I want to start this off by saying that no service provider can promise an artist success because success is due to the quality of the artist's work. It’s due to their marketability—the marketability of their look, the marketability of their personality, the marketability of their presentation—and whether there is a market for what they do.
I had the honor, privilege, and pleasure of working with a really talented artist who checked all of those boxes, by the name of Billie Bodega. This is a story of quality over quantity because it's about the impact we were able to make on the people we converted, as opposed to how many people we converted, how many streams we got, or how many views we got. It's about the significance of that impact—because we were able to generate buzz and create fans—and one of the hardest things to do in this business is to get people to care. Even if it’s a small group, it can be perceived as a microcosm of a larger group.
It was DJ Self who said in an interview that if he hears an artist buzzing online, he'll go and play that song at a club, and if even two people recognize it and start dancing, he knows they have something.
"Ocean Blues" was the first single off of Billie’s EP Koo da ta.
In marketing, there’s a discipline called the Rule of 7, which says a consumer needs to see a brand’s message at least seven times before they’ll consider buying anything. Now, with music, it’s not technically an actual sale, like buying a CD or a digital download. What we were looking for was more of a buy-in—buying into the artist’s brand.
My plan was to drive awareness and aggressively re-engage captured audiences with ads for retention rather than relying passively on social media posts that are subject to the algorithm. We started with a promo video leading to a pre-save, which was the first point of contact.
We followed that up with an ad blitz across multiple platforms, running ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. These banner ads covered pretty much 90% of the internet, so if someone went to their favorite news website, they’d see an ad for the release. If they went to their favorite sports website, they’d see an ad for the release. If they opened a mobile app they liked to use, they’d see an ad for the release. That was the third point of contact.
Next, I asked her if she had anything we could use for a giveaway to deepen the relationship with the people who were into the music. She said yes, so we organized the giveaway, but she didn’t tell people what she was giving away—she just said it was a special gift. That was one of the things that made her an amazing person to work with because she just knew how to work the crowd. That giveaway got us our first social media mentions.
The result was an impactful impression on Spotify's algorithm, which drove 1,000 streams per day through Release Radar. Then, once we triggered Discover Weekly, it was 3,000 streams per day from Discover Weekly. All of this happened before the major record companies started pressuring Spotify to pull back on how much traffic they would drive to independent artists.
Next, we had the EP drop, and we started that off with a pre-save campaign for the EP, which was the fifth point of contact. Then, when the release went live, I asked her if she had any images we could use to represent each track on the project. We took images for each track and ran promos for every song that didn’t violate Facebook’s terms of agreement.
The result of all this was that, as a solo act with no other artist on the bill, we were able to do a live performance at a venue and sell it out—100 tickets, first-time performance, first release.
This also led to an expanded brand deal with Neiman Marcus, where they created a campaign featuring her and her music, a featured role in the FOX network hit series American Horror Story, record companies calling with offers, and venues reaching out for bookings
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Then COVID hit and depressed the industry. Billie decided to remove her music from all stores and start fresh, and in doing so, we saw how sorely missed the music was, as fans demanded its return.
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