Adrian and I talked the other week, and I've been fascinated by what he's been doing ever since I saw him on TikTok. He worked at Floodify and now does more music marketing work at a YC-backed company called AIVideo.com. I wanted to bring him into the discussion because he's seen things at a scale that almost nobody you'll ever talk to has seen. A lot of the questions you all ask me, he's answered through brute experience.

So I'm going to break out the things he said, because he packed more into a few answers than most people manage in an hour.

We covered Floodify on here about a year ago, so some of you may have forgotten. Adrian was the lead content strategist for their enterprise customers, meaning the major labels.

Floodify ran a network of about 65,000 TikTok accounts. At its peak, it was doing roughly 50,000 posts a day spread across campaigns. That is an insane amount of volume. And it wasn't blind volume. They were doing sound linking, geo-targeting, custom captions, and custom content, all at scale, with the click of a button.

Sound linking is a term most people don't understand, so Adrian broke it down: You have your official sound uploaded to TikTok, and underneath that sound, you can have a stack of videos using it. Sound linking is the work of attaching every one of those thousands of posts to your official sound so they all live under it. The theory is that it triggers the algorithm.

This is exactly what people ask me about all the time. What if somebody rips three seconds of my song onto one of these things? The reality is that's mostly how it works. There was a song that sat at number one on Spotify's Viral 50 forever, back before they killed the Viral 50, and most people were only using about three seconds of what was really a 45-second loop. Sound linking was highly requested, and Adrian pointed out something people don't realize: at the time, there was a ton of actual human effort behind it, because that was the only way to do it.