Water & Music Member Audio Feed

Hi everyone!We've been quite delayed in getting our archive of hangout recordings published on our Patreon page — appreciate your patience. On that note, we're excited to finally be publishing full recordings AND transcripts of our hangouts from the past few months exclusively for members, so you can revisit the many gems dropped by our special guests, and/or listen for the first time in case you weren’t able to make any previous events.We’ll be releasing several different recordings over the next few weeks, so please keep an eye out for them in your inbox. The first one featured below is with Olivia Shalhoup, Founder and Director of Social Media and Marketing at Amethyst Collab, a creative agency that works with artists from Warner Music, Sony Music, 10K Projects and Internet Money. Olivia joined us last month to discuss the art of effective music rollout strategies and opportunities for improving both the higher-level structure of artists' social media campaigns and the analytics tools that help support them.Hope you enjoy and please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!P.S. If you’d like, you can also keep up to date with future recordings/episodes via a private RSS link for Apple Podcasts or Acast, which you can set up by following these instructions. As a reminder, these episodes and transcripts are meant to be for paying members only.✯  ✯  ✯FULL TRANSCRIPTThis conversation was originally recorded in the Water & Music Discord server on May 28, 2021.Cherie: Thanks so much again to everyone for joining our Hangout today. If this is your first time, we host these audio only hangouts in our Discord server every Friday, where we bring in special guests from across the music industry, to share more about their careers and get their takes on current trends and developments in the music business.Today I am super excited to have Olivia Shalhoup. She is the Founder and Director of Social Media and Digital Marketing at Amethyst Collab, which is a multifaceted creative agency that works with artists across Warner, 10K Projects, Internet Money, and many other music companies. Today, we're going to be talking about all things social media and effective rollouts in the music industry. Also, as a reminder, logistically, we'll leave around 10 minutes at the end for an audience Q&A. You can either type your questions in the Hangout chat text channel, or you can request to come up to the stage and speak your question verbally for Olivia and myself, if you prefer.Olivia, thank you so much, again, for joining us today.Olivia: Of course! I’m so excited to be here, thanks for having me.Cherie: To start off, it would be great if you could walk us through your background in the music industry. In particular, what inspired you to start your own company in music?Olivia: Oh, absolutely. So I am a Digital Strategist. I focus strongly on social media and creative direction in the digital marketing world. I started actually as an A&R intern at a small label in DC called Carpark Records. I was going to school in DC at the time and there's not really the same major-label opportunities in DC as there are in LA or New York, so I was kind of trying to make my own way into the industry. I cold reached out to the label asking if they would take me on as an intern. We did an interview and I was fortunate that they said yes!This was back in 2017 or so, when social media managers for artists were nearly unheard of. It's a very recent phenomenon. So they have this artist named Toro y Moi. And I asked if I could take over his Twitter because I realized he wasn't tweeting very much. And they were pretty confused as to why I asked that because — again, in 2017, the social landscape has changed so much in the past few years, and it’s very recent that it’s become widely accepted that socials are important for artists and music in general.So they said yes, figuring they had nothing to lose — I was just an intern, anyways — so they might as well let me take on more. And it turns out I was really good at it. So I moved into the social world completely and away from A&R. I took on socials for a few other of the label’s artists and for the label itself.And then I moved into Hip Hop Caucus, which is an organization founded by Jay-Z and Diddy that encourages people in the hip-hop artist community to get engaged politically and civically. I did socials and marketing for them. Then I moved on to Maverick in LA, where I did socials and marketing not only for my boss who was a major A&R at the time working on the Nicki Minaj Queen album, but also for some of our other clients in the hip-hop space. I had a great relationship with my clients there, and I did keep some clients, thankfully, from working there.I decided to go off on my own during COVID. While I've had Amethyst as a panel organization for a while since 2018, as a creative agency, it's brand-new. We just hit our one year in March, which is really exciting. I just took the opportunity to just build it into my full-time company.Cherie: Amazing. Thank you so much for walking us through that. I actually had no idea that you were only just hitting the one year anniversary mark. That's super exciting. Congrats on that.Olivia: Thank you. It's crazy because I have been working with these artists for so many years, but under my own name as a freelancer. Under the Amethyst name, it’s very new.Cherie: So before diving into the specifics of the work that you do now, like how you run campaigns, I have a couple of higher-level questions about the role of social media and digital marketing in the music industry today. One question that has come up a lot in this particular server in the past several months, and also just in industry conversations generally, is fundamentally whether artists have to be on social media today in order to succeed. I imagine that given that you run social media for many artists, maybe you’re biased or you have a certain perspective. But do you think that social media is a non-negotiable necessity for artists today, if they want to succeed? Why or why not?Olivia: Keeping in mind, of course, that this is coming from a social media manager, I think it's incredibly crucial. I think there are so many artists of all levels, who are missing out on a lot of marketing that they could be getting quite easily with just a little bit of social engagement. I do think it's absolutely necessary. And for small artists, it's a very exciting tool to get you in front of these audiences. I do want to add that now as the world is opening back up — concerts are coming back, club engagements are coming back up — I'm interested to see whether the crucialness of using socials as a new artist is going to remain the same, and will keep both spaces active or if in-person events coming back will give artists a bit more of a balance with how important digital is .Cherie: That’s super interesting and related to something I wanted to ask you about as well which is the impact of the last year-and-a-half. I think generally the COVID-19 pandemic has woken up the entire music industry  — across independent, emerging and established artists, and their teams — to the importance of a really strong digital presence and the importance of digital marketing … What have been some of the biggest changes that you've seen in the last year-and-a-half on your side, whether in terms of the creative and social media campaigns, or the tools being used and the reach and impact of these campaigns? What specific trends come to mind?Olivia: That’s a great point you bring up, Cherie. I think the biggest trend that I've noticed is people migrating away from one app being the central, most “necessary” social media app. Pre-pandemic, you could easily make the argument that in terms of marketing, Instagram is the most crucial, and all other apps fall after in whatever negotiable or debatable order. Now, I think your audience is very spread out. Twitter and TikTok have made enormous gains during the pandemic, and while it’s pretty clear that TikTok is the most important app for breaking songs, I would argue that Twitter is very important for breaking artists in general. As we've seen on TikTok, it's not necessarily a shoo-in path for an artist who blows up a song on TikTok to become a popular artist themselves. In that respect, you kind of need to look outside of one app now, whereas before it was definitely more centralized.Cherie: Can you dive a bit more into that distinction — which I think is super important — of breaking a song versus breaking an artist? What is the main difference, and what do you have to think about, in both cases?Olivia: Something I've been seeing a lot lately is that major labels, or subsets of major labels, are really, really good at picking up TikTok artists who have a song or two, or even three to five songs that go huge on TikTok — and yet every other part of the artist’s digital presence is incredibly lacking. You look at their Instagram, their Twitter, etc. — you wouldn't even know they were famous. Even their Spotify might have a little bit of a lack in what you’d imagine streams would result from a viral TikTok song. And I think that's where the difference really lies: Okay, you've broken a song, but how are you going to translate people who hear the song on TikTok into long-term fans for the artist? And I don't know if it's something that we as an industry, or as like the corporate machines of the industry, if you will, have figured out yet.Cherie: Of course, I'm also definitely biased coming into this conversation as a writer who has built a lot of her career on Twitter. Aside from Twitter, what other platforms have you seen that have been super effective in building long-term fan bases and communities? I know you've talked a lot in the past about fan pages and the importance of fans. Are there any other platforms that you're seeing coming up that have been really effective?Olivia: I’ve seen Discord become very interesting for artists. Most recently, an example would be BIGBABYGUCCI, who is a completely independent artist, but has like thousands of members on his Discord server. And it was always shocking to me that Discord is primarily being used by independent artists; it doesn't seem that a lot of major artists have tapped in yet. I think the more artists get frustrated with Instagram — and Twitter doesn't have so much of an algorithm problem, but artists get frustrated by having to navigate the statistics and algorithms of other socials — they're going to turn to things like Discord, where they can completely control their fans and the narrative.Cherie:  That's a really good point. Especially with bigger servers, it’s a different [challenge] but also an opportunity of managing your community, as opposed to having to always do this guesswork of what will or won’t show up in [recommendation] algorithms.So, diving into your day-to-day, you recently did an interview with DJBooth, just you know, talking through your career as well. You addressed a really important and interesting misconception about social media management for artists — this misconception that it's mostly just the act of posting, when really about 80% of what you do is analytics, and following data. I think that’s definitely reflective of what the reality is for a lot of marketers in the music industry today. I would love it if you could dive a bit deeper into that, and also share the kinds of tools that have been most helpful for you to do that analytics part of your job, especially now that audiences are spread out across a lot of different kinds of platforms and channels now.Olivia: Absolutely. A really interesting thing that I think of when I think of measuring analytics is — first of all, a lot of on-platform analytics are, in my opinion, phenomenal. I know a lot of social media managers who would advocate towards using a third-party type of server that will measure analytics across platforms. But I’ve found that on-platform is the most accurate, and the more you can lean into your on-platform analytics and making sure you’re monitoring everything you’re doing in real time, everything that your fans are looking towards in real time, the more successful you're going to be as a strategist, because every artist is a niche. I wouldn't be looking for Trippie Red to trend in the same way that I look for somebody like Haviah Mighty (another one of my clients) to trend because they're just such different artists. So leaning into niche analytics is what you're really able to do with on-platform, which is something I strongly advocate for.A big thing that I think is lacking in analytics is the ability to measure things around your artists on Twitter. So when we dropped, for example, “Miss The Rage”, obviously, I can look up “Miss The Rage” and see how many tweets have been made about it and see if it's trending, et cetera. But I really was interested in the way people really loved this one line from the song: “I can't see a damn thing if it ain’t guap.” I wanted to know, are people tweeting these one-liners from his song? I was trying to measure the use of “guap” as it relates to Trippie in his song, and it was pretty difficult for me to do. Sometimes Twitter can be a little bit lacking on the analytics side, and I think it's because people don't necessarily look to Twitter for advertising in the way that they do Instagram and TikTok, so Twitter hasn't been compelled to create these analytical types of services. But I think Twitter is one of the most effective platforms for artists, so I would really love to see them expanding their analytic capabilities.Cherie: This is super fascinating. I have noticed in conversations about streaming analytics or fan analytics, there’s a lot of emphasis on just the pure consumption side, like number of streams or number of likes, but not as much is formalized around measuring fan sentiment and measuring the conversation around a piece of music.Olivia: Fan sentiment is the perfect way to say it.Cherie: Yeah. I really hope more analytics platforms can help build that out.In case people listening are not aware, you have a really great newsletter called Rollout Roundup, that's totally free and is where you and occasionally some guest writers will break down some of the most interesting music or single rollout campaigns from the week. There are a lot of elements I've noticed that will pop up again and again across your recaps and review, in terms of things that you'd like to see artists do more of, like press shoots, which [you’d think] are pretty simple…Olivia: I’m all about the press shoots. But you would be surprised how much it's overlooked. Right? You’d think it's just a box to check. But it gets overlooked from even the biggest of artists.Cherie: It’s a very simple investment. And TikTok — you mention [in the newsletter] that many artists could be more active on there. Is there anything else in particular that comes to mind where you feel that artists may be under-investing, in the specific case of investing in marketing for single rollouts?Olivia: Not so much under-investing, but I think artists are mis-investing in features. I've seen so many collaborations, and I've written a few times on Rollout Roundup about these collaborations, where one artist enlists another artist, and there’s clearly a big gap. Like, the feature is meant to bring lots of fans to the main artist on the single, but they don't do anything outside of the song together — there's no shoots together, no TikToks together, not even an ounce of evidence that these two artists created together. I think that sends an almost worse message to the fans than not having an artist on the song at all, because it looks like you kind of just shopped somebody into a verse and there's no synergy there. So what incentive do fans of the bigger artist have to follow the smaller artist that’s supposed to be benefiting from the collaboration?On the other hand, I think this is something specifically that Lil Durk and Lil Baby are doing really well. They're making it very clear that their joint album is because of the synergy between them as artists. So that's a positive example of something that I think a lot of artists are really missing out on right now.Cherie: Yeah, I do get a similar sense that a lot of these features, at least the ones that are coming up recently, are purely for streaming SEO to optimize the song’s placement on artists’ Spotify profiles, because especially from a label standpoint, it's all about optimizing for streams. But in terms of the higher level branding around it, that’s still an underrated consideration.I wanted to ask a quick follow-up question on remixes. In one of your recent Rollout Roundup issues, you were talking about remixes — I think in this case, it was a remix that was effective, but would you give similar guidance on that as well, in terms of really only investing into remix if all the artists involved are also down to promote it openly and be involved in the branding around it as well? What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of remixes?Olivia: Oh, that's a great question. And I've been thinking quite a bit about the effectiveness of remixes, because actually today if you all want to keep an eye out, today's Rollout Roundup is including a remix, where the original song was not included on the rollout roundup — I didn’t deem the original song a great rollout.So I think the opportunity in remixes lies in treating the first rollout almost like a trial-and-error. What did we miss on the first release of this song that we can hit harder now? I think that's the real value in a remix marketing-wise, even more so than who can we get on this that will make the song blow up. I think that's obviously a good tool to use. But when you're re-releasing a remix, it's really important to remember that the artist who joins you on the remix is not the only marketing tool that you should be adding to the song. If you didn't do a TikTok campaign the first time, you should add that in. If you didn't have enough photos about it or press shoots or artist content about the first song, you can add that in on the remix. It's really an opportunity for almost a do-over rollout wise.Cherie: Yeah, super interesting. I’ve noticed — and Water & Music published an article on this recently — that artists will publish short, seven-song “EPs” onto streaming services, for the sole purpose of not just getting music out there but also testing the waters and seeing how people react before figuring out what to invest in next.Is that something you’re doing regularly — and I guess on a higher level, in terms of your mindset with working with artists, how do you embrace a testing mindset? Unlike in, say, tech or software testing, where you can bet- test an app before it goes out to a wider audience, it's a bit harder to do that with music, because once you put a piece of music out, it's out. Maybe you can change the title, but it's hard to change the underlying core product. So how do you normally approach a testing mindset for artists, I guess in a marketing and social media context? Are there are any specific examples, you can point to as well?Olivia: This is an amazing question. I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit as I am working on my first version of this with one of my new clients. We're doing a test version of a project — we're calling it a “mixtape,” if you look at it you'll see it looks like an EP, and we’re seeing which type of song his fans gravitate to. He’s a very new artist, but he has some support from some big cosigns. We wanted to intentionally make this project featureless, because something we noticed is he's very heavily known for his cosigns. So we're trying to almost isolate him here in the market, and see, okay, aside from his co-signs, what do people like about him and his music, and how can we harp on that in our official debut project with him which will occur later this year or early next year. It's very interesting to see how something creative turns into a marketing project or almost a case study.I think the most crucial thing that we're going to be looking at here is going back to analytics, which songs performed the best, and being intentional about — we do have a lead single, but knowing when songs performed well organically because fans like that style of music, versus when we like the style of music and pushed certain songs harder thus far. I think this will be an interesting case study for us, and something I'm definitely still developing my opinion on as I work on things like this more. But I personally think it's a great idea to start off with — it definitely can't hurt.Something I would note is the shorter the better, in my opinion, when it comes to new artists — keeping with singles for a really long time in your career, shorter EPs and not putting out a full-length project until you're really ready to put 110% into the rollout of that project is something I strongly believe in.Cherie: Going back to on-platform analytics — I already saw some people asking questions or comments in the chat channel about what kinds of data are most important to you when you're trying to gauge what a niche around an artist even looks like or whether a campaign is successful. Are there any particular data points that come to mind for you?Olivia: Yes — oftentimes you'll see a big jump in monthly listeners on Spotify due to a new release, and something I look for is whether the Spotify increase in numbers, whether that be followers, listeners, etc, translated to any social growth. Even looking at how many people visited their linked profiles — so you can link Instagram and Twitter on Spotify, and looking at how much that visit rate increased in a particular time period will really show you if your campaign and music is successful. I think that's a very crucial analytic.Cherie: So, by "visit rate," are you just trying to imagine the flow for the fan so you're saying like, how many people clicked on a Spotify profile, then clicked on the link-in-bio in their profile?Olivia: Yeah, so the source of data is the social app. I’m looking for how many people liked the song on Spotify, for example thinking about Trippie and “Miss The Rage” — how many people who listened to “Miss The Rage” and then felt compelled to follow him on Instagram. So that's what I'm looking to measure with these analytics, and that can usually be found in the Instagram profile visits rate. Instagram will give you this nice little graph where you can see how much the profile visits spiked in either a particular week-, two-week or month-long period. That's what I'll typically look at to see if Spotify growth led to social growth.Cherie: I see, thank you.Now going back to Trippie Redd, who you're the main digital social media strategist for — probably one of the biggest artists you’re working with at the moment — something that you've talked about in the past that I think is increasingly true for a lot of artists who are blowing up today is that Trippie himself has been super actively involved in his social media across multiple different channels ever since the beginning, in particular on SoundCloud and Instagram. In this kind of environment when an artist already has so much direct connection and control over their audience, what role do you see social media strategists playing in terms of the value they can add? Or, for example, with this latest single rollout, what were the goals, and how are you working with Trippie and his team to kind of add to the activity that was already there?Olivia: I'm super excited about this question, because it's definitely the most common thing that people ask me, whether it's in interviews or DMs or whatever, and sometimes they ask it in a way of like, “oh, if he already had 10 million followers before working with you then what do you do for him?” It's a fair question because it's a little bit of a behind-the-doors thing in digital strategy.So the biggest thing that I would say is crucial for a strategist with a major astronomical artist like Trippie is pointing out blind spots — essentially what I do for any artist, small to big. You come in and you're basically doing one long audit, picking up blind spots of what they're not doing, and strategizing ways that you can get them to authentically incorporate that content.The biggest difference I think, on “Miss The Rage,”  was that it was my first single with total control over social strategy for Trippie, and it was also his and [Playboi] Carti’s biggest career-wide debut by quite a long shot. Trippie had actually never cracked a top 40 before and this debuted at number 11 which was really exciting, and I credit a lot of that success to our recent engagement of TikTok. I think TikTok has been the real pivoting point for Trippie — not only the fact that he made his first three TikToks in years since he first started with the label, but because we were really intentional around influencer strategy for TikTok with him. And a big key point was pre-planning, right, like a big thing that I was very adamant about is starting our campaign early. We were working the song since February, and it came out a few weeks ago. Most people would say that working a single for three months is crazy, but it resulted in a career-wide debut for both artists involved. So, I think timing and strategy are definitely the biggest things that any strategist will come in and tell major artists that they need.Cherie: I think that planning is definitely underrated, in a world where songs can seemingly go viral overnight. It seems that culture is generally moving more and more quickly, the cultural cycles are getting shorter and shorter. Lil Nas X has talked about this, like how the rollout for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” took like six months to a year just to figure out how the rollout is going to look.You mentioned that you’ve been working [“Miss The Rage”] since February — I guess the “checklist” and blind spots look different for every single artist, but what work exactly goes into those months? You mentioned influencer marketing, so maybe researching influencers — what are the main elements that go into that pre-planning?Olivia: With an artist like Trippie, you have to consider the context of where artists come from. He comes from the SoundCloud era, and what his fans love about him is that he's very accessible. He does lives all the time, he follows fan pages, he comments back to fan pages, and it's led to him being an astronomical influencer on Instagram. He actually has a higher engagement rate than Kim Kardashian, which is exciting for somebody like him!Basically, the biggest thing that went into pre-planning and working the record before was very strategically teasing. So he dropped that initial Instagram clip, which went super viral of him playing the song, and since then, it’s never stopped — fans were making viral meme campaigns for him on both Twitter and Instagram, and fan pages were sharing the snippet almost on a rolling basis for the entire three months. Fanpage engagement is incredibly important to me. I liaise directly with fan pages myself, especially the big ones, for people like Trippie, and I recently worked a Lil Wayne record as well — artists like Wayne and Trippie have these massive fan pages on Instagram that could almost be considered influencers themselves. Coordinating posts and announcements with them has been really crucial for our campaigns, too.Cherie: That’s super interesting. I want to dive into fan pages in particular. This is a very different genre, but I think there are some parallel issues: Probably the genre that is most notorious for their fan pages and fan groups is I guess, like pop generally, but especially K-pop. And in the last week, you know, there was a story around like BTS’ latest single [“Butter”] and like fans were coordinating in droves globally to try to get BTS’ streams to a certain level. There's a whole controversy around Spotify filtering out those streams. That's a separate conversation.But I think one theme that comes up there is how much of that work to leave to these self-organized, self-mobilizing fandoms, versus how much should be coordinated officially with artist teams. I think in certain cases, there is some magic in letting the fans do things themselves. And of course, it can sometimes go very wrong and come across as inauthentic if there's too much top-down commanding [from the artist side] of what fan pages should do. For you, how are you thinking about engaging with fan groups and pages in a fair and equitable way, and also that allows them to feel free to do the kind of work that they've already done, as opposed to trying to box them in?Olivia: I take a very unconventional approach to fan pages where I try not to infantilize them — I really try to recognize their value. As an example, there's this one Trippie fan page who makes these beautiful, elaborate graphics that go viral every time. And he's so in tune with what Trippie does, like Trippie will make an Instagram story and then he’ll make this beautiful, beautiful graphic that will go viral about it. So I really think a crucial part in liaising with fan pages is knowing their worth and treating them with that respect and dignity. Like when we announced a virtual concert with Trippie that we did a few months ago, I asked [this fan] to post one of his famous graphics about it, and in doing that I approached him like he was a graphic designer, because they’re professionals and they're causing quite a lot of money for these big artists. So you know, treating fan pages with the respect that they want.And then in turn, whenever he asked me to share something that he's done with Trippie or to share it myself directly, I'm always happy to do so, because it's only boosting our artists. So just knowing that the relationship you have with fan pages is mutual — knowing that you're not doing them a favor by leaking information to them. They're doing a favor to you by promoting your artists constantly, 24/7, for free. And once you have that base level of knowledge, I think your relationship with your fans is very solid, and you can really start to build that pyramid of trust with them.Cherie: Yes, that kind of two directional, mutual trust is definitely super important.Moving on, I would love to dive into global fan trends, speaking about regional differences in music marketing. What inspired this question in particular, is the latest issue of Rollout Roundup that you published with the writer Cee Valentina. The two of you compared different rollouts for drill artists across the US and the UK. And I thought it was a really interesting comparison. Generalizing a bit, what are some interesting differences that you've seen in different parts of the world, in terms of how releases are marketed, what kinds of channels do or don't work, et cetera?Olivia: That's a great question. So the biggest thing that I've noticed is that TikTok is leaning incredibly [towards the UK] for drill right now. We've had a few drill songs blow up on TikTok in the US, like Sleepy Hallow and Dusty Locane. But right now, if you go to search under the trending sounds, you look up like the hashtag #drill and you do a little bit of finessing to find out what songs are popping, the UK is gonna be dominating a lot more of those than you think. So TikTok is definitely one of the most useful platforms for UK drill. I don't see a ton of crossover between the UK and the US on platforms like Instagram for marketing. So I think the two countries still have very different marketing approaches on Instagram. Twitter, of course, [is] crucial for both and also definitely provides the most cross-marketing experience between the countries, in Cee’s research. In fact, that's how I came across her and her writing, was through Twitter. And it was really fun for us to get to do those comparisons because we found that the biggest mutual piece of success is a solid visual, a solid video, just like press shoots, like I talk about so much. So video seems to be pretty crucial in both the US and the UK, but TikTok seems to be a bit more crucial in the UK than in the US.Cherie: So, I guess building off of that point of the importance of videos and really strong visuals. This relates to the very first question I asked about the necessity of social media generally. Some artists have some anxiety or are not super comfortable with the tension between investing super heavily in marketing and digital presence and having a really solid rollout, versus just having the music speak for itself and having the music itself do most of the work and like really prioritizing making the song as best as possible.Is that a balance that you're thinking about in your day-to-day? I'm sure probably a lot of the artists you're working with are thinking about it … I think a lot of artists might feel like investing too much in marketing takes away from the music and arguably that's not sustainable for them over a long-term music career.Olivia: Absolutely. Even though a lot of people expect me to have a different answer than I do on this question, I think the music has got to come first. You've got to be putting at least like 70% of your energy into music before you put the other 30 into marketing. I think if the music isn't there, there's not much I can market and I'm always telling that to people.In fact, something I was just discussing with one of the managers I work with on our new artists last night was how we find it impossible to know if we want to work with an artist if they send us just their socials. If I don't know what your music sounds like, how do I know what I have to market and the potential that you actually have as an artist? I think the digital space has kind of convinced people that digital and social comes before the content but the content comes first in my opinion, every time.Cherie: That’s a really good point. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on this: There’s a small but growing number of mega-influencers on TikTok who are releasing their own music now. The most recent one is Bella Poarch. Her song “Build a B*tch” has already gotten 100 million views on YouTube in just a couple of weeks because she also has millions of followers on TikTok. Addison Rae, Dixie D’Amelio, a lot of these huge influencers are releasing songs that some people say are pretty good... I'm wondering if you've been following that or if you have any thoughts — is that changing the way that you're thinking about music marketing, or how do you think it might change marketing as a whole?Olivia: This has been, like, the only thing I’ve had thoughts on in the past week. [laugh] I need to find this article and post it in the Discord because I think you all would really like it. It was an article I just came across yesterday, about how people like Bella and Dixie D’Amelio and Addison Rae are crossing over into music. TikTok fame doesn't last forever, and it certainly doesn't provide enough money and opportunities for a living for years and decades to come. I thought it was such an interesting reversal of the typical artist's path. Normally someone is an artist, and they need to promote their music better, so they'll get better on TikTok. But these people and these mega-influencers have taken the opposite approach.I think — not that they’re feigning numbers, but because you have this social platform, you're gonna get all these numbers and you might break some records, etc. But in five to ten years, I don't think anyone will be talking about “Build a B*tch” in a musical sense. We might be talking about it like this, like, “what an interesting marketing case it was,” but I don't think people are gonna say, oh that was such a beautiful debut song and she's such a budding creative like they talk about, like, Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love” — to this day there are still conversations about [Beyoncé’s] debut as a solo artist. I don't think we'll have those types of conversations about people like Bella, Dixie or Addison, aside from people like us talking about how they're an interesting case study.Cherie: Very good point. If people are reviewing the songs by these TikTok stars, usually it does talk entirely about the marketing behind it, and not about the actual musical qualities, like, “oh this has a great melody and great songwriting.”Olivia: It's insane for me, right? I'm always thinking about the composition of songs and the meaning. The opposite of that case might be someone like Olivia Rodrigo, where I think we're gonna be talking forever about the musical impact of “good 4 u” and of SOUR as a whole. Even though she is kind of a product of an internet generation, I think she does have real musical longevity.Cherie: I totally agree. She’s used her TikTok presence in a really great way, but it doesn’t take away from the music itself.Olivia: Exactly. She is definitely one of my favorite positive marketing case studies. Keep a lookout, I'm gonna have a little Rollout Roundup just on her. We have a new deep-dive series where I harp on to the strategy of one artist. I'll also be breaking down my own strategy on “Miss The Rage” soon.Cherie: Can’t wait to read that.I think looking at the time, now would be a great time to move on to audience questions. So I think we're going to start just by going through the hangout chat channel, because there are already lots of really good questions submitted, definitely feel free to keep sending them to that channel or requesting to speak.There are a couple different questions that are tied to the same idea, which is: How do you decide what to prioritize early on as an independent emerging artist, in terms of which social media platforms to invest in? Like, should you try to be ubiquitous? Or just, you know, focus on one to two different platforms? How would you advise artists through that process?Olivia: Love this question. I get it all the time. I don’t know if artists like the answer, but my answer is to harp on one type of content and progress it across platforms. So right now, the most popular type of content across every social app — yes, Twitter included — are 15-second videos. So while you might have a different format for specifically Twitter, across every platform that's the most popular content consumed. So I would focus on making TikTok-style videos — whether you make them on TikTok’s platform isn't particularly important. Make those 15-second videos and then copy them across all your platforms. Put them on Instagram, put them on Reels or your [IG] story, put them on TikTok and on Twitter. Especially if you're an artist doing freestyles or covers, that stuff tends to do really well on Twitter and really gets fans talking. It's a great way to attract new fans and use that cross-platform marketing that a feature might bring without actually having a feature. I think investing in one type of content and then projecting it across platforms is a much more effective way to not burn yourself out as an artist than to focus on like one or two platforms instead of all of them.Cherie: That’s really good advice. This is something that Water & Music has published some pieces about recently, particularly around livestreaming. But I feel like this could apply not just to livestreams but also like longer-form videos on YouTube as well, in terms of splicing them or editing them for distribution across Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. People think about songs themselves in this way already, like maximizing the longevity and the value of songs, and I think that definitely applies to marketing as well, in terms of making the content work for you.Olivia: Absolutely. Making one piece content last is important, too, not just posting and going.Cherie: Exactly. Next question: You mentioned Discord as an app that’s gaining a lot of traction among artists today, which I totally agree with. Someone asked a question which extends that to the direct-to-fan “creator economy” generally. There's been a huge surge in newsletters and a lot more artists have joined membership platforms like Patreon (which Water & Music runs on). So are those platforms something that you're interested in? Do you think that has any particular impact on how artists approach social media? How do you think artists should incorporate those kinds of more intimate, community-driven platforms into their digital marketing?Olivia: That brings up one of the most interesting platforms for artists, OnlyFans. OnlyFans has become the artist version of Patreon. Cardi B’s usage of OnlyFans is incredibly interesting — she’ll share snippets and behind-the-scenes videos, and she’s famous for her candid videos, so her using that kind of content behind a paywall was just genius. I’m sure it generates a remarkable amount of revenue for her.I think it’s very smart, but I would love to see more creative ways of how smaller artists can implement it. Because, right now, it’s people like Tyga, Bhad Bhabie, Cardi B using the platforms, but I would love to see ways that more independent or self-funded artists can use those platforms when they don’t already have an existing giant base to just come over from their other socials. That’s probably something I could think more about myself … I think it’s all about finding your niche, and what you could provide to your fans that no one else could.Cherie: Exactly. I think so many artists and tech platforms are trying to figure that out right now. I think it works with artists who are comfortable engaging in a very consistent way, and posting much more consistently, it’s a good fit for certain kinds of artists. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that.Someone asked a question about your day-to-day work with Amethyst. In lots of your projects, you’re interfacing with a lot of different people who might be touching different parts of digital strategy — it might be an artist manager, it might be a label. How do you see all those different entities working together, in a way that doesn’t create too much glut or overlap?Olivia: Great question. I’m in a unique position where I’ll come in and work with a manager and a label. What I do isn't at odds with them, I don't manage artists, I don't work with the label’s Digital department, I work on my own branch of things.I think the most surprising thing to me that would probably surprise people in this chat as well is knowing that “Digital” at labels usually doesn't include social strategy. Most of my artists are signed to major labels, but I'm contracted often by major labels to supplement their work. I think the future of labels and the machines behind artists will include social strategy, but right now it's kind of a blind spot. So what I come in and do is make sure that I'm focusing on things that they either don't have the bandwidth or don't have the expertise to be constantly studying. Labels’ digital marketing teams are often doing so much that they're often not doing what I do, like measuring how much an artist is trending on Twitter, and measuring what sounds are trending on TikTok that our artist should capitalize on — things like that, that are just very social-specific, I would say that's where I come in. That's very different from anyone else on the team.Cherie: So if labels’ digital teams aren’t focusing on social strategy, what are they focusing on, then? Is it more streaming, playlist marketing?Olivia: 100% streaming. The word “digital” means something very different in and outside of labels. And it's something that I wasn't particularly expecting, and definitely it varies from label to label and their approach. But oftentimes, you'll find behind the biggest artists, their social teams are not from their label — they’re independent contractors and agencies, like me. As socials become more and more niche, and that requires more and more time to actually research and develop strategy for socials, it's becoming a whole external position.Cherie: That makes sense. I guess labels, especially major labels — so much of their business model and how they make money is around streams, so any “digital” team they've will prioritize streaming … But hopefully, labels will also take [social media] more seriously and actually invest in social media in-house. We'll see.Olivia: Yeah, I see that being a big next step. And I think something that most people would be surprised by, post-pandemic, that pre-pandemic no one was really thinking about, is how new the idea of having a social strategist is. For my biggest, most major clients, oftentimes I'm the first social strategist. It's such a new and growing field that there are even some artists teams who don't think that that's a crucial part of their artist strategy. I think that that will continue to grow exponentially and will only become more crucial to artist teams.Cherie: Thank you for that. Okay, there are two questions about two specific companies. I think this would be a good way to round out the conversation. So we mentioned a lot of different apps, like Tiktok, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Someone [in the audience] asked about Triller. I don't know if you have any thoughts on Triller, if you've used it at all in any of your campaigns, or how you think it might grow in the future? Any thoughts?Olivia: I have strong feelings about Triller. I think it’s the most interesting case of an app that has funnelled millions and maybe even billions of dollars into their marketing, and has not too much to show for it.We did a big trailer campaign for Trippie for Pegasus with his lead single “Sleepy Hollow," where we did like a banner on their trending page and a push where I actually coordinated directly with Triller’s marketing team to push him and we saw huge, like astronomical numbers for the song on Triller. But we couldn’t find where the results were at — we didn’t really see a streaming jump from Triller particularly. I didn't see people using the sounds and videos organically on Triller. So the listens seem to be from people playing the song. On TikTok, the number that you see associated with a trending sound will be the amount of videos that were made. On Triller, it's the amount of times people have played a song, which is definitely misleading in an analytic sense to the relevancy of Triller, because anyone can listen to a 15 second snippet.I really would like to see Triller improve, I think they have the resources to do it. You know, not to put any pressure on this — but I would love to see a Water & Music analysis on why Triller hasn’t popped off despite their massive investments in influencers as well. They're just such an interesting case study.Cherie: We’ll definitely look more into that. Also, quickly for context — so I think the parent company of Triller [Proxima Media] is making a lot of different kinds of acquisitions without, at least from my point of view, a clear throughline of what they're actually trying to build. They bought Verzuz, they bought a marketing company and a live streaming service. So it seems like they're almost trying to become like a mini media-focused holding company. We'll see how well that does. But yeah, definitely, an interesting case study.Olivia: Oh, I'm following them like a hawk. I'm so interested in where this is going.Cherie: The last question is also about a specific platform, YouTube, which has not actually come up too many times in our conversation today. This person was asking, do you view YouTube more as a streaming service than as a social media or creative marketing tool?Olivia: Great question. I view it more as a streaming service. I'm not going to stand behind that and say that that's the right way to view it, though. Like, we just did a video premiere yesterday for “Miss The Rage” and I monitored the chat pretty closely to see what people were talking about in the premiere chat. The more that YouTube develops those types of capabilities, the more that I'm thinking it will be pretty crucial to my job as a social strategist soon. But as of right now, I approach it more like a streaming platform.Cherie: Interesting. Yeah. And I guess in the context of music, my sense is that most artists use it to just distribute music videos, or maybe occasionally like interviews or live performances, but it's very much a consumption platform in those cases.I don't want to keep you for too much longer. This was a really eye-opening and fascinating conversation. So yeah, thank you again for taking the time.Olivia: Thank you so much for having me. This has been one of the most stimulating conversations I've had lately. It's always so great to talk to you, Cherie. It’s really a pleasure to get to learn from you during these conversations.Cherie: Thank you, I really appreciate that! Post this conversation, what are the best ways for people to follow you? I guess I can post the link again to Rollout Roundup in the chat. But are there any other ways for people to keep up with the work that you're doing?Olivia: I have a newsletter for Amethyst. If you subscribe to Rollout Roundup, you'll also get the newsletters. I don't send them out often, maybe once a month. You can also hit me on Instagram, Twitter, etc. My handle is @geminitoofly, same as my name on here [Discord], everywhere. So you can always find me there. I try to be very responsive on social media, and am always down to connect with people.Cherie: Thank you so much again.