If you have six seconds, you may have a hit.
The mobile video app Vine and its 40 million users are changing the way people discover hip-hop online, one six-second clip at a time.
Just ask Glasses Malone. Sales surged for the L.A. rapper’s 2012 single “That Good,” saw a 700 percent increase in monetization, after user SheLovesMeechie uploaded a video of himself dancing to the song. It has received more than 53,000 reposts since December.
“People enjoy the six seconds, and then they start following up on the song,” says Malone, 34. “If you go to my YouTube page, you see people saying, ‘Vine sent me here’ or ‘SheLovesMeechie sent me here’ or ‘Jayballout sent me here.’ It hasn’t slowed down – it’s been selling consistently on the East Coast. It’s pretty cool.”
Music is the most discussed topic among Twitter users in the U.S. But since launching in January 2013, Vine has added a new dimension to social media’s music conversation, providing an endless stream of original user-generated content. Artists are already finding ways to leverage online popularity for promotion, as Jason Derulo and Ellie Goulding recently did by creating official videos compiled from fans’ Vine clips for their respective singles “The Other Side” and “Burn.” Thanks to its young, tech-savvy fan base and danceable beats, hip-hop has proved to be particularly fertile ground for Vine’s emerging tastemakers.
Bay Area rappers Iamsu and Sage the Gemini both have found success on Vine. The former launched a contest last month asking fans to produce an original video for his song “Only That Real,” with a $500 prize for the winner. Sage’s single “Gas Pedal” got a boost last summer after two Vine videos featuring the track earned more than 580,000 reposts between them, a surge in popularity that the artist and his label credit for sparking a 583 percent increase in monetization around the song.
“It just validated what we already knew,” says Chioke “Stretch” McCoy, Sage’s manager, of the track, which has sold more than 1 million digital copies since its release in March 2013. “We had already seen the success regionally, and then it just grew. When it got to (Vine), it gave it that sense of discovery. Now the song was bigger than him. Now you can go find it and buy it. All of it leads to awareness. With Vine, you can either be a joke or a success.”
Vine is also proving to be a powerful tool for finding new artists. Unsigned Atlanta-based group We Are Toonz watched debut single “Drop That #NaeNae” explode on Vine after its release in November, thanks to popular videos re-creating the signature dance uploaded by Bow Wow, Lance Moore and the Auburn University football team. Of the 2 million mentions of the song on Twitter, 769,000 have included links to Vine clips.
Nick Simmons, digital marketing director at Capitol Records, discovered and helped sign female rap crew PTAF after parody versions of the group’s song “Boss Ass Bitch” began trending on Vine.
“I was once told by a very famous artist manager that the key to making a hit song was repetition,” Simmons says. “And that’s essentially what ‘Boss’ is: It’s just repeating the hook over and over again, and it’s catchy. And for me, watching this song over and over again on Vine, it got stuck in my head with the six-second loop, and it made me want to go find out, who are these people? Why do I keep hearing this song?”
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