 What if I told you for the first time in the music business the artist has more control over blowing up their own song than ever in the history and to be honest it may not last long. All my life I've heard from musicians that if only the music was what mattered most then they would be huge. And let's be honest it's rare we have good news in the music business today but I have it. If you always hoped you could do only a few hours of promotion and if your music was really great it'd actually get to people who are likely to love it. Well I have great news because I'm convinced we're closer to that than we've ever been and we're now in what I am calling the earworm era of music promotion where if you play a hook of your song enough even if you have zero fans if that hook is infectious it could blow up and we're seeing it every day. But a bunch of you were like what the f***? Jesse I thought we were in the tiktok era you've been talking about tiktok so much now you're telling me I need to put some worm in my ear there's no way I'm going outside to touch grass and find a worm I stay on my grind and live in the studio dog hashtag grind life. You seem real cool. So let's first say this an earworm is another word for an infectious hook or a part of the song that gets in your head really easily and won't leave hence worm into the ear. Some of you may remember be talking about song susceptibility in a past video which is the more scientific term for the measure of an earworm which is the concept that when a listener hears a song every song has a measurable likelihood that if someone hears it how easily they'll be converted into wanting to listen to it again by whatever that weird force inside of us that urges us to listen to a song and it's obvious to everyone who's not a brain dead moron that thinks the whole music business is rigged that some songs are more immediately likable than others so they get more popular. For example right now we are living in the era of Miley Cyrus's song flowers which is one of the fastest growing songs in the history of music and I get it I heard the song once and I could have sung it back to you accurately after one listen and yeah I know no one's asking for this voice to sing something I got that clue a long time ago something about flowers melody was perfectly predictable without being pathetically cliche while also being infectious earworm that burrows in and you can't get it out of your head anyway so here's the thing most of us don't make music that's for everyone like Miley we make music that's for a specific set of people so we don't need to worry about writing the most infectious song of all time but susceptibility matters in that let's say the average person who likes your style of music hears a song 10 times in 10 ticktocks if that song isn't very susceptible well they'll never jump to Spotify to hear it more no matter how many times they hear it but if the hook is highly susceptible to them they will run over to hear more or watch the ticktock a second time after a listener this matters since if your song is in a certain level of susceptible no matter how much you push it it'll do nothing but the more susceptible it is the easier your promotions go and yes song susceptibility matters even in genres you don't think of as pop since susceptibility is purely about the people who enjoy a genre and whether they're apt to like a song or not for example the same goes for an experience many of you have on Spotify when you get on a playlist you're so excited to be on the playlist but then you watch your song either go up or even off the Spotify playlist or sometimes down on the playlist and the fact is Spotify is removing the songs that don't get rinsed aka the ones that are less susceptible and they're moving them up and down depending on how susceptible people are to engage with those songs and the ones that are most susceptible stay high on the playlist since they want people to keep listening to that playlist what matters is is if people who like the type of music you're making will love this song or not so what you really want to do is you want to get it to those people who will be susceptible to it and what I mean by that when I say we're in the earworm era is that through algorithms we're finally at a place where if your song is a great earworm you can target your microgenre with hashtags on tiktok and reels and get to exactly the people who are most susceptible to your music with the help of the algorithm no longer do you need some loser playlist gatekeeper label or radio DJ to get it there the fact is if your song is highly susceptible and you make some moderately compelling tiktoks and have a susceptible song in it if you repeat your susceptible songs hook enough in those videos repeatedly well your song could blow up and your dreams could start to come true but some of you are like I knew Jesse sure sounds like the tiktok era to me not chief this was the promise of the tiktok era but not the main trait of the tiktok era the songs that got popular in that era were largely popularized by UGC which is not some kpop artist you haven't heard of who has members with impossibly good skin tone for lack of plastic surgery but instead user generated content which is nerd for content that was made by users of the platform not the artists and what I mean by that is that the songs that were broken by tiktok that got huge were largely done by other users making videos around them that got popular rather than the artists making the content themselves let's take licky lee having a song get millions of streams or even my friends of the lo-fi pop band teen suicide when they got tens of millions of plays from tiktok too it wasn't that they bought tiktok influencers content to make videos of their song it was that users of the platform made videos that started a trend and then caused their song to get rinsed which admittedly is way better than the way many eras of music got music popular since at least it was people powered instead of gig capped but then you probably are wondering what about that era last summer where those pop songs like heat waves from glass animals and Bastille's Pompeii that was nine years old got popular well that was also UGC since it was a bunch of nerds in offices seeing a trend that was starting and then paying influencers to make more of that trend happen and then unpaid influencers and users made more of it and propelled the songs but the distinction i want to make with this era is that whatever's changed with the algorithm or creators awareness of how to use the app is that now when musicians keep pushing their hook over and over it's working and this is weird since tiktok was notoriously bad for self-promotion like really bad especially if you try to promote like tour dates right now well that's gonna bomb like there's no tomorrow but oddly enough if you put some low rent video of you lip syncing your video and you have some charisma and doing it a compelling way that sells the song and maybe put a story on top of it and keep finding ways to do that over and over again over a bunch of days well it seems to be working now some of you could argue that this is no different than what Lil Nas X did with Old Town Road and i would say that you're actually not wrong but i'd put a giant asterisk on it we have to remember with trends that there's often a trend that starts to kick in to where it's actually a trend meaning a lot of people are doing the thing and it's working and Lil Nas X was actually an anomaly where it didn't happen and it wasn't repeated often but now this is a trend but to make this crystal clear the previous era of music promotion known as the tiktok era was much more about other users spreading you and while that's still a big piece of the puzzle in the last era artists weren't usually the ones igniting that but now they are which i love because it gives you agency over your own career like never before to have you be the one who holds you back by whether or not your hook is actually great or if you're choosing to promote it and really give it your all since all you have to do now is make some compelling content choose the right hashtags to reach people that target your micro genre and if you're making some simple eight to sixty second videos that have a lot of motion some storytelling and a few other ingredients to them instead of whether you can get some 16 year old influencer named Madison Hawthorne or even worse the era before tiktok where Spotify playlists were nearly your sole chance was you'd have to hope to god some nameless faceless playlist or took a liking to you well i prefer this a lot more so i find this era to be promising if it continues and lasts which i don't know how long that's gonna be so you better get moving but you're probably like how does this work for you who has no tiktok followers and how does that end up building up since i'm always talking about going from zero to millions of fans what happens here so i'm sure you've heard tons of songs are breaking as musicians are posting 30 to 60 tiktoks per song over 30 to like let's call it 100 days at max and let's remember this trend is still emerging and we're riding the wave of this technique pretty early so the formula isn't quite there but that seems to be the quantity that we're seeing that works right now so let's say an artist has a hundred followers but is making some content probably hashtagging their videos any who so you make a video and it only gets 104 views but then you make another and all of a sudden your hook was a little more familiar to the user who got it served last time and after one of those users watches it all the way through the algorithm knows to connect it to another user similar to them and then you get 208 views and then eight more people then like the song and listen through and then they start to stream it and become fans eventually this keeps adding up and then some people start to make their own videos to your song helping you out since your hook is susceptible they watch the video to hear it again or they like it or bookmark it then eventually this turns the hundreds tens of thousands and well you can do the math i should say this ramp is logarithmic and for those of you who have paid as little attention to math class as i did well that means it builds slow but eventually starts to build way faster and it's much like that thing i always talk about where the beginning really sucks and that you're in the pain point at first but then things start to get better and like everything the chances you have to grow only increases the more you're consistent in sustaining this and grow with each song you do this with and the other thing to remember here is every song you release that does decently in the algorithm sets the next one up for success but i do want to explain a little more since it's important that you get this since the earworm isn't solely just doing these 30 to 60 ticktocks but how an ecosystem works together and more proof of why it's not the tiktok era since it's so much bigger than tiktok let's take monty pk whose song prism i funnily enough heard on the hyper pop playlist on spotify which is a sick playlist but it didn't really hit me when i heard it there and i know we've all had plenty of songs on our favorite playlist not hit us and i've had that happen hundreds of times since i've listened to this playlist weekly for years but the song got another chance to make me a fan when i heard it a few more times on tiktok and now while i rinse it because it converted me there and i went to spotify to listen to it and clearly if you look at his profile he's making tons of tiktoks of this hook so i got one of those tiktoks and then another and then i started listening to it on spotify and for all of you who think they're too busy to make tiktoks you could clearly see here that he's sneaking them in at work and then just doing some cool editing later but this is illustrative of what i want to drive home here when you post your tiktoks to reels and then put your song in stories and you drive fans to share your songs and then influencers make videos to your songs whether you pay them or not you're increasing the chance the earworm gets into their head and they start a fan relationship with you and to make it even more complicated a thing i experience pretty regularly is that the earworm infiltrates my community you know the concept i'm always talking about so i obviously follow a ton of my favorite producers and artists as well as people who i've met who have music tastes like me who are sharing songs they liked on instagram stories or twitter i mean most avid music fans do this but oftentimes i'll hear a song on tiktok first and then i'll hear that from them and the hook will really hit me this time especially since i saw an endorsement from somebody i trust and that takes me past the susceptibility point and makes me a fan this is why your community matters since the same people who get served the hashtags for your music on tiktok follow the playlists on spotify that are playing and when you're making all these tiktoks and you get served them it gives the chance for this song to actually break with the people who like that genre earliest on which is how you get your early fans and how this works from the bottom on up but there's so many ways that this all works together hell it can even be a music nerd in charge of putting on a playlist between acts at a club or what the hip dj plays that you enjoyed a song but now you go on tiktok and you're like oh that's the song i heard the other night or you go on youtube and you're watching shorts and then you hear a song that you heard previously on tiktok and i should say spotify's new feed that they just announced is no different that the idea is that they will play small earworms and drive up the songs that are most infectious and keep you in the app listening rather than going back to tiktok and watching some really attractive girl explain well you know what she's explaining here but it's not just that music discovery happens in so many ways it's sometimes this is the reminder someone needs to check you out as it's been stated so many times in marketing it takes seven impressions of seeing a name before someone becomes curious to look up an artist and listen but in the earworm era you're getting reminders of what you already liked but maybe something happened let's take the musician ryan hall who immediately struck me because he had a good-looking guitar and a sound that was similar to one of my favorite artists break-ins but at his own twist on the sound so i immediately wanted more this song slapped and i wanted to listen on spotify and then sure enough i discovered when i saw my previous searches on spotify come up i had already searched for him and remembered i got distracted the other day when i saw another one of his tiktoks because i was sending someone a meme or something dumb i know me and memes who to thank but once i did listen and actually got there to his songs i added a few of his songs to my main listening playlist and have been driving up his streams ever since and this perfectly illustrates why you need to make so many posts since if someone didn't quite get to listen to you you may convert them the next time we've all had it take a few times before a song really sells you when you've heard it not every song is our favorite song the first third or fifth time we've heard it but we've all had our favorite song be converted after later listens but the earworm era really makes it so that every bit of promotion you're doing increases the chance that you can get your song heard so syndicating your tiktoks to reels and youtube shorts increases the chance that it crosses the point where someone finds your song susceptible and becomes a fan since if the hook gets in from any platform even a little the first time then a little the next time depending on how susceptible it is as long as it crosses the listeners threshold of susceptibility you have the opportunity to make a fan with less effort and money than you've ever had in music history take advantage of this era by posting your hook as much as possible within reason this era makes it so that any way you make content where your song gets heard if the hook really is infectious and highly susceptible is the chance to get you new fans and blow up your fan base but i know a lot of you are wondering what to post for those 30 to 60 videos i have great news in the video on the screen now i detailed that and this promotion method so click on that now or it's in the description but you should really subscribe and have notifications on since next week's video goes even deeper on this technique thanks for watching