As artists release music and content, it’s fascinating to watch the trajectory of individual songs and pieces of content in comparison to others.

The idea of a long-tail event is an interesting one in this space - a long-tail event is essentially an event or action that is infrequent or low in number but has a high impact.

For many artists (not all, but many), the majority of their fanbases are built around the success of a few songs and for artists (as well as creators), the majority of their audience is acquired through a few specific pieces of content that over perform.

This newsletter covers:

• The long-tail growth of music and content

Let’s dive in ⬇️ 

A few months ago I wrote about how this exact idea was mentioned in the book The Psychology of Money - the book explains that out of all the investments investors make, only a handful will be successful…but that success can compensate for the other failures and propel their careers.

In a lot of cases (again…not all, but some) this same theory applies to artists with the music and content they release. Here’s a breakdown…

Music

It doesn’t apply to every single artist but for many…the majority of their fanbase discovered them through a few songs that became very successful, as opposed to incremental growth from each song.

Many emerging artists have a few songs in their catalog that account for the majority of their streaming consumption (every week those songs are a big percentage of their overall streams) and the majority of their audience discovered them from those records. If an artist is fortunate enough, they’ll have many songs that result in this type of impact but some artists only have a few.

For example, take emerging Queens, NY artist Lexa Gates. Lexa’s song “Angel” is her #1 most popular song on Spotify and is the highest-streamed song in her catalog (in terms of total plays) as well as the most streamed song week over week. It’s become the discovery point for most of her audience and is doing more streams per week than the other songs in her catalog.

This is an example of a “tail-event” - this one song accounts for the majority of her streaming and audience growth, despite there being more than 45 songs on her DSP profiles.

Content

As it relates to content, the long tail theory essentially says that the majority of a creator or artist’s social audience will likely be gained from a few individual posts that overperform (not all the time, but in many cases) as opposed to incremental growth from each post.

Example #1

For example, take R&B artist Jay Safari. As of November 17, 2023, Jay had under 8,000 Instagram followers. Then, a video he had posted on November 13 (just a few days earlier), started to take off and exploded (below for reference).

whoisjaysafari

View more on Instagram

For whatever reason the post over-indexed (more than likely the Reels algorithm - I saw it on my explore page!) and started to explode virally.

Less than two weeks later, before the end of November, Jay had almost 50,000 Instagram followers - it appears most of those followers were acquired from this one specific post which would go on to generate +4.5 million views.

You can see the sharp increase trajectory in the graph below.

The increase directly correlates to the success of that one Instagram Reel and when looking at Jay’s page, it’s his highest viewed Reel to date. That one post accounted for Jay’s Instagram following growing by 6x in just 2 weeks. Jay’s Instagram now sits at 63,000 followers with the majority of that growth coming late last year.

Example #2

Another example is That Mexican OT’s viral TikTok meme below. The meme exploded with +26 million views to date and caused significant growth on his account.

@thatmexicanot

He couldn’t believe i said this 😭😭 #thatmexicanot #kaicenat

In 3 weeks, OT’s TikTok grew 300,000 followers with most of them coming from that one viral post, bringing his total to 1.8 million.

So…if for many artists the majority of their audiences are built off a few releases or events, how do you know which ones will hit? That’s the tricky part…you don’t. In today’s landscape, it’s about creating great art you’re proud of, and then shots on desk - taking a lot of chances with great music, great content, and consistently iterating to see what your audience reacts to.

When something does connect, it’s about analyzing and seeing if you can identify a nuance or pattern that might’ve helped it react. What was it about those pieces of content that helped it react?

Thanks for reading, until next time.

If you enjoyed this newsletter, feel free to share it with someone you think might appreciate it!