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Let’s dig into the rise of NXCRE. right now they're sitting just above 800,000 monthly listeners, with a sound that's reminiscent of early Coheed and Cambria. They've been releasing since 2018 and have most recently experienced explosive growth, with the most dramatic surge in the last 4 months - particularly from August 19th when they absolutely fly up the charts. Let's dig into what's behind this.

Content Strategy

Discography & Evolution

NXCRE operates with a backing band called "The Villains" - but this is a recent development. From 2018-2022, NXCRE was strictly a pop R&B artist with Michael Jackson-influenced vocals. Their output was consistent: 11 singles (2018), 5 singles (2019), 5 singles (2020), 3 singles (2021), and in 2022, 10 releases including an LP. In 2023, they pivoted to "NXCRE and The Villains," releasing 4 songs under this new formation. Worth noting that while the villains only appear on tracks with NXCRE, NXCRE continues to release solo material. They're currently teasing a new LP.

Genre Switch & Rebrand

In their pop era, we see classic volatility - tracks jumping from 3 million streams down to 68,000: constant ups and downs. Their 8-track LP followed the same pattern - some tracks hit, others missed. But the genre switch was a clear turning point. So many artists find it to be an uphill battle getting a fanbase and algorithm to accept a drastic genre change. This was a clear exception.

"Usurper" and "Indigo" showed immediate impact with the new sound. What's interesting here is how they handled it. NXCRE proves it works both ways - they kept all of their catalog, social media, and fans while evolving their sound. Both approaches can work.

Spotify Page

Their Spotify profile shows mixed execution: while their artist playlist's "Raw unfiltered imperfection" branding aligns perfectly with their image, they're significantly underutilizing playlist features that could deepen fan engagement and reinforce their musical identity. Inviting curiosity of what that may sound like while also making an appealing lure of what you will get here is more real than the fake world of artists we see each day.

YouTube Channel

Let's pop over to YouTube because there's some interesting stuff happening here. They have a whopping 479,000 subscribers - obviously very, very impressive. The really interesting thing is the trajectory: they weren't doing well with the pop era, but they flipped into their Villains era, they started consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views, with many videos hitting over a million.

YouTube Shorts

This is the first group I have ever seen when doing these dissections that perform better on YouTube shorts than TikTok. Their content reveals why this strategy has been truly incredible.

Looking at their TikToks - here's what's fascinating about their numbers: When we look at smaller artists (not an A-class artist like Doja Cat or Ariana Grande where everything is on a different scale), the ratio between their Spotify streaming numbers on a song vs the song’s views on Youtube can really tell you how well they're actually doing. For NXCRE to have their YouTube views reaching 50% of their Spotify plays - that's exceptional and shows that they’re not just winning on one platform, and are converting those YouTube Shorts viewers into actual music streams.

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