Musicians Are Thinking Like Marketers
Nursing home performances, threatening videos, and catchy covers—artists are going to great lengths to build audiences online.
Two years ago, Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine posted a TikTok with the caption, “The label are begging me for ‘low fi tik toks’ so here you go. pls send help. ☠️ x”.
Other large artists have also blamed their label for forcing them to make TikToks. FKA twigs saying, “it’s true all record labels ask for are tiktoks and i got told off today for not making enough effort.” Halsey shared, “My record company is saying I can’t release [the song] unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok.”
While posting on social media may seem like an unnecessary evil to larger artists, smaller musicians are finding it’s the exact thing that’s allowed them to have any audience at all.
In the past year I’ve noticed musicians market themselves on social media in extraordinary ways. They are creating recurring series, starting videos with unexpected hooks, and using song covers to increase their reach. Musicians are thinking like marketers—and it’s working.
The band Ray Bull has gained over 1M followers thanks to this viral cover series and catchy performances. I asked them about the role social media has played in their music career and they quickly replied, “I mean we owe pretty much almost everything to our social media strategy and just our presence online. It's like you have to be good at making music and then you have to be good at marketing yourself too.”
While the idea of posting TikToks is new, the concept of an artist going to great lengths to promote their music is not. Ray Bull tells me, “We sometimes joke around thinking of artists in the past. It's like Thom Yorke and Joni Mitchell weren’t waking up being like ‘I got to make a TikTok video’…I like a lot of old country music and I know back in that day it was all about going from radio station to radio station, trying to convince people to get you on. It was still a crazy effort to try and get people to pay attention. It's just something different now.”
Now, instead of running to radio stations, bands are covering popular songs in nursing homes in an attempt to go viral. Last month, I came across a video of the band CUB SPORT singing Addison Rae’s Diet Pepsi for their “102 year old Nana and her friends”. It has 4.1M views on TikTok and 685K on Instagram. One commenter said, “okay i started out laughing but the song and vocals are good so i just started vibing”.
Ray Bull also built a good portion of their audience through covers. In their popular series “Songs that are the same” bandmate Aaron Graham will start singing a cover of one song and then Tucker Elkins will come in with another song cover that sounds similar. This one mashing up Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap and Oblivion by Grimes has 4.7M views. The Temper Trap commented “Woah cool 😁”. You can see nine of out Ray Bull’s ten most popular videos are from this series.
When I asked Ray Bull about this these covers, they told me that it “really boosted our visibility and our profile. The whole idea was like…we just need to go viral somehow. We need to get followers. And we thought that if people are just following us, they'll naturally think, Oh, I wonder if they have any music I can listen to. Which now is kind of silly, but there's also a certain percentage of people that it did work on. These mashups boosted our monthly listeners and the people who knew about us.”
Of course, a band can’t grow with covers alone. To get viewers to care about a musician’s original music, a clever hook is vital. The other week I stopped scrolling at the sight of a guy standing in the middle of the street, playing guitar, with one end of a rope tied around his ankle and the other end of the rope tied to a driving car. The video was from Joe P, an artist with 398K followers on TikTok. As he sang in the video, the car pulled the rope—an anxiety-induced ticking time bomb that did, indeed, make me watch until the end. Someone commented, “idk this guy but i think im gonna go listen to more”.
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The artist UPSAHL, who has 992K TikTok followers, will often start off a video with “Make my song _____ in 60 seconds”. It intrigues you whether you know her work or not—pulling in people who are just curious to see the mechanics that go into making a song.
When Ray Bull performs original songs, they often have a microphone set up in an unexpected place—train tracks, a lake, Times Square—and essentially “perform” for their TikTok audience. They rarely post concert footage, instead opting for what feels like a private show for their followers. They tell me, “It's never just ‘Here's our song. What do you think?’ We're always trying to think of something that we can use to deliver the song—something valuable and interesting that has a song inside of it.”
Speaking of delivering songs, some of the most successful musicians on TikTok aren’t afraid to deliver their songs over and over and over again. One of artist hemlock springs’ most popular videos is simply text that says “y’all the way i teased the bridge for months and it’s the chorus that goes viral” with her song “girlfriend” playing under it. After a brief scroll, I can see that hemlock springs has used her own song “girlfriend” in at least 45 videos. Like her video text suggests, it’s not uncommon for an artist to tease a chorus or a bridge repeatedly to get their audience excited for a new release. PinkPantheress does a particularly good job at this—essentially guaranteeing listeners on day one of a song being out.
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Artists put in all of this work because having an original song go viral on TikTok has real impact. As Ray Bull tells me, “We put out this EP and one song specifically just caught on TikTok and Instagram—and we definitely saw a huge boost in our numbers specifically for that song. And then over the course of that month, every time we would post that song, the next day we would see a clear spike.”
Benson Boone, who rose to fame in part thanks to his jump-through-camera transitions (this video has 70M views), just performed at the VMAs. His song “Beautiful Things” is a TikTok-turned-global-chart-hit and is 3x Platinum according to Warner Records.
Still, it’s a lot of work for artists to market the music they make. When I asked Ray Bull if they had a team helping them with social media, they jokingly gestured behind them saying “Get out here guys!”. No one came out. While the two bandmates say they love the creative aspect of running their own social, it can be quite time consuming. They told me they focus on content pretty much every other day. They describe it as, “Music day, content day, music day, content day.”
When small businesses owners or artists vent to me that they feel like they have to post on social media, I always say “You don’t”. I work in social media and believe in social media, but I’d never force anyone to create content who doesn’t want to. And record labels absolutely should not force their artists to log on. What I do say is that social media can be a powerful tool if you choose to embrace it. Yes, it’s cringe at times—and maybe that’s why larger artists feel the need to pin the ick on a label. But if you can find a way in, that still feels true to you, it can unlock a lot—even for big artists. When Florence Welch started posting those lo-fi videos her label so desperately wanted, fans commented “Florence I’m sorry the label is right we love these.”
When I asked Ray Bull for any final thoughts, they told me, “All your heroes today have done cringey stuff to get to where they are. Part of the crappy part of being an artist is you have to do some stuff that you don't like. You owe it to yourself to use these platforms. They can really help you out.”
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Fantastic post! And while I do agree with the overall theme - to sell is human, and artists have always had to jump through hoops to promote themselves, the market today is substantially different...
The algorithm-driven nature of these platforms (especially TikTok) can feel impersonal and chaotic. Success can hinge on trends that often have little to do with the music itself. And based on your writing, it seems that I doesn't really matter how big you are, there's always this latent expectation that you have to play by these rules.
It feels more like a survival game rather than an authentic exchange between artist and audience. And with all of these fears around AI and artificial music, I worry we're headed towards manufacturing everything, less soul, less meaning, less art.
Hopefully the reality is less grim than what I'm making it out to be in my head.
Tessa Violet is also such a great example of this! She has a track record of turning her songs into viral transition trends (which isn't that surprising, given her background as a YouTuber)