It’s no secret that social media has become a major part of the artist and song promotion playbook.
Short-video apps like TikTok and Instagram have become the center of many of those efforts, given that hundreds of millions of people now discover new music by scrolling through feeds.
TikTok, in particular, has revolutionized how users discover not just new songs and artists but old ones too. Decades-old tracks like Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride” have experienced a resurgence after trending on social media.
“One of the interesting things that has emerged out of this TikTok ecosystem is that catalog is never really dead,” Sean Kane, a cofounder at the music marketing firm Hundred Days Digital, told Business Insider. “A record is new as long as there’s momentum around it.”
While some songs rise on social media organically, many are pushed into the mainstream by music-marketing agencies that work with artists, managers, and record labels to help tracks take off. As short-video platforms have become more saturated with videos from non-music creators, brands, and other commercial content, these marketers have had to get creative to help new songs breakthrough.
Gone are the days when labels or artists hire a few top influencers to popularize a song. Marketers now work with producers to remix tracks, create custom augmented-reality filters, work with micro influencers in a specific music community, or find other creative ways to help fans discover artists and songs amid a sea of content.
“We’re not just going to hire five influencers to do a dance on platform and hope that sticks,” Ramzi Najdawi, cofounder at the music-marketing firm ATG, told BI.
These marketers are scrappy and quick to adapt to changes in the industry. When Universal Music Group pulled its songs from TikTok amid a contract dispute, marketers quickly pivoted to campaigns on Instagram reels. Some even found ways to capitalize on the moment by swapping in new songs on videos that previously featured UMG tracks.
To highlight how music marketing on social has evolved, BI compiled a list of 13 agencies and upstarts doing innovative work in the space and some of their key leaders. We turned to sources at record labels and other music-industry professionals, as well as nominations from our readers, to find companies doing creative campaigns in music marketing.
Here are those companies, listed in alphabetical order below:
Read the full article here