How RJ Pasin Turned Daily Guitar Videos Into Millions of Streams

How the "sample this" content template took him from 35 to 4,500,000 million monthly listeners in 2 years

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As someone who reads a lot of comments on the Internet – as part of my daily brain-poison diet – the people who make instrumental music feel the most helpless about their music ever blowing up. And with good reason outside of EDM it is nearly a blue moon event to see a song like RJ Pasin’s “Lobster” rack up so much success. He made it to the top 10 on the Viral 50, with almost 57 million streams on the song with an instrumental song where a distorted guitar is the main instrument. He consistently turns out Viral tracks on the SFV platforms with that twinkly Polyphia-style trap guitar riff head-boppers. Despite his fast rise to those who watch the acts who consistently show up at the top of viral charts, RJ has been chipping away at this with a rarely seen work ethic. RJ's lore began when he posted audio engineer content while working at Quad Studios in New York, giving him the chops to create unique sounds, but his consistent content schedule paved his way to stand on top of each viral moment to get here.

RJ Pasin’s “Lobster” dominated Spotify’s Viral 50 Chart in 2024

RJ seems to see himself as more of a producer, so he's collaborating with so many different people across many genres - and that's how he now has 4.6 million monthly listeners. If RJ’s career path interests you, I recommend going through how he's evolved on TikTok and spending some time there studying someone who truly mastered the platform. I know so many people in metal who are afraid to collaborate.

That’s quite a lot of streams for an under 2-minute guitar riff with a trap beat under it.

The Song Length Myth

Lobster is a minute and 57 seconds long—pretty rare. One of the biggest lies ever told is that songs should be 2 minutes to go viral when most songs on the viral charts are longer. While I think songs have gotten dramatically shorter in the TikTok era, 7 how long the song is doesn't matter; you can still see 7-minute songs blowing up. RJ mostly makes instrumental songs that have blown up for him a lot of time on TikTok, which are largely short-loop snippets that he then expands upon when releasing them on streaming platforms.

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