Before we get started this week, I want to point out that I've made the video I worked the hardest on in the last year. If you'd like to help support what we do here, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could watch and share this with someone who may be interested. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena I have witnessed in music marketing this year - the widespread use of fan and influencer accounts.

This dissection comes with a trigger warning because a lot of you asked me about AI and faceless accounts. I think this is one of those things, and one of the craziest music marketing strategies we've seen in a while is Civ.

Now if some of you are saying "Civ? The guys who sing that song that plays at every sports event, 'I Can't Wait One Minute More'? You know, the guys who were in Gorilla Biscuits??? The singer of Gorilla Biscuits???? The best youth crew hardcore band of all time?" I'd say no. That was 30 years ago when that song was popular, and you were wrong.

What I'm instead talking about is a fucking AI bear. This AI bear hit number one on the viral chart for many, many weeks. I wish I could look up how many weeks it was number one on the Viral 50, but it has been lingering there for a long time.

This underground rapper exclusively represents themselves through this AI bear, dropping the track "1 AM" with that catchy "Pop out at one in the morning" hook that's been absolutely everywhere on TikTok.

I'll continue refining this section while maintaining the authentic style:

Metrics

So Civ is a very interesting case. Oftentimes, when we're looking at the Chartmetric timeline graph of Spotify monthly listeners, we're looking at years to get up to the mark that they get to.

So Civ is a very interesting case. Oftentimes, when we're looking at this chart, we're looking at years to get up to the mark that they get to. Civ currently has 2.2 million monthly listeners, which is interesting because that's all you get from being at the top of the viral 50. It's a very different thing from being at the top of the regular charts - the charts have massive amounts of consumption from different things, the viral 50 totally different.

If we go back to February 7th, which is only 3 months ago, they had zero monthly listeners. Yet they had 3 songs out before this that were doing nothing. One of those tracks, “Do It,” now has a million streams, which dropped on January 10th. Remember February 7th, they still had no monthly listeners - nobody gave a shit what they were doing.

In about 2-3 months, they went from 0 to 2.2 million monthly listeners. People love to manipulate you with stats like "2.2 million times growth!" but that's not really how we should measure this. Anyway, this is all to say, I think this is a fucking interesting case study for a few reasons we're about to get into.

From 0 - 2+ Million Monthly Listeners

So one of the more interesting things is, you know, they did start to have some success. Looking at their early TikTok videos from back in October, you can see that their visual approach was mid as fuck. The Dropbox waveform they used in their videos was mid as fuck. The font choices were mid as fuck. No contrast to anything in their designs.\

@whoisciv

Demure. #newartist #newmusic #song #music #musictok #lyrics #fyp #civ

Some people asked me what I mean by contrast - when the colors in their videos are all similar with barely any difference between them, there's no visual pop. Nothing stands out in this bear design. Their overlaid elements look terrible, like they're just badly executed. And as we can see from view counts on these early videos, they're doing a bunch of pretty mid shit that isn't getting many views. Most of the higher-view videos probably happened after they went quite viral, but you know, they keep going and they keep learning.

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