6 Marketing Lessons from the New Music Industry
The content creation process is changing, and the music industry is showing us much of it in real-time if you pay close enough attention.
With the Christmas season behind us, chart-topping mainstays like Mariah Carey and Brenda Lee have begun to fade from Apple Music and Spotify's heavy rotation. We can learn a lot from how Mariah Carey, the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas, has turned the season (beginning at 12:01 am on November 1 for her) into a money and content-making machine.
But that's not why I'm here.
Yesterday, the #1 song globally on Spotify was I'm Good (Blue) by David Guetta and Bebe Rexha, with more than 6.8 million streams. This is significant for a couple of reasons:
1. The song was never even meant to come out.
David Guetta first played the track, a remix of Eiffel 65's 1999 song Blue (Da Ba Dee), during his set at a music festival in 2017. The performance was actually the only time the song would be played. It was never released in an official capacity by Guetta, Rexha, or their record labels.
2. Content can have many lives
It wasn't until August 2022 that a TikTok user uploaded a snippet of the 2017 performance to the platform. It quickly went viral, amassing 130k creations, 500 million views, and loud demands for the whole song from fans.
This caught the attention of Guetta and Rexha, and they knew they had to strike fast to capitalize on the virality of the moment. Creators should always think beyond the “right now” when conceptualizing content.
3. Be nimble.
When it was clear there was a demand for the full version of the song, Guetta and Rexha got in the studio and recorded a new version of the song. They began teasing the collaboration on TikTok, sending demand skyrocketing.
By the end of August, less than a month after the snippet had gone viral, the official version of the song was released and began its ascent up the music charts. A music video, award show performances, and more followed the song.
4. Believe in your own hype.
Millions of pieces of content are created and uploaded across social media daily. Some things hit right away. Others take time to find an audience. If you make good content, it will find an audience. Trust the process.
5. Not all content is evergreen.
Nor should it be. But it may find relevancy through different channels later in time. Capitalizing on these situations can result in some fantastic success stories.
6. Everybody is an influencer.
The music industry has changed. Record labels no longer hold all the power over what music becomes popular. More and more, we're witnessing the fans choose what "popular music" is. Anyone can be a tastemaker, as evidenced by I'm Good's success being attributed to a random TikTok user creating a viral sound. That extends beyond the music industry into all media and creator-based platforms.
Conclusions
This brings us back to January 3, 2023. A remix of a song from 1999 played once at a music festival in 2017 topped the global Spotify streaming charts. It's a remarkable achievement neither artist had ever expected when they cut the track many years back.
It's proof that good content will always have an audience, similar to how Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill broke records over the summer after appearing in Stranger Things or how Mariah Carey dominates radio airplay throughout November and December year after year.
TL;DR
Don't just think about today and tomorrow when creating content. Consider how your content can live on and evolve as platforms change and audience appetites and expectations shift. David Guetta and Bebe Rexha weren't counting on TikTok when they recorded I'm Good back in 2017, but as their song racks up millions of streams daily in 2023, thanks to a viral moment, it didn't even matter.
