One of my artist is viral right now- here's what it looks like behind the scenes
And what I'm doing to keep things moving
Going viral us lucky. What you do next is not
The reason it’s so important for artists to post content consistently, is you need as many attempts to break into the algorithm as possible. And sometimes, you just get lucky.
Two weeks ago someone attended Angrybaby’s festival set at Lost in Dreams fest in Los Angeles. And during it, they got a video of a girl walking up to a security guard and making out with him. The video wasn’t exactly viral, but what we noticed right away was that during this interaction… Angrybaby’s song I Found Love was being played live. Ironic right? So- we knew we had a story here.
What to do when you have something like this on your hands
First step was for Angrybaby to duet the video and give his reaction. This is low hanging fruit. So we had a post go live of this, and it got 1MM views:
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But the way you keep things going and moving, is you get other pages involved. We pitched an entire “Are festivals the best place to find love?” campaign with a media company and had multiple posts go up that all had SONG FOCUSSED messaging in order to make sure people paid attention to the song:
Then we went live with the videos, and the videos we seeded got almost 25 million views and over 100,000 shares
What I did next is I searched a few keywords and came across someone I remember did a video a while ago breaking down different styles of house music who had built an audience of festival fans on her page. I reached out to her with my video idea for her which was basically to green screen the original video with a reaction to her audience. Simple and I knew green screens were doing well. She posted it and overnight got over 1.5 million views and currently has 4.5 Million views:
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The video did amazing, but again- we didn’t see a MASSIVE spike. This is because the only note about the song name was in her caption, which people rarely read. However, the real effect was shown in Angrybaby’s festival set at Outside Lands. It was an early set, at a smaller stage. Yet we noticed over 1500 people added this set to their calendar the before Sunday at the festival. I was curious of all the mentions of Angybaby and the set going viral itself would lead to some buzz around his set.
And he packed it out:
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As I was writing this post, preparing to talking about how I’ve posted it three times on my own page with no luck - I realized my video is actually going viral for the song which is as ironic as it gets. The reason my video , although it has less views than Ade’s video (mine currently has 800k views), is working better for the song from a streaming perspective we’re seeing is because my post is very SONG TITLE focussed. I wrote the song name on the top of the screen as “I Found Love starts playing and they literally found love”, and near the bottom of screen— I wrote the song title. This forced people to read the song name and realize that it matches the video so well of the two strangers “finding love”.
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The result? The song had back to back 10k streaming days, and a has doubled it’s streams week over week. And while we haven’t been able to get the song to 50k streams/day yet, all of these things matter and add up, plus the festival set moment will surely give him leverage for later set times at more festivals.
While this isn’t the most viral song on earth, these things I think are worth noting while building an artist early in their career. Last year, Angrybaby started the year with 8,000 monthly listeners. Since we started working together, he played awesome festivals like CRSSD and Outside Lands, sold out shows in NY, SF, LA, has two songs nearing 10 MM streams, and we’re gonna keep pushing.
More updates later, but for now I wanted to show you what we were cooking on while we have a moment and I think this one still has legs.
Steve I want to know which media company you used!!