Hey. Quick pattern from twelve years of this.
Every few years music marketing finds a new channel. For about eighteen months it converts like magic, then everyone piles in, the platform raises the rent, and the whole industry moves on to the next one like nothing happened.
I’ve been in every one of these. Here’s the pattern, and here’s what nobody wants to say about it.
2013: direct to fan
The first major direct-to-fan campaign I worked on was Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet. It ran on websites. Fans moved between them, found pieces of the story, found the music, and told each other where to look. The blog era powered the whole thing. No platform sat in the middle, and the fans did the discovering.
Three years later we launched travisscott.com and sold merch and album bundles straight off it, no store in between, no label taking the middle. Tech had been doing direct-to-consumer for years. Music was late, and being late was the whole advantage. Almost nobody else was doing it, so it worked in a way it would never work again.
That’s the first rule of every meta. It works because you’re early. Not because it’s right.
Then ads
When we started running paid ads, the targeting was so precise it felt like cheating. You could find the exact person who’d buy the record and put it in front of them for almost nothing. Conversion rates were absurd.
Then everyone learned the same trick. Costs climbed. The people we were targeting started ignoring the ads, because there were now forty of them. What felt unfair became a tax.
Then organic
TikTok and Reels did something clever. They put themselves between the ads. Suddenly the content that mattered wasn’t the ad, it was the thing your fans made in the gaps around it.
The job changed overnight. Stop buying attention, start earning it. Get fans, creators, anyone with a phone to interact with the record, share the record, use the record. Sound of the day. The more people who touched it, the more it moved.
And for a while it really moved. December 2021, I was in Sweden for a pandemic Christmas. Tim Collins had recently launched Creed Media and was showing me the ropes on a Swedish Christmas when I pulled up a trend forming around Aaryan Shah’s “Renegade,” a record on our label. He looked at it and said we’d caught it at the right moment. We engaged Creed that week to fuel the momentum, and on the same trip I hit up TDE and got Zacari on the remix. It tipped into a trend that ran without us. Five years on the sound has over 64,000 TikTok creations, Doja Cat got on it herself, and the record is past half a billion streams. Off one sound and good timing. That was the meta at full power.
And the creators kept moving up. Dixie and Charli D’Amelio went from making the videos to being what the videos were about. Creators stopped being the channel and became the stature. Some of them are the artists now, and they’re starting to convert like it.
Then the industry did what it always does and industrialised it. Clipping: hundreds of accounts, paid per view, cutting every stream and interview into thirty-second moments and flooding the feed. Organic in format, paid in mechanics. Once you can order ten thousand clips, going viral stops meaning anything.
The crack
Here’s where it breaks. Run the same play today. You go viral on TikTok. Millions of uses. You check the streaming numbers and the record isn’t resonating. The “Renegade” conversion doesn’t happen anymore.
The trend won’t leave the platform. We manufactured so many moments that the moment became the product. People on TikTok are discovering memes, not artists. That’s the product working as designed. The feed rewards the format: the joke, the dance, the reaction. The song is the soundtrack to the joke. Nobody goes to Spotify for the joke.
A fan who found you through a meme fell for the moment, not the record. When they get to where people actually listen, there’s nothing for them to recognise.
Viral used to convert. Now it mostly proves you were viral.
Now: own the fan
So the industry has arrived at the thing tech figured out a decade ago. Labels and artists are obsessed with emails and phone numbers. A direct relationship with the fan, owned, not rented through a platform that can change the rules on a Tuesday.
The move is to treat that first list as an engine: these are the people who care, now go find everyone who looks like them. Five years from now the artists who own their data and their direct relationship with fans are going to be untouchable. I have real conviction about that. I’m less sure the industry does.
Which is funny to me. That’s exactly where Because the Internet lived in 2013. Sites we owned, fans coming to us. It took the industry twelve years and four metas to get back there.
Notice the pattern
Direct to fan, ads, organic, creators, first-party data. Five metas in twelve years, and every one was the industry renting attention from a platform until the platform noticed and raised the rent.
Through all of it, the fan didn’t change. People who love a record still want to be close to it, still want to belong to something. What changed, over and over, was where we went to rent access to them.
We’re on the fifth landlord now. Guess who the sixth one is.
Cheers,