On the major streaming platforms, “you can’t search by lyrics,” Bogan points out. “Instead of a top-down situation when an artist promotes a record and people create content around that, it’s fans connecting to a song, and whenever part of that song resonates with the viral movement, that has to translate back into discovery on other platforms,” explains Dae Bogan, a music licensing expert who founded TuneRegistry, a management platform that deals with song metadata.Īt the moment, the system for artists and labels to meet demand halfway is clunky.
Historically, labels launch marketing campaigns to create demand for songs now, songs can be tailored to meet overnight waves of demand that arose mostly independently. To some degree, this inverts the typical power structure of the music industry. “We don’t want people looking on their phones and then going to Spotify or Amazon and saying they want but not finding the song.” “Users are gravitating towards a certain phrase, a certain lyric,” Andrews explains. And if listeners can’t easily connect the two, an artist is unable to capitalize on the surge in interest, meaning titles might have to be adjusted on the fly. In a matter of days, that snippet could soundtrack millions of videos, but, as in the case of “ily,” the audio might not have a clean, obvious link to its parent track. On TikTok, for example, listeners latch on to a 15-second snippet of a song. But it’s also important for labels to ensure that, once a single starts to acquire momentum on one listening platform, that energy can be translated to the other streaming services. Bringing Surf Mesa into the fold was “the most challenging signing I’ve done,” Dodge says.Ĭlearing samples is crucial to prevent singles from being taken down. When Natalie Dodge, Astralwerks’ senior director of A&R, noticed “ily” beginning to move, she had to find a way to clear both the vocal sample - ripped from another popular TikTok user without permission - and the original “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” composition. The first and most important hurdle remains sample clearance: Singles often become popular among young online listeners before the legal matters are buttoned up. Today’s fast-moving viral hits face several challenges. Now that’s a practice we’re looking into for other records of ours - things that have good traction behind them, but maybe the title doesn’t necessarily match the theme of the song that people are looking for.” “So we went in and changed the title to add ‘I Love You Baby’ to make it easier for people to find.
“We found that because of the way it was titled, ‘ily,’ the search terms ‘Surf Mesa I Love You’ weren’t finding the song,” explains Toby Andrews, general manager of the label Astralwerks. Four weeks later, the song made it to Spotify’s Top 200 - which currently requires more than 700,000 streams a day - and it had gained an appendage: The title was now “ily (i love you baby).” The track merged an acoustic cover of the Sixties classic “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” originally recorded by Franki Valli, with a downtempo, four-on-the-floor beat. On March 3, the electronic producer Surf Mesa’s single “ily” debuted on Spotify’s Global Viral chart, which highlights songs benefitting from a recent surge in interest.
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