Stemmer's founder Sam Goetz talked with Lilo Key to learn how his success happened. Some responses are paraphrased.
The Spotify computer system saw that there was organic growth happening over time. People were actively searching this song, which shows Spotify that these are organic, real streams. One day it did 10,000 streams. The next day it did 13,000. The next day it did 16,000 and was charting on the US viral 50 chart as the 30 most viral song in the US, and then in a week it did 100,000 streams on Spotify.
It went beyond that within the next couple weeks and made it up to number 16 on the most viral chart. It was on the chart for about a week.
You have to succeed without being promoted by any of these influencers first. Then you can go to them and show them the traffic you'll bring to their platform. When my song Too Young got promoted by Rap Nation, it already had 10,000 views on SoundCloud. This means that users were seeking this song out already, and it would drive traffic to Rap Nation's YouTube channel.
I'd been trying to market my music for a long time before that with not much success or anything. It was nearly possible to break a thousand plays on SoundCloud at any given time. I was waiting for Blonde by Frank Ocean to come out and I was constantly checking his website, checking Reddit and everything, trying to figure out as to when this album was gonna drop. For whatever reason I decided I could get a lot of traffic if I just uploaded those 13 songs that I made and called it Blonde on a profile on SoundCloud, as if I was Frank Ocean. And so I did that. It worked.
And for like a week, I was Frank Ocean, this was Blonde. I expected to get a lot of backlash from people listening to it and finding out that like, no, this obviously isn't Frank Ocean, but I didn't surprisingly.
I was on TikTok. My TikTok feed is a wreck of just the weirdest videos you've ever seen. Like independent, no name rappers rapping at me, and then some valuable content interspersed. So coming across your video, I was like, oh, that is an interesting case study for AI and it's right in my wheelhouse. Like this is music. So I reached out and I was like, "I wanna be a part of something in AI and how it applies to music". And that's why I reached out to you, and then the fact that you knew who I was, was big to me.
Dude, it was awesome. Even if that just eliminates an hour of my time in terms of mixing and keeping me from second guessing myself in the process of making my music before I release it, there's value there.
.png)
