How the Major Labels Use AI Fans To Market Music

0:00Joe Lim: This is all faked like that, you know, we're trying to make it look like there's a real person's account, but obviously it's not. So what is your approach there?

0:12Ari Herstand: I think if you're doing it at small scale, you could definitely just name it like your artist name fan club or your artist name. OK. Fan hub. OK. And once you get up to the scale of like hundreds of accounts, you probably, and just put the artist in the profile picture. Once you get into the hundreds of accounts, you likely want to make these avatars. So, for example, like let's say you're marketing a film. a film or let's say you're marketing a song uh for i don't know playboy cardi right you want the you i mean you could have the account say like uh stacy williams one two three and then it looks like stacy is listening to playboy cardi the content you could post is like an ai stacy right or what people do is like they find footage of uh real people and just call her stacy even though that her real name is like nancy it's it's that's kind of up but like it's what goes on

1:28Joe Lim: so you're like impersonating some a real person for your account essentially yeah yeah

1:38Joe Lim: what's going on welcome to the new music business i'm your host ari herstan author of how to make it in the new music business the book third edition is out now all formats hardcover ebook audiobook however you like books you can find the book today my guest is joe lim he is the founder and ceo of Fluttify. It is a marketing tech company that distributed over 2 million short form videos for Universal Music Group, Warner and Sony, the big three, the major labels. I heard about Joe reading about him in New York Magazine, the Vulture piece, all about music marketing. He's also been featured in Billboard, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Financial Times.

2:20Joe Lim: If you've been following kind of the new music marketing tactics, of course, the episode on the Billboard podcast with the chaotic good founders that went viral because of Eliza McLem's sub stack piece. Then then Wired came out with an article calling a geese a psyop. All of this was just because of these new music marketing tactics that all the majors are using. A lot of the indie labels are using. Geese is on an indie label. Now a lot of indie artists and managers are using. This is the kind of the modern music marketing tactics. It is wild. And this episode get crazy. I mean, I'm telling you, prepare yourself.

3:00Joe Lim: This is not for the faint of heart. Basically, he shakes the listeners a few times throughout this and saying, do you want a career? Do you want to have a career? You want to just make music and you're better? Because basically, it's, you know, this is the state of music marketing. And yes, if you want to reach people with your music, it's important to understand these tactics. Now, whether you choose to utilize these types of marketing tactics is totally up to you, of course, but these are very cutting edge music marketing tactics. And he breaks a lot of them down, what they've used, what is out there and what their company is now starting to do.

3:35Joe Lim: It's wild. It's crazy. I'm not going to give anything away. You just got to listen to this because man, are we in wild times of music marketing. Honestly, just the state of humanity and society in general, whoa, it's wild. Anyway, if you wanna learn more about what Joe is working on in his company, Fluttify, you can just find him at fluttify.io. His Instagram is Joe, L-I-M-M-M-M-M. That's five Ms, Joe Lim. You can find all of us that make the show happen at Ari's Take on the socials. Find me at Ari Herstand on Instagram. Right now, pause this episode, leave us a five-star review. If you haven't already, please leave us a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, podcasts.

4:20Joe Lim: Give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the follow button. And visit ariestake.com and get on that email list. That's actually the best way to stay in touch with us, ariestake.com. Get on the email list. Everything is fake. Those are the parting words I'm going to leave you with, but our email list is real. And if you want to hear from me directly, sign up on the email list. All right, let's kick into the show. Joe Lim, welcome to the show.

4:44Ari Herstand: Yo, Ari. Thank you for having me. Hey.

4:47Joe Lim: Yeah, for sure. So this is, I'm really excited to talk to you because, you know, one of the hottest topics in the music industry, you know, ever since kind of that interview, the Billboard podcast with the Chaotic Good Guys went viral, and then everyone started talking about it. It was kind of like pulled the curtain back on music marketing, something that a space you've been working in now for years, I know. And you're one of the biggest players in that space who I know have worked with all the majors and indies and everybody in between on just kind of music marketing. And I'm sure maybe I'm curious, just like now having taken a step back or a pause and just like taking a beat and seeing the public reaction of kind of the state of music marketing right now in 2026.

5:38Joe Lim: I'm curious just like what your takeaways and just kind of like where your stance is at just like the state of music marketing in general and just from your vantage point, just like how you're seeing all of this play out.

5:54Ari Herstand: dude i think music marketing is actually behind like it seems like all this stuff is new and crazy and people are like oh this is a dark society but this has been happening in other industries for since 2022 maybe 2020 2022 for sure 2021 maybe um people have been using these burner accounts and have been creating these fan pages like all the hot topics that uh the media is talking about clipping since like over five years ago now. It's been in OnlyFans, politics, personal brands, everything. And now like it's been in music for a few years. I think I like I was pushing it way before like these articles came out.

6:42Ari Herstand: But like now that it's now that it's out there, like the streets are like surprised. but it's been here for a while.

6:54Joe Lim: That's true and the streets are surprised because I don't think most average music consumers and definitely not indie musicians that didn't have you know a budget or a machine or a label behind them kind of understood what all was happening behind the scenes so you you reference a few things that I really want to touch on and maybe you can break these down a little bit like just really at a basic level for people that maybe are not familiar with any of this. You said burner accounts, you said fan pages, you mentioned clipping. Can you just start there and just explain what are those things? What is a burner account?

7:30Ari Herstand: Yeah. So burner accounts is what it all comes down to where these accounts don't really matter. These accounts aren't attached to a personal brand. They're not attached to a brand at all. What they are, are just these like small social media accounts that are there for this purpose of marketing some parent concept like an artist or a model or an influencer. They're there to serve a purpose. If they get banned, they get banned. They're meaningless real estate. The thing that's getting popular is this idea of clipping. And these clipping pages are also happening mainly through these burner accounts.

8:14Ari Herstand: It's kind of like the main product. And then these different strategies like burner accounts, fan pages, I mean, clipping, fan pages, all that type of stuff stems or they're a part of these burner pages.

8:28Joe Lim: What is clipping? What does that mean?

8:31Ari Herstand: So clipping is started with the idea of chopping long form content like a YouTube video, film, TV show into short form clips. the idea has now expanded into like people use it as a broad term for just posting content at scale um posting derivative content at scale and um yeah i think like anyone like the term is went from long form and short form all the way to uh just posting well give me some examples here

9:09Joe Lim: You said like clipping accounts or like, you know, burner accounts became clipping accounts. Just, yeah, give me an example of like what a clipping account is.

9:17Ari Herstand: Yeah, I mean, like the most obvious one happens with streamers like Neon or Kaisenot or Speed. They have these pages that are posting like streamer content mainly to get paid or to market the streamer and get

9:41Joe Lim: exposure. You mean like live streams? So they go live for like a couple hours and then they clip that and they just clip moments from that live stream and they put it on TikTok or something?

9:51Ari Herstand: Yeah. Like, for example, Kik has a bunch of social media accounts that they operate. They do somewhere between 10 to 15 billion views per month. Kik? What is Kik? Kik is like Twitch. It's like a streaming platform. um they operate pages and they're uh they're doing over 10 billion views per month like clipping clav like clavicular or neon or any one of their streamers got it so when it comes to

10:24Joe Lim: music give me some examples of just like what well what you have done i mean things that either you can speak to uh that you're not bound by nda or maybe just like that's in the public domain or just like any kind of example uh pretend you know there's a lot of people listening to this right now that are not as in the weeds as you are or up to date and maybe haven't even listened to uh read any of the articles that you've been interviewed for maybe they didn't hear the podcast uh they they know nothing so I want to just break it down for like the you know there's probably hundreds of thousands of indie artists out there that actually have no idea what you're talking about and you're still speaking a foreign language to them.

11:04Joe Lim: So I want to get like super, super, super basic. Give me an example of in the music space, how this works.

11:14Ari Herstand: Yeah. So at a basic level, think of you have your main social media account, which is posting footage of you. You can also make a second social media account that posts lyric videos or behind the scenes footage or um just any derivative content that isn't good enough to go on your main page or wouldn't make sense branding wise uh these big music artists they have labels that operate accounts that are their secondary accounts um they also have platforms like WAP. WAP is a platform that takes their music. They have a bunch of clippers and the clippers will take their music, the artist's music, and then post it to their social media accounts to get paid.

12:13Ari Herstand: That's another strategy. Another strategy is... Sorry, just before you move on, what is WAP now? WAP is a payment processor, but really what they are is a creator economy that has different strategies that they host. So one of the strategies that they commercialize is clipping.

12:37Joe Lim: So yeah, I'm not familiar with this at all. So just explain to me how that ecosystem works of WAP. I've never heard of WAP before. So to break down how that all works.

12:48Ari Herstand: Sure. Here's some free promotion for WAP. But a label can upload their song or they can upload like concert clips and basically there's hundreds of thousands of of people that have access to seeing those pieces of footage so what the labels do is they'll put up like a five thousand ten thousand dollar budget and those hundreds of thousands of clippers will get paid to use that footage on their social media accounts?

13:25Joe Lim: Oh, so WAP is like a marketplace where the labels say, hey, we want people to help promote this song or this clip from this podcast or this concert clip or something like that, or this concert footage and here's here's the full song here's uh here's a here's a four minute concert clip or something like that and then the creators on the other side of uh of this marketplace will go in and see that and then i'm assuming there's like a budget or a bid or something or they'll say like oh i'll do this for a hundred bucks or i'll do it for 50 or do they just say uh everyone who clips this gets 50 bucks or their incentives based on how many views they

14:10Ari Herstand: get or how does this all work yeah it's like a budget and a bid so like okay they'll say here is uh five thousand dollars and it's a pool of money that goes to the clippers if you get like a thousand views maybe you'll get a dollar or two um if you get a million views you

14:29Joe Lim: might get like a thousand dollars oh so it is incentive based it is incentive based it leads

14:35Ari Herstand: to a lot of problems like bots and um sure accounts in foreign countries and stuff but the idea of it is commercialized clipping got it and then typically do labels say this is the

14:50Joe Lim: moment in the song that we want you to use or do they say here's the three minute song you choose whatever part of the song you want generally it's a tiktok sound so they're trying

15:02Ari Herstand: trying to get uh create some the sound like people using um the exact same part of the song yeah

15:12Joe Lim: got it okay so that's one of the tools in in this arsenal uh that i i think you know i've never heard of that platform uh i'm sure a lot of people listening to this have never heard of that i i've i kind of vaguely understand the concept and i know that there's other marketplaces that exist out there where that type of thing happens. So yeah, so break that down some more of just like, because you mentioned labels might have or agencies like yourself or something might have clippers themselves or your own burner accounts that you own or fan accounts. Like you said, a label or an artist might, you know, you have your main profile, but then you have some other secondary profiles that you control break that down for me like the uh what a label controls what an artist might control versus what you go to the marketplace and just try to get other

16:02Ari Herstand: creators to do uh on your behalf yeah so for example i have this connection at sony she manages 90 fan pages for different artists herself like she manages 90 accounts using different virtual assistants to chop up content and then she'll post it on those social media accounts so inside labels they generally don't 90 accounts might seem a lot but in comparison to their roster it's not that much so okay they'll generally offer uh services to the artist where they manage one or two fan accounts um when you go towards the agencies like i was running an agency it was called over distribution we ran uh anywhere between 300 400 accounts uh for this one a-list celebrity there was one friend that i was doing marketing for where we ran over a thousand

17:04Joe Lim: accounts um to market one song one yeah one artist one song one song yeah how do you do that how does one person or one company manage a thousand different accounts yeah so uh basically what

17:22Ari Herstand: it comes down to is something called a device farm or a phone farm and it's basically this assortment of different devices whether they're physical or there's phones that exist on the cloud as well and what these phones have is like a tiktok or instagram or youtube on on the phone and then they'll make social media accounts. And these are just channels to post content on at that point.

17:51Joe Lim: And they have their own account. So does somebody, does a human go in and create, like did you have to go in and create a thousand different profiles and set them all up and start following and get followers and the whole deal? And then they're all connected to your portal and then you can start sending content to these thousand different accounts or step me through how that works.

18:14Ari Herstand: So there's different ways to do it. I know this guy that he has like 3 ,500 phones, like real phones. And like he uses AI agents. So basically these like AI that acts on devices to create accounts.

18:34Joe Lim: Wow.

18:35Ari Herstand: I personally used virtual assistants. So people in like the Philippines to remote desktop into the phones that were sitting in the U.S. Okay. So there's different ways to go about it.

18:51Joe Lim: Wild. And then how do you come up with the content to post on these accounts? Or is that also with AI assistance or virtual assistance? Or how do you, yeah, come down to that?

19:05Ari Herstand: So the way to do that is at scale is to use AI or some automations. So what I've developed is this AI clipper that looks at, I'm more in like films and TV shows these days, but they watch hours of film footage or TV footage and they'll take like the best parts of the show and then they'll just post it. There's also automations where you can do like fan edits or just re-templating the content. So it's either AI or automations. It's rare that a human actually goes there and creates the content. I'd say Sony is probably doing that because they have really good, they're only managing 90 accounts or something.

20:00Joe Lim: Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. So, I mean, have you found that this is effective? Like you said, AI will watch the show or something and pick the best clips. What does it determine the best clips or how does it know what clips are going to be, are going to connect with humans?

20:16Ari Herstand: Dude, I mean, like AI is actually really incredible. I can't talk about the clients that I'm working with right now. Sure. But I, like while we were developing it, we were just playing around with the show Billions, which is just a Showtime show. Is that still on?

20:33Joe Lim: It's been on for a while.

20:34Ari Herstand: I think it's coming back, but it's like this finance show. And the episode one that we chopped up, that AI basically clipped up the exact parts that were on TikTok or YouTube posted by the brand, like posted by Showtime. So the AI is actually incredibly strong these days. um and and like we're using google gemini which has access to all of youtube and such so it uh

21:07Joe Lim: so does it reference what clips are already out there and then goes and makes them or does it just kind of know based on referencing what is on youtube and the types of content and the types of clips from the other shows are out there it'll then uh it forms the clipper to say like this is the type of clip that does well so find that type of clip in this show and just chop clip that it's

21:31Ari Herstand: more of the latter where it's like you just give it a prompt and tell them like what a good footage what a good um clip entails yeah so how does that how does that work for music how is how is clipping

21:43Joe Lim: film clips helpful for music or is that just an example of this like how does this how does this

21:48Ari Herstand: work in the music space so i founded a company flutterfy and yeah flutterfy what we used to do is we had 65 ,000 people or 40 ,000 people link 65 ,000 social media accounts to us. They gave us authorization to post content on their behalf. What we did was we automatically made lyric videos. So edits are really scalable. It wasn't necessarily clipping up music videos or short form content. It was more so creating like thousands. We posted 50 ,000 lyric videos in a single day, for example. And that was the type of marketing we were doing for music.

22:33Joe Lim: That's wild. Okay, so you said 40 ,000 people linked their accounts to you. Did you, like, is this through a WAP type of marketplace, or did you just put the word out and you got 40 ,000 people to opt into your system?

22:52Ari Herstand: Yeah, I mean, like, we did a little bit of ads for, like, the first few hundred users. And, like, that shit, like, skyrocketed from there with, like, referral programs and that type of stuff.

23:05Joe Lim: Are these real creatives or are these just people that just have a burner, just, like, have an account they don't care about? It's more so the latter, yeah.

23:13Ari Herstand: Like, we were just using them as channels. My thesis on distribution has changed since that version of Flutterfy. Okay. What I think is actually more effective is having your own dedicated accounts. As in, like, if you are, I don't know, Lewis Capaldi, you have 100 Lewis Capaldi accounts. I think that's way more effective than what Fluttify used to do. And it's actually where I'm pivoting to now. um the reason for this is is distribution is very focused on uh the channel that's getting distributed it's getting distributed on so like for example if you were to do marketing for a finance product on a knitting page it wouldn't really pan out um so the idea is like if you take that to the highest level it's like if you're posting content about an artist the other content that's posted on that page should also be of that artist got it now when you say

24:27Joe Lim: there's like a you know have a thousand or a hundred lewis capaldi accounts do you mean these are like fan accounts or these are i guess these are just like posting lewis capaldi content yeah like fan accounts you know like fan accounts or what yeah i guess whatever you want to call

24:43Ari Herstand: they're they're not really fan accounts but uh they're called fan accounts so it looks more

24:49Joe Lim: legit yeah right right of course they're like real fans aren't running them you're running them um so how would you do that i guess you then have your your clipper your ai clipper will you just like ingest all of the live footage that you can find or or interview clips or whatever and you just have the clippers kind of go through clip them a bunch and then you just start flooding all of these uh for lack of a better term um like i don't know what do you want to call them fan accounts or burner accounts or or just like uh they're not official artist accounts but uh you just like flood these accounts with with that content yeah i mean it depends on how uh into

25:36Ari Herstand: it you want to get but that's the best way to do it like when we are doing a this a-list celebrity that i was talking about we chopped up all his movies we chopped up all his tv shows like seasons of tv shows and we would post those clips live streams whatever uh they were on

25:59Joe Lim: and the purpose of that is what uh it's just to like remind the world that they're there

26:08Ari Herstand: um okay like there's there's different ways to go about it i think a lot of um uh people just go purely for views but really what you want to do is like if you were Netflix or something like you wanted to say like in the in the caption like uh this is like the best Netflix show or something like that something that could lead them to actually go back on

26:35Joe Lim: Netflix yeah so tell me how that works at scale I mean I can kind of comprehend uh like an AI clipper analyzing hours of footage uh on on youtube videos and then like clipping the best clips and then it somehow automatically sends it to uh these thousands of creator accounts or or accounts that that you somehow control and then it's also creating a caption and you can automate in all of this at scale or is there any human intervention throughout this this workflow here dude i mean if you're using human intervention it's it's really hard to do um so you want most of it to be

27:24Ari Herstand: automated if not fully automated like at least assisted to the point where like a human just says yes or no um you want the system to do as much as you can um and then let it run

27:40Joe Lim: okay so back to music so i mean i get that for uh like a celebrity like a like a uh an actor or something like that and just like uh elevating their persona maybe it will lead to more brand deals maybe it'll lead to uh when they're negotiating their next movie they can point you know to their popularity uh to the studio and be like look at look at we have a million videos that are about this actor and my rate should be$3 million higher than it was in the last film because look at how popular I am. It's theoretically gonna drive ticket sales because I'm so popular. I get that in the film actor space.

28:21Joe Lim: Talk to me about how this works in music. You touched on a Lewis Capaldi 100 accounts or whatever, but how does this work? And, you know, I would say most people listening are indies, like indie artists, indie labels, managers that are doing this for independent artists. How would something like this work for an indie artist? And, yeah, and tell me kind of the focus and the intention of all these campaigns.

28:52Ari Herstand: Yeah, I'd say the idea for indie artists is a bit different. Because you're operating at the scale of like probably 10 accounts at max. Okay. Like maybe you and your manager are both managing five accounts. What you're probably going to benefit the most from is just getting your face out there more. You can get your song out there more. there's other platforms that just help you automate content at that smaller scale and the videos are a bit more targeted versus using something like a WAP or a Flutterfy.

29:41Joe Lim: Tell me about your program then is this a Flutterfy thing is this like a Flutterfy 2.0 or or what are you working on? Yeah so for context I talked a little bit about Flutterfy before

29:53Ari Herstand: Or what happened was we ended in February for some problems that I had in terms of like messing up the operations. We had to shut down sales, et cetera, et cetera. Since then, we've gotten tons of press. We were in New York Magazine, Washington Post. We're getting an HBO episode, all that type of stuff. and the basically the the old investors that we had want us to come back and then they put more funds in and we're relaunching with a new business model that change like with the new thesis that i have on distribution where the uh creatives and distribution channels should be very specific to the artist or the film or whatever we're marketing.

30:43Ari Herstand: So what Flutterfy 2.0 is, is a platform that helps you manage a fleet of social media accounts. So what we'll do for a film or record label is say like, hey, here's, you know, 400 accounts. These are just for you, just for your film, just for your TV network. And they'll distribute AI-assisted content at scale. What I mentioned before with the indie artists is like this scales down linearly. So if you want to manage five accounts, we'll still be able to assist you in the content creation and distribution process for those five accounts.

31:29Joe Lim: and just break it down a little bit more specifically uh so you said manage the content and the distribution how does this work so like so do it for me let's say i got a band you know and i i'm i'm interested in this service what are the steps what do we do yeah so you can

31:51Ari Herstand: either come to the platform with uh five to ten or a hundred accounts that you create link them to the platform or you could purchase accounts from us and we'll give you the um channels that you could distribute content onto post content onto what does that mean channels that we can

32:11Joe Lim: distribute is it are these like tiktok accounts you're talking about tiktok instagram youtube

32:16Ari Herstand: whatever you want.

32:18Joe Lim: Okay, so that would be I wouldn't say is this still like I'm creating we're creating five to 10 accounts for my band. And or I can ask you to create five or 10 accounts for my band? Or what do you mean? There's this just accounts that are out there?

32:31Ari Herstand: Exactly. So you can either create them or you can get it created from us or our partners. we'll basically make sure you have social media accounts that can be posted on and then we'll have ai automate the workflow of what type of content would you should post on all these accounts and we'll do the content creation for you we'll do the posting for you and you just let the engine run.

33:03Joe Lim: And the idea around this is it's all going to be, so let's say I do 10 accounts for my band and it's, these are all, every account is focused around my band and you're just doing like live footage of my band or we're doing lyric videos or other film clips. Like how focused around the artist are you getting here? Are you using a lot of the tactics that you've used in the past of putting the sound to a lyric video or putting the sound to a film clip or to a sports clip or

33:40Ari Herstand: promoting the sound versus the artist yeah so it depends on when this episode releases but it'll be lyric videos you can put in different movies you can put in different uh sports and you can put in clips of yourself. So it'll be all of the above.

34:02Joe Lim: And does somebody choose that? So when you're working with the artist or the label or the manager or whatever, I'm assuming you kind of have a focus and an intention for these campaigns and be like, okay, we want to, what if the idea is like, I got a new album out, I want to promote the music. What do you think we should do to promote?

34:26Ari Herstand: the music yeah so well what we what we offer is a platform that makes it as easy as possible to run campaigns on so let's say you have a vision for soccer clips what you could do is just tell the ai on our platform get me soccer clips and it'll find you a bunch of soccer clips from youtube or TikTok and um once you like the clips it'll just automate the entire content creation process

34:57Joe Lim: for for you and your accounts and like just as a soccer example uh it would be like put my song on the soccer clips and then it'll just post a bunch of soccer clips with my music

35:11Ari Herstand: Yeah, and if you want, we'll link it to your TikTok sound.

35:17Joe Lim: Got it. And these 10 burner accounts, just for lack of a better term, what is your recommendation of just the account title? What's the name of the account? What's the image? What's the description? like like who obviously this is all like you know behind the scenes and this is all faked like that you know we're trying to make it look like there's a real person's account but obviously it's not uh so how what is your approach there i think if you're doing it at small scale you could

35:55Ari Herstand: definitely just name it like your artist name fan club or your artist name okay fan hub um okay and And once you get up to the scale of like hundreds of accounts, you probably and just put the artist in the profile picture. Once you get into the hundreds of accounts, you likely want to make these avatars. so for example like let's say you're marketing um a a film or let's say you're marketing a song uh for i don't know playboy cardi right you want the you i mean you could have the account say like uh stacy williams one two three and then it looks like stacy is listening to playboy cardi the content you could post is like an ai stacy right or what people do is like they find footage of uh real people and just call her stacy even though that her real name is like nancy it's it's that's kind of fucked up but like it's what goes

37:07Joe Lim: on so you're like impersonating some a real person for your account essentially yeah yeah Got it. Okay. So I guess like outside of your program, I guess just like zooming out a little bit, just like the state of music marketing. Yeah. You know, this all I can I can sense people listening are kind of uh feeling their stomach turn a little bit as just like how just like seemingly manipulative or fake or like all none of this is is like in the traditional sense authentic like this is you know social media was created for people to connect with other people you know if we get just like go back to the basis and the core of the purpose of social media of back in you know facebook era or whatever when facebook was a thing or a friendster thing or my space or you know get to the core the original obviously we've evolved now but still most people I think that aren't in this marketing space that you are like to assume at least maybe in the last couple of years, uh, like a couple of years ago that, that each account is a person and one person, one account, you know, it's like, I have my Instagram and maybe I have two because I have like my business account and like my personal account and people get that.

38:46Joe Lim: It's like, oh, they're running a business running a person. But now we're talking about this, like, like AIs are running these accounts and we're using AI avatars and we're doing, you know, all the hundreds of burners accounts for this. And it's like, yeah. How do you make sense of all this? And like, you know, explain where we are at as a society now with all of this.

39:10Ari Herstand: It's a dead internet. Like what's going on is you're having bots interact with bots to basically push posts higher. So you might have a post that gets a million views and maybe 100 ,000 of that is fake. It's that$100 ,000... I mean, the 100 ,000 fake views is what accelerates it to get 900 ,000 real views. Or you might do it to the extent where it's like... like you could fake a lot of things to the point where you get a little real engagement and hopefully those little real real engagement leads to money okay so break that down for me the

39:58Joe Lim: uh because i i still think that there's people that just don't quite understand what like how the algorithm works in that realm so you said you might need to get a hundred thousand fake views to reach 900 ,000 real views. How? How does that even work? It's just for people that don't understand the algorithm.

40:17Ari Herstand: Okay, that was a poetic way to give an example. But the actual way that people are pushing posts is comment farming. So I've had like pretty big CEOs message me about Like, hey, can you help us push posts by faking comments, replying to each other and stirring up controversy so that people, when they watch the video, they'll have something to read and they'll feel like they could have a conversation. So you fake some engagement to hopefully get some real engagement.

40:58Joe Lim: Got it. So they're stirring up controversy in the comments and then – and those are – that's maybe they're all fake – those are fake comments. But then a real person sees this and like, oh, I want to join the discourse. I have something to say here. So then they comment. And so then it spurs more engagement. And more engagement, of course, triggers the algorithm that people are engaging with this post. So let's show this post to more people. It gets more views, more engagement, and it just kind of snowballs from there.

41:26Ari Herstand: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

41:28Joe Lim: Got it. yeah it's it's it's pretty fucked um like i i i get it conceptually but uh yeah we're at a wild state of humanity right now uh in society that this is this is what it's all worth um so like you know when i talk to artists um about music marketing and kind of mention just just touch on some of these concepts uh the usual response is repulsion and it's just like what what's the point like why why would i do this like this is everything is fake i mean everyone's seen the james blake quote you know go around right now that that anything on the internet in 2026 is fake and you know he's one of maybe the loudest voice at kind of revolting against all of this this music marketing of course that's why people were so fired up on the the wired uh piece around geese calling it a psyop um because they want to believe that like geese is this like authentic indie band um and they felt duped and i think a lot of uh people listening to this fans of artists maybe feel like you know they're being tricked or they're being duped or they're being manipulated because the comments aren't real or these posts aren't real or whatever.

42:49Joe Lim: How do you, like, how would you talk to an artist and say, this is worth it and here's why?

43:00Ari Herstand: Okay, I used to be a full-time artist. For three years, I made around 350 songs. And what came out of that was the songs, but like maybe 10 ,000 followers on TikTok, under 500 followers on Instagram, like under 25 ,000 streams or 50 ,000 streams, whatever. Like no career, right? And I left a job in quantitative finance making the equivalent today is like$400 ,000 a year, right? And what I came to the conclusion of is being an artist is very different than making a career out of your music and your art. Like if you want to be an artist for the beauty of the art, then you can just go on Logic Pro and just make songs all day.

43:56Ari Herstand: If you want to make money through this, you have to play the game. You're not only competing with other artists and record labels, you're competing with the world. You're competing with businesses that are spending millions of dollars putting ads out there, like doing UGC content, clipping, influencer marketing, all this stuff. You're playing with the big dogs. And if you're not willing to do whatever it takes to make your music into a career, then you shouldn't play the game. You should just make music and get a job. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, that's a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people because, you know, a lot of artists grew up idolizing artists that that are, you know, that that changed their lives.

44:45Ari Herstand: They talk about Drake and J. Cole and like all this legit stuff like Big Sean walking up to Kanye, J. Cole walking up to Jay-Z. This like is nonsense. They still played the game. They still played the game at the time. The game was just different. yeah like nowadays like go listen to podcasts like this and figure out what the hell you have to do and go fucking do it stop being like these artists are so dumb like i was an artist and i was so dumb like oh you gotta like uh keep the brand image or you have to keep the the look of um legitimacy and authenticity who gives a fuck like make some fucking money dude

45:29Joe Lim: i mean i i i can get i i understand that uh that take and i understand that yeah if if you don't play the game you're not going to get anywhere and you're not going to if you don't market your music no one's going to hear it and no one's going to care uh on the other side of that like people are still attracted to artists that hold some level of authenticity and have a have a voice and um they have a vision and you know they stay true to themselves in some capacity and so it's like you know i i can understand why some artists are struggling with this because it's like they don't want to feel inauthentic and i i think that you know a a perfect like visual representation of that was kind of you know when tiktok first came out in 2020 2021 when everyone was like oh if you want to make money you want to have a career uh you know don't be a little bitch get on tiktok and do a dance you know and these artists are like you know i like i don't i don't do TikTok dances.

46:38Joe Lim: I don't want to do this thing. This is so stupid. And then I could hear somebody like you saying, you want a career or you want to be in your bedroom using Logic Pro and like make music for yourself. And they're like, well, I want a career, but like the only way to have a career is I got to do a TikTok dance. And I feel like now this is the era we're in now where it's like, it's not TikTok dances anymore, obviously, but it's this.

47:03Ari Herstand: Dude, they're just not studying enough like when they were doing the the tiktok dances and stuff there was still that song addison ray right um where it didn't take a dance it was just like a video of a selfie like rapping like or singing and there's different ways to do these uh trends or these concepts like for example let's say you have to use burner accounts i'm not saying you have to right but like let's say you have to do it do it in a way that fits your uh you know style like authentic if you want to do authentic then like post content of yourself and go write different quotes every day and go do something that feels authentic to you but like definitely play the game to a certain extent it might take more work to do it authentic but that's the game that like that's uh what you're choosing to do.

47:59Ari Herstand: Yeah, that makes sense.

48:01Joe Lim: It's like, this is the state of music marketing that we're in right now. And this is how these are the best ways to market music and market bands and artists and artist projects right now. And this is, so these are the cutting edge techniques and tactics. and you can lean into this if you want to have a career and push your music out there. And I always kind of tell artists, this is a means to an end. The end is playing a sold-out show in front of thousands of people. We're doing all of this to lead up to that moment. And I think every artist can understand that because that's real to them. Numbers, all of this is fake.

48:47Joe Lim: When we're really talking about it, it literally is fake. Like none of this is real, but what is this is a means to the end of having people buy tickets to your show because they become fans of you. So if we can visualize, we can say like that's the end game is we're going to have a career with real human fans buying tickets to my show. I guess getting there now just looks different from when it did 20 years ago where it was like, oh, you got to get a song on the radio. or you know you got to put posters up around your hometown so people will see that you're performing and they'll go want to check it out or you know whatever like there's there's different styles of of marketing and promotion over the years but now this is kind of where we're at um it's yeah i mean it makes sense and it's really smart and it's kind of like it's just a

49:42Ari Herstand: wild time that we're in right now dude think about this like some people like put some people the radio beg to play the song right like if it was the beatles or something the beatles don't have to pay every single radio station so it's like legitimate but then uh some people pay the radio stations a lot of people pay the radio stations like is that fake you know what i mean

50:11Joe Lim: like that's a great point no absolutely and that's why they banned that's why they outlawed payola yeah but you know this shit moves too quickly right now because yes that was fake i mean that was like you know that's exactly right that's what happened is they saw radio was the biggest driver in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and 80s and you know and it was like okay and then it just evolved and so instead of giving the radio dj a wad of cash which is what they used to do before they banned payola they would fly them out to a private resort in hawaii uh where the artist was performing and they'd put them up and they had a whole thing it's just like no money exchanged hands but hey you had a great time didn't you and here's the new song and it's just different forms they used to do that with uh spotify editors like 10 years ago when spotify playlist editors where were the gatekeepers and they were the most powerful people in the music industry you know they they would say Spotify would like to say that uh you know their their their editors can't be bought is it's like okay but then again I see them getting flown around the world to resorts and stuff like that and and I get out and seen invited to very glamorous parties in New York and I get them see you know seen invited to label offices and being treated to fabulous dinners and all that stuff is like okay they weren't like giving them a lot of cash or whatever.

51:32Joe Lim: And so it's kind of like, all right, it looks different now. And so you're not treating the gatekeepers now, I guess, it's just the algorithm.

51:44Ari Herstand: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, it's the tech dogs. Yeah.

51:50Joe Lim: It's the tech dogs. Right. They're the gatekeepers. So what do you see moving forward? And it's just like, I'm curious, like, you know, you said that with floodify you took a break um you're bringing it back you're bringing your new platform back you mentioned a little bit of how it's going to work um i'm just curious kind of specifically in the music space uh yeah like what do you what should artists be doing right now and and uh where are

52:15Ari Herstand: you heading yeah i mean artists should basically like i gave a strategy to um to this hbo guy And basically what the strategy is, is basically get up the creates on a sound on TikTok. Because TikTok is the only thing converting. Get up the creates on a sound and then go get some influencers or micro influencers to post like 10 to 20 videos. Such that when someone clicks on the sound, it looks legit and it looks popping. So when you get other people, like real people to start using the sound, that's when it pops off. and you're basically just trying to trigger that at that point once it starts popping off then you can start saying oh let's be authentic let's stop doing that but like go get it some motion and then yeah uh talk about your morals afterwards um well i mean sorry keep going no

53:12Joe Lim: no go ahead well i was just gonna say so yeah we haven't really touched on sound promotion as much so that's a big thing still you're seeing is is sound promotion and through influencers which also haven't really we talked a lot on burner accounts but paying people paying influence versus micro influences to use your sound is still a viable strategy yeah dude i mean like um

53:35Ari Herstand: if you think about it like let's say you're running an account for uh okay i had a friend running some ai only fan stuff right and what he did was like he just scrolled on the feed and found anything that had uses and then just use that song to post their own content. The AI OnlyFans person was getting like, I don't know, 50 ,000 views of video. Like that's legitimate traffic to the song. Every sound has a button to add to Spotify or add to Apple. And that's it.

54:12Joe Lim: What's an, sorry, AI OnlyFans? Does that mean that these creators, these like people? The OnlyFans model is AI, yeah. The OnlyFans model is AI. Got it. Okay. What a wild time we're in right now. Okay.

54:28Ari Herstand: You're blowing my mind, Joe.

54:31Joe Lim: There's like these things that come just so naturally and that there's old news for you. I don't know if you realize how many people don't actually know that this stuff is happening right now or exists, but that's wild. So you hire these accounts, these influencers to use the sound. So like, you know, five years ago, the strategy was you hire Charli D 'Amelio to, you know, you pay her 50 grand or whatever to dance to your song, and that made it go. Now that's not the strategy anymore. where you think it's more effective to just like get, you know, a hundred micro influencers or something to use the sound and post that and that'll help trigger the algorithm to ideally boost the sound as a trending sound and get more people to create to that sound?

55:18Ari Herstand: To be honest, forget about the idea of tricking the algorithm. Um, like more so think of the idea of tricking the person. Okay. Because basically what you're trying to do is once someone clicks on the sound you want them to think like if they post with that sound they're going to go viral right like that's what you're trying to do or like when someone clicks on the sound give them an idea like i'm helping this person blow up a song right now and like his whole his whole uh sound is just movie clips like let's say you're a person scrolling tiktok like a regular person and you click the sound and it's just movie clips you're like i have no idea what to post with this right think logically about like what is going to trigger real people to use the sound you need to give them ideas inside the the video yeah whether that be like really cool captions or

56:13Joe Lim: or whatever well that's the trend thing that you know that that's been around since the beginning of the tiktok where you know you have you have a trend that people can participate in and usually it's tied to a sound, right?

56:24Ari Herstand: Yeah. Yeah. Make a, make a nice little trend for yourself.

56:28Joe Lim: I mean, it's easier said than done to get a trend going, but okay. Um, cool. Now, Joe, this has been, um, super, uh, wild and illuminating and, uh, you know, I, you're, you're obviously at the cutting edge of this. Um, so yeah, tell me, tell me what is the next phase for you and, and, uh, and Flutify and, and, uh, everything that you're working on.

56:48Ari Herstand: Yeah, Flutterfy version two is releasing probably when this video drops, it'll be released. And the idea here is we're going to help you run your burner accounts. We're going to help you grow your burner accounts into real accounts. and it'll be all done on one platform where you can link your accounts or purchase accounts. You can automate all your content in the way that you want it automated and then you can automate the posting however you want as well. We're going to take the industry back.

57:28Joe Lim: All right. Well, we will look out for that. um i am uh interested and intrigued to check this out and see how that all works uh joe i've i have one final question that i ask everyone who comes on the show and that is what does it mean to you to make it in the new music business what is making it um dude i mean like i used to want to

57:52Ari Herstand: make a are you talking about as an artist are you talking about like personally however you want to take it dude i would love to go one day buy warner music i think that is uh that's you're making it all right yeah that is yeah that is like undoubtedly i made it yeah all right i you

58:10Joe Lim: know in 250 episodes of this show that is the first time that i've ever heard somebody say that for their they're making and i love it all right i'm rooting for you yeah all right thanks yeah that episode was edited by ruben zarate with music by brass roots district and produced by all the great people at ari's take