![]() ![]() Once Kaufman and Druz got gamers interested in their tracks, they would arrange for clips featuring the tune to trickle out carefully. A certain type of song often seemed to work best: Rap tracks built around a simple guitar loop augmented with rat-a-tat drums and bulbous bass. Much like radio programmers trying to secure commitments to a star’s new single before it comes out, Kaufman and Druz would send tracks to a slew of prominent gamers pre-release. The marketers began buying posts from channels in bulk, which helped them keep competitors out of the space. “It’s the same as on TikTok - when you have a viral song, everyone uses it to blow up views,” Druz explains. (He told Houstle about the marketing tactic as well.) Not only that, if a song really became popular in the montage community - marketers agree that various flavors of hip-hop tend to work best - people would begin to search for it, which would drive channel viewership as well. It turned out to be a mutually beneficial arrangement, where the gamers behind these channels made more money and Kaufman could get artists more streams. It’s common for popular TikTok creators to take money from labels to use specific songs in their videos, but Kaufman discovered that a lot of the Fortnite montage-makers “had never done song promos before.” “They didn’t even know this was something they could get involved in,” he continues. When he visited their YouTube pages, he’d see comments referencing various gamers. “These were acts that have 10, 15 million streams on records with no major backing, no editorial ,” he recalls. He was scrutinizing various digital rankings, comparing YouTube charts with Spotify’s, when he noticed a few names he was not familiar with. New 11’s other co-founder, David Kaufman, stumbled on the Fortnite montage community almost by accident. Some marketers have started looking for different digital communities that might spark listenership - Facebook pages in Indonesia, for example. On top of that, TikTok has proved harder to manipulate than labels would like. But they’re often all fighting over the same spaces - especially TikTok - and as a result, the prices of campaigns have risen and the platform is increasingly oversaturated. ![]() ![]() “You were paying $5,000 for a campaign and almost guaranteeing a song will get to 100,000 plays a day,” Houstle says wistfully.Īt a time when streaming accounts for the vast majority of the music industry’s revenue and live music’s fate is still uncertain, labels have gone all in on digital marketing campaigns to drive clicks for their artists. “We had like a year-long run where it was really just us and a couple other people running the same play over and over.” “It was almost like striking gold,” says Dillon Druz, who manages Bankroll Hayden, co-founded New 11, and also runs a digital marketing business. “The level of attention was beyond what I could believe,” Rarin says. Houstle paid more widely-viewed montage creators to post videos soundtracked by “GTA,” and streams of the track shot up to more than 150,000 a day. From there, he signed to the label Black 17, where co-founder Jake Houstle had also been scrutinizing Fortnite communities, intrigued by their potential to activate streaming behavior. This helped Rarin push the track’s streams to 12,000 a day. Many of the gamers who post Fortnite montages have avid followings, sometimes millions strong, and several of those viewers heard “GTA” in the videos and liked it enough to stream it on their own. “I just made the best of what I had, put my name out there as much as possible.” “I commented on every single video that used my song - thousands of videos,” he says. But he made up for lack of funds with tireless digital hustle. Rarin was just a junior in high school he didn’t have a lot of money to throw at marketing. After the rapper released the track, back in the first summer of the pandemic, he noticed it pop up in YouTube videos that contained montages from the popular video game Fortnite, action-packed clips full of leaping, blasting mayhem and merciless digital destruction. Rarin’s “GTA” is a briskly aspirational single - “I been getting all this cash, I don’t need a label/Made it up from nothing fast, yeah this is a fable” - with distorted bass in all the right places. ![]()
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