How do songs go viral in today’s music landscape? And why has making it as an artist never been more strategic? Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, co-founders of Chaotic Good, joined Billboard On The Record for a live episode at SXSW to break it all down. Speaking from their experience building one of the leading viral marketing agencies in music, they explain how TikTok trends, niche audiences and volume-driven campaigns shape which songs take off. Coren and Spelman share how they simulate trends, optimize placements and use data to help artists reach the right listeners while freeing them to focus on their art. From algorithm insights to creative strategy, they reveal what it really takes to turn a song into a hit and navigate the fast-changing world of music discovery.
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Billboard On The Record is a podcast in partnership with SickBird Productions.
Kristin Robinson:
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 Coren and Andrew Spelman, two of the co-founders of Chaotic Good. These are some of the music industry’s go to digital marketers from Gies 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 slot makes it harder to find good new hits than ever. All right, 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. How do songs go viral today in this incredibly crowded landscape? I’m joined here by Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman. 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. 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.
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