These days, many in the music industry are trying to harness the power of the “superfan” – the highly devoted segment of an artist's audience that regularly shows up at concerts, buys T-shirts, orders physical albums and obsesses over the artist online. In the digital marketing space, this means that companies are increasingly turning their attention to fan pages, hoping to capture the attention of this top tier of online audiences.
“The TikTok Influencer campaign has been front and center in marketing songs for some time,” he says Ethan Curtisfounder of PushPlay, a digital marketing company that has promoted songs like “Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy“Golden Hour” by JVKE and “Glimpse of Us” by Joji. “But as it became more saturated and more expensive, we found that there was interest in creating your own fan pages where you can have complete control over the narrative.”
“Fan pages” secretly created by groups of artists may have become the digital campaign du jour in the last year, but the idea is not new. Even before TikTok took over music discovery, management and digital teams quietly used anonymous accounts to pose as fans on sites like Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter, sharing interviews, videos and other content around artists because , as Curtis puts it, “It's a space you can have.”
Curtis is now taking this idea a step further with his innovative, if controversial, new company WtrCoolr, a spinoff of his digital company dedicated to creating “fan fiction” pages for artists. To put it simply, WtrCoolr is hired to create virally credible fake stories for their clients, including the likes of Shaboozey and Young Nudy. While Curtis says he's open to making videos with all kinds of “imaginative” new narratives, he says he draws the line at any fan fiction that could be “negative” or “reactionary” to the people featured in the videos.
The results speak for themselves. A popular TikTok video created by WtrCoolr falsely claimed that Dolly Parton is Shaboozey's godmother has 1.1 million views and 121,500 likes to date. Posted on digital agency fan account @ShaboozeysVault, Curtis says the popular video was created by piecing together old interview clips of the artists, along with some voiceovers.
“We're huge fans of pop culture, fantasy and satire,” says Curtis. “We see it as creating our own version of a Marvel Universe but with pop stars.”
All TikTok accounts created by WtrCoolr note in their bio that their content is “fan fiction”. The videos on these pages also include “Easter eggs,” which Curtis says point to the fact that the videos are fabrications. But many fans still fall in love with it. Many viewers of Parton's video, for example, took it as gospel truth, posting comments such as “how many godchildren does Dolly have and where can I sign up?” and “Dolly is an Angel on Earth.”
In the future, Curtis believes that this new form of “fan fiction” will be useful beyond simply trying to attract fan bases online. He thinks the pages can serve as a “testing ground” for real-life decisions — like one artist choosing to collaborate with another — to see how the fan base would react. “Traditionally, you don't have to look before you leap,” he says. “Maybe in the future we will.”
What was the first “fan fiction” post that took off for WtrCoolr?
It was the shaq video being a super fan of rapper Young Nudy [10.4 million views, 1.7 million likes on TikTok]. We had worked [promoting] the Young Nudy song, “Peaches & Eggplants”, mostly from the influencer side. We had dances and all kinds of different trends. It became a top rap song up to that point and then we sold the client [Young Nudy’s team] making one of those fan pages where we just tried a bunch of stuff. The first narrative video we tried was this video where we found some footage of Shaq—I think it was at Lollapalooza—where he was in front of the crowd [for a different artist]vibrations and blows to the head. It was a really funny picture. We just got clever with the editing and created the story of Shaq showing up at every Young Nudy show and then it went crazy viral.
It was really exciting to watch. It brought fans to Nudy and also made existing Nudy fans very excited that Shaq was committed. Then there was tons of goodwill for Shaq that came from that as well. Lots of comments like “protect Shaq at all costs” or “Shaq is a damn near perfect human”. It was a positive experience. We put on our pages that this is a fan page and fan fiction. We're not really pushing that it's the truth. We're just having fun and letting it be known.
There was some backlash after this video went viral. Weren't there some rap blogs posting about the video and taking it for real?
I don't know if they necessarily thought it was true. We didn't actually have any conversations with anyone, but it was definitely being shared everywhere — either because of that or just because it was such a funny video. Even Nudy reacted and thought it was funny. I think the company may have approached Shaq and invited him to a show, and he thought it was funny, but he was on the other side of the country that day and didn't make it.
I'm sure there are some who thought it was true, but many of the videos we'll be putting Easter eggs in at the end make it obvious that it's not true. Then in our bios we write that it is fan fiction.
Do you think there's anything bad that could come from fans and blogs believing these videos to be real — only to later realize they were fake?
I don't know if anything is really bad. We're not claiming it to be true, and we're just having fun, weaving stories and basically saying, “Wouldn't it be funny if?” or, “Wouldn't it be touching if?” I don't think we ever touch on things that matter, that could lead to negative energy or reaction. We're just trying to do fun things that the fans enjoy. Just fun little moments. It's no different than taking a video out of context and pasting meme captions on it.
Do you see this as the future of memes?
i do it I also think there's a future where what we do becomes kind of like a testing ground for real partnerships or TV show ideas. I could see a label coming to us and asking us to test how a new collaboration between Drake and Kendrick would be received after the beef, for example. They could say, “Can you make a post about this and see if people turn on Kendrick for backsliding or if fans lose their shit for rallying?” We could see if it's a disaster or potentially the biggest release of their career. Traditionally, you don't have to look before you leap. Maybe in the future we will. But even now with the Shaq video, he basically proved that if Shaq went to a surprise show and raged in the front row, people would love it. I mean, if it was so successful on socials, why wouldn't it be as successful in real life?
It appeared that Shaboozey and Dolly Parton's video introduced Shaboozey's name and other new phrases using an AI voice filter. Do you rely heavily on AI in these videos, or is it mostly about careful editing?
Most of it is just clever editing. Every now and then we might change a word or something [using AI]but most of it is just collages of clips together.
How long does it take to make these videos?
The process has changed. It was much more time consuming before we realized that smart processing was more efficient. In the beginning, we were writing scripts for the videos, running them through AI, and then trying to find clips to match the scripts and stuff like that. You have to match the edit with the artist's lips so it looks like a lip sync. This is just extremely time consuming. Then we started to realize that it's easier to just set a basic goal, go online and see what we can find. We develop a story from there so we only have a few fakes [AI-assisted] words here and there, and then we'll cut to the video, show some footage from a music video or something. It makes it more efficient.
As far as you know, is WtrCoolr the first group in digital marketing to try to do these pseudo-narrative, story-telling videos, or is this something that's been popping up all over the internet?
We were definitely the first to do it. There are definitely people imitating it now. We generally see this in the content that exists on the internet, especially meme pages. It becomes part of culture.
Do you run your ideas for fan fiction narratives by the artist before you make them?
We work with them and talk through ideas. There is as much communication as they want. Some artists want to know what's going on, but some artists just aren't interested in participating.
It seems like, so far, no one has had a problem with using it in videos — they even look at it positively — but are you worried about the legal ramifications of using someone's likeness to support an artist or idea that isn't actually endorsed?
We do not claim it to be true. We include disclaimers that this is just fan fiction. So I think if we were claiming that it's true, then that's a different story, but that's not what we're doing.
It's all over the bio on the page, but not in the video captions, right?
It's listed on the profiles and then a lot of videos of us just doing Easter eggs at the end make it obvious it's a joke.
I found the idea that you mentioned earlier interesting — the idea that you could try collaborations or things without having to get the artist involved first, whether it's the Drake and Kendrick collaboration or something else. It reminds me of when people I tease a song before putting it up for official release. Do you think that's a fair comparison?
Completely. What TikTok did for song teasing, it also did for status teasing.
This story was published as part of Billboard's new music technology newsletter “Engineering Education.” Sign up for 'Machine Learnings' and Billboard's other newsletters, here.
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