How The Founders of Chaotic Good Make Songs Go Viral on TikTok — Live at SXSW

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0:30Jesse Coren:How do songs really go viral? Sure, it could be something as simple as a single singing video posted to TikTok that just totally explodes. But now trying to engineer virality has become a big business in the industry. Perhaps no one knows more about how modern songs go viral than my guests today, Jesse Koren and Andrew Spellman, two of the co-founders of Chaotic Good. These are some of the music industry's go-to digital marketers. From Geese to Zara Larson, Travis Scott, and Alex Warren, the Chaotic Good team has had a hand in making sure new songs reach listeners in a time when 100 ,000 songs are uploaded every day, and AI Slop makes it harder to find good new hits than ever.

1:12Jesse Coren:Welcome back to On the Record, a music business podcast from Billboard and Sickbird Productions. As always, I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and this week we're doing something a little bit different. We are at South by Southwest in Austin at the Billboard House talking to some incredibly smart executives in front of a live audience. I'm joined in this episode by Jesse Corrin and Andrew Spellman, two of the co-founders of Chaotic Good. Jesse and Andrew, at their core, are artist managers. After successfully building a management company called Mutual Friends, which is home to talents like Chelsea Cutler, Jeremy Zucker, Quinn92, and more, The pair said that they were inspired to start Chaotic Good because of the challenges they saw artists go through every day when trying to promote their music online.

1:51Jesse Coren:The truth is, back in the day, labels could basically engineer a hit song. There used to be all these different levers that they could pull, including late night show performances, MTV, radio stations, press, etc. They could even guarantee that you would be put in the front of record stores, making it seem like an unknown artist was actually the hottest thing out there. Relationships went a really long way back then, and labels had both that and a bunch of money to spend. But today, many of the gatekeepers are gone, and now music discovery is largely dictated by the whims of algorithms, especially those on TikTok.

2:25Jesse Coren:That's where Chaotic Good and other digital marketing companies like it have come in. They're hired by record labels to come in and find a way to crack the algorithm. In 2020, which predated Chaotic Good, it was the influencer campaign. Pay a popular girl on TikTok to play your song in the background of a video. But now even that doesn't work super well. That's when the idea of volume campaigns, or as Chaotic Good calls it, trend simulation, started to take over. So basically, instead of paying a handful of top creators to use your song in a video, what if you created this network of hundreds to thousands of small TikTok accounts, plugged the songs into the background of those videos, and created what looks like a groundswell of genuine interest in the song?

3:05Jesse Coren:These creative pages are often themed, whether it's a fan page for the artist or meme pages, sports clips, love quotes. All of these types of accounts can be used as vehicles to share songs in the background. This might sound simple, but pulling this off is no easy feat. So today we're here to talk to Jesse and Andrew about how they do it. So let's go ahead and cut to our conversation at South by Southwest. All right. Hello, hello, hello. Hello. Welcome back to our second live taped episode of On the Record, which is Billboard's new music business podcast. We are going to discuss all things virality.

3:41Jesse Coren:How do songs go viral today in this incredibly crowded landscape? I'm joined here by Jesse Corrin and Andrew Spellman. They are the founders of Chaotic Good, which is a digital agency used by so many people. it's hard to count but a lot of labels hire them artists managers all in the service of breaking their songs online so thank you guys for being here thanks for having us all right okay so i figured that we could start by just talking about the history of tiktok marketing the very short history of tiktok marketing because it's already changed the online landscape has already changed a million times since tiktok was you know popularized in like about 2020 so andrew do you mind explaining to me like kind of the the progression of TikTok marketing for artists?

4:26Andrew Spelman:Yeah, for sure. I think in a lot of ways it's changed a ton, but like the core principles of what we do to make a song go viral like are the same, which is like we are looking for like underpriced efficient places to put your songs where we think your audience will be. So that hasn't changed. But like when TikTok first started like proliferating, it was a lot of the old techniques applied to TikTok. So macro influencers or trigger markets or all these kind of concepts that were really popular in 2019 or 2020.

4:53Jesse Coren:So like a Charlie D 'Amelio, like hire Charlie D 'Amelio to use your song in a dance or something like that.

4:59Andrew Spelman:Jesse and I worked on a record together before we were partners where we hired Dixie D 'Amelio. Yeah, this is from five, six years ago and it made an impact. I think what we've seen the progression be and what we've done a chaotic good is kind of really think through what it means for like a feed to be algorithmic. And that really, really changes what your approach should be. So it's a lot more volume. It's a lot more thinking about niches and it's a lot more kind of like hand-to-hand combat. And so like our day to day isn't that different. Like we are kind of studying the internet and TikTok and seeing what's working organically and then trying to recreate it at scale inorganically.

5:30Jesse Coren:Okay. I've heard people talk about these kind of new age campaigns on TikTok and use a bunch of different ways to describe it. I've heard volume campaigns. I think y 'all have said trend seeding before where basically can you describe exactly like what this means?

5:45Andrew Spelman:We use the term trend simulation, which I think is useful. basically what we're doing like every day is sometimes artists get lucky they post a song and it goes viral and so what we're doing is going and looking and studying what actually happened like you know what were the inflection points who are the key people that picked it up like what who are important people in certain genres like what are the niches why did this happen and so then we have a song that isn't naturally going viral we apply that to it and so we say we're kind of simulating a trend and part of that is also studying how the tiktok algorithm works, what's important, how you want to pace out videos, all these kind of things.

6:20Andrew Spelman:And so we can get into kind of the details there, but that's how we think about these song campaigns. Yeah. And what we've done, I think since the initial song UDC campaign is scale out a bunch more. So now we focus a lot on narratives and discourse online. And so it's not always even song specific. It could be a little bit more about an artist campaign or somebody who worked with another artist or you know we had a somebody we work with who produced a big pop record and so it became about how do we get that narrative out there ahead of their record that they were putting out um so yeah it's it's it stems a lot further now than just the song campaign yeah i've heard

6:57Jesse Coren:i've heard it described to me before is like back in the day it used to be top down for marketing so it's like hiring your biggest creators you can find paying them and having them use their song in video. Now what you guys are describing, like practically speaking, is you run or have a network of a bunch of different accounts that are meme accounts or sports clips or truck videos or whatever these types of accounts are. And then you can plug the song into those. So it creates more of a groundswell effect rather than coming from the top down. Is that correct?

7:30Andrew Spelman:That's correct. And there's a very specific reason why this works on TikTok. A question I like to like kind of ask everyone in the music industry is, you know, why do no songs really break off Instagram reels? Like ostensibly it is the same platform as TikTok. It's an algorithmic feed that you swipe on. There should be Instagram reel songs, but that kind of is not a category that exists. And the reason we think that's true is TikTok is entirely based around trending audios. Like that is the main primitive. It's like a really obvious point, but it has huge implications. And so on TikTok, it's really easy to get views.

8:01Andrew Spelman:You just post trending audios. Like TikTok weights that really heavily in the algorithm. But artists can't do that because they want to promote their own music. And so a big part of what we are doing is posting enough volume across enough accounts with enough impressions to try to simulate the idea that the song is trending or moving or whatever you want to call it. And then as that happens, the artist posts are doing better and all this kind of things. Because, you know, if you were building a new account, which we do many times a day, you would never post non-trending audios. It's worse practices, but artists have to.

8:31Andrew Spelman:And so we view our job as kind of pushing against that and helping them.

8:34Jesse Coren:Interesting. Wait, so like, how do you run all of these accounts? Do you just have a bunch of cell phones somewhere or?

8:40Andrew Spelman:Yeah, pretty much. We have a large network of, you know, both employees and contractors and people in our network. And yeah, a lot of, a lot of phones. We have a rapid Verizon at this point. We are like a VIP customer of them and our office is overrun with iPhones. And our partner, Adam, has this theory about which iPhone is best. It gets very, it gets deep very fast. Yeah.

9:02Jesse Coren:Do you think it's more superstition or do you think there's actually merit to what he's saying?

9:06Andrew Spelman:I think a lot of like trying to figure out the voodoo of the algorithm is. However, this is our job, like full time. And like we study it at like a collegiate level. And so, you know, anything to get an edge.

9:19Jesse Coren:Yeah. Well, can you tell when the TikTok algorithm changes? Like, is there a moment where you're like, well, wait, what was working yesterday days, all of a sudden not happening today?

9:27Andrew Spelman:I think what we can tell is like, you know, I said TikTok is structured around trending audios. I think the other side of that coin is TikTok is structured on these kind of like trending formats. And so for a specific genre and a specific time, there'll be a format that really works. I think what we're paying attention to is when that starts to have diminishing returns and we need to take our camp and set it up somewhere else. I think we really pay attention to that. I would say like algorithm changes is more so kind of on like Instagram and Reels as they're figuring it out. And so like, if you listen to the meta earnings reports, which I doubt anyone does.

10:01Andrew Spelman:I'm not listening. You know, view time on Instagram Reels is up 30%. And so that's a real thing. Like they're clearly perfecting the algorithm. And so we as a company have to pay more attention to it. We've been running a lot more experiments there. And I think a year from now, if you ask me like, what's changed? I think it'll be that we've done a lot more on Instagram.

10:17Jesse Coren:That's very interesting. Yeah. Well, OK, so one of the big updates is that TikTok in the US is now under new ownership. And I feel like personally, as a TikTok user, I've noticed that the algorithm is a little bit different. There's also a couple of days where I was getting like repeat videos that happened multiple times. But I'm wondering for you guys, has that impacted you? Have you seen that algorithmic change?

10:39Andrew Spelman:No, I mean, I think it's more just being mindful of like the macro scale of what this means. And like Andrew said, like paying attention to what, you know, the competitors are doing and making sure that we're mindful of what things may change at any time. And we always say, like, we reserve, you know, a percentage of our bandwidth to kind of experiment and to make sure that we're building out the like, you know, emergency situation just in case something were to happen on, you know, any platform in this in this case, TikTok that we use, you know, so heavily. um and uh yeah so i think that's it's more about you know i don't think we're seeing that much change right now but it's a it's a signal that we should always make sure we're prepared for

11:20Jesse Coren:anything at any time yeah and i'm wondering you guys work across like pretty much every genre at this point right okay so could you give me some like practical examples of types of content that resonates with certain audiences in certain genres because i imagine if you're working on a country song one day and a latin song the next day those are not going to be the same campaign to try to reach those audiences. So give me some examples.

11:42Andrew Spelman:This is a really core principle of the company, which is, you know, we can drive impressions on anything. At this point, we know how to go viral. We have thousands of pages, but making sure that they are like not empty calories and that they are impressions that will actually find your audience. And so, you know, for a lot of underground rap songs, it'll be these kind of like stretched out clips of video games right now are really popular or like for a lot of like singer songwriter stuff. I'm sure a lot of people here have seen the kind of like yellow text quotes. You know, we call that pastel talk.

12:11Andrew Spelman:Like, we think we were kind of the first people to do that, and now a lot of copiers, and then you have to pivot to the next thing. And so, you know, when we spoke, you know, however many months ago that was, on the countryside, it is a lot of trucks. It is a lot of cowboy hats and things like that, but it makes sense, yeah. I think for us, one thing as it relates to our team is really focusing on hiring people who understand the niches and the genres. We feel like, you know, We can sort of teach anyone the principles that we have as a company on how to go viral and how to make an effective campaign.

12:42Andrew Spelman:But I think that them being people who understand these niches and these genres very, very intimately is a really, really important core principle for us.

12:51Jesse Coren:Yeah. And well, OK, so let's get into why you founded this company in the first place, because you guys are managers by trade, tried and true managers, have been managing for a long time through your other company, Mutual Friends. did that inspire the creation of the digital marketing arm? Like, tell me more about that origin story.

13:10Andrew Spelman:Yeah, totally. I mean, initially it wasn't let's start an agency, but I think we just, you know, recognized all the challenges that happened for us and for the artist. And, you know, we were in a time, and I think still are, where there's so much pressure on the artist. And, you know, it's how much are they posting? Have they posted today? Why haven't they posted? you know the whole thing and and I think for us as managers our job is to support the artist and so you know for a while I think you know we were used to sort of throwing our hands up and thinking well if they're not driving it from their page then you know what can we do um and and we sat for a little bit like two years ago I would say and we just recognized like this isn't going anywhere we've had a lot of success in digital but we're not doing enough um and so I think at that point we knew we really wanted to strengthen how we were in digital as managers.

14:05Andrew Spelman:And then it made us more aware and more, you know, made it top of mind for us. And then I would say it wasn't until we kind of met our partners, Adam and Tim, two really brilliant young internet kids who were building something really interesting and had this approach that we had never really seen or heard of. And we decided at that point, like, this is not only something that will help us in our roster, but the industry needs. And so that was the idea to start the agency.

14:34Jesse Coren:Interesting. Okay. So you guys feel very confident that you can make a song go viral online, but does that actually translate to streams all the time? And do you still consider a campaign to be a success if there is virality on TikTok, but maybe not a huge translation into streams on Spotify?

14:50Andrew Spelman:That's a great question. I think the way we think about it is, you know, if there's a ton of virality, but we aren't seeing conversion to streaming, it's kind of like two options. Like there's something irreducible about the song that people just don't want to listen to. And that is something like we can't fully control. But the first thing we check is like, are we targeting the right people where the audience is? And so we may be driving a ton of views. There may be some trend happening, but it may not be connected to the song or it may not be finding the audience of that artist. You know, if we still have a viral trend, like I think it's can still be a really successful campaign.

15:23Andrew Spelman:We manage an artist named Kevin Atwater, who we saw that there was a lot of overlap with his fan base and the show Yellow Jackets. And so we'd been trying a lot of stuff for this song and we ended up putting a quote from the song like before the audio and it went crazy.

15:38Jesse Coren:From Yellow Jackets?

15:39Andrew Spelman:From the show. You know, I feel it so deeply in my bones, I think it's a quote, something like that. And then the song starts and it went crazy. And the song has, you know, 40 ,000 creates on TikTok and it's streaming improved a lot, but it's not like a crazy consumption hit. But what it's done is now, every time he posts with the audio, his posts do well because he has this trending audio and it's tied to his brand. And now fans show up dressed as the characters. And it's kind of been this huge moment for him. So I view that as a huge success for client on our roster, but it's not this kind of runaway TikTok number one hit.

16:05Jesse Coren:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting. I mean, you guys have run campaigns for all sorts of artists. I was looking through your Instagram. You have artists on there like Coldplay and Zara Larson and Childish Gambino. Could you walk me through an example of what are these campaigns working and why you think it works so well? Maybe Childish Gambino?

16:24Andrew Spelman:Yeah, Childish Gambino is a fun one. The song is Let Her Home. And when we get a song, we see it as a team, the full number of 25 people. And we talk about what we've seen on the internet that week, what we think is going to work. And then we try to put it into action. And we have a very serious testing process. And all of our tricks were not working. We throw the fastball and the curveball and the other thing and it wasn't working and then we kind of noticed one style of like quote on screen creators really working but we weren't able to do it at a scale that was actually moving the needle so Adam who is you know one of our partners in the company who we mentioned kind of had this like fuck it I'll do it myself mindset and you know we are confident and so is he that we can train anyone to go viral and so he just started training his friends his brothers, his brother's friends, and built this kind of like army of people to post on TikTok.