Our favourite music marketing quote of 2022 might just be this, from Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling. “It turns out that doing absolutely nothing to promote a record is a more successful strategy than doing absolutely everything…”
Honer and Gosling are the two members of British duo I Monster, best known for their 2001 track ‘Daydream in Blue‘ whose chart success at the time has been followed by regular syncs ever since. However, that’s not the song that’s currently getting more than half a million streams a day in 2022.
That would be ‘Who Is She?’ from I Monster’s 2005 album ‘Neveroddoreven’, which has overtaken ‘Daydream in Blue’ to reach 43.6m streams on Spotify alone, and will soon be reissued by label Dharma Records.
The announcement of that re-release outlines the reason for the instant popularity: TikTok. “Millions of young people, mostly girls” who are using the track to soundtrack their clips from Roblox or popular RPG Genshin Impact, and more recently fan-created trailers for Netflix show ‘Wednesday’.
“This trend was spotted by a (Genshin Impact and animé-loving) label team member (a Gen Alpha) who has been helping permeate these edits around the TikTokiverse,” said Dharma Records. “But no matter what she or anyone else can do, once it goes viral there is nothing you can do to stop it.”
It’s far from the first deep-back-catalogue track to be revived on TikTok. While there has been label involvement in fanning the flames – so far 47k TikTok videos have been made using the track – Honer and Gosling’s refreshingly blunt quote is a reminder that this kind of virality is most powerful when it springs organically from one or more fan communities.
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