepreneurship. He can’t define it, and doesn’t want to, because that would create limitations for himself.
“I was always a fan of this famous Bruce Lee quote, ‘be water,’” he explains. “Take the shape of whatever it is that you're trying to do and never box yourself in. I've done everything in the arts, whether doing it myself or being able to communicate through collaborations. I'm able to articulate my creative perspective — and same in business. It’s about having an understanding of knowing what it is that you want to do, knowing what it is that you want to say and knowing how you want to bring it to the world.”
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La Mar TaylorCourtesy Photo
That’s how he works with The Weeknd, helping him translate his big ideas to wax, to arenas, to the screen or to the biggest stages like the Super Bowl. “Abel draws the map, and we chart the course,” he says. However lofty the concept, Taylor and his collaborators figure out a way to execute.
The After Hours Til Dawn Tour is a narrative-driven, world-building translation of The Weeknd’s trilogy of albums After Hours (2020), Dawn FM (2022) and Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025). It features huge setpieces, masks and costumes and plenty of pyrotechnics. It’s been dissected online, with interpretations finding new meaning in every move like it’s a Christopher Nolan movie — something that Taylor lives to see.
“Whenever I go on Reddit and I go on forums and I see fans breaking down symbolism and what things mean — the choreography and Abel on stage, the set list and the visuals on the screen. I love all of it. I love that creative discourse and I love people coming up with their own ideas on what they think the story is. To me, that’s everything.”
Taylor got to the point where he could create a vision as big as this by always pushing himself to outperform the last thing he did and keep striving for more. That’s something he encourages young artists to do too.
He won’t sugarcoat his opinion, though: the Canadian industry is not in a good place.
“Canada is in a very dire situation right now,” he says, candidly. “The economy is really bad, and it's getting worse. Leadership sucks, and there's no one at the helm to really bring the country to a place that we need it to be. Resources are very limiting and limited. No one's able to afford a house. Rent is skyrocketing. There's lack of opportunity, lack of resources, and a lot of creatives are getting priced out of creativity — not because they want to, but because they have to focus on the things that are going to pay the bills and cover rent and make ends meet.”
In a way, it resembles the environment Taylor and Tesfaye came up in — when the abundance of talent but lack of infrastructure sent the most promising talents to seek opportunities in the United States or Europe. Taylor’s ambition is to create the space for talent to thrive in Toronto without having to look elsewhere, but he’s also realistic. If the systems aren’t there, you have to be extra persistent and self-reliant. Still, he believes resilience and creativity can thrive even in hardship.
“Tough times create strong individuals,” he says. “My advice would be to just lock in and really hone your craft. Be really f–ing exceptional at it. There's no room to be mediocre — be great.”
La Mar Taylor is the winner of the Billboard Canada 40 Under 40 Visionary Award and will accept the special honour at the Billboard Canada 40 Under 40 celebration at the W Toronto on November 20. Tickets are available here.
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