Call it what you want: “flooding,” “seeding,” “volume posting,” “trend simulation,” “burner pages,” or — as one digital marketer jokingly called it — “The Great Meme Wars of 2025.” There’s a new digital marketing strategy out there, no one knows what to call it — and seemingly everyone is trying it.
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This emerging strategy flips standard TikTok marketing on its head. Now, instead of spending thousands for top creators to include certain songs in their posts, crafty managers, labels and a crop of new digital marketing companies like Chaotic Good and Floodify are quietly operating or working with their own armies of hundreds or thousands of tiny TikTok pages — with the covert purpose of using them just to place songs in the backgrounds of posts.
“Five years ago, there was a monolithic culture on TikTok,” says Federico Morris, Range Media Partners director of A&R and co-manager for Dylan Gossett. “Everyone knew who the top stars were, and because of that, I think, the same way labels were once able to force a song to the top at radio, digital marketers could force a TikTok trending song from the top down. Now, we’re trying to do it from the ground up.”
As TikTok has matured, many in the music industry found that paying top TikTok creators large sums to post videos using their songs was becoming increasingly ineffective. Major creators’ rates climbed, online trends continued to fragment, TikTok became saturated with content and the return on investment for labels became more dubious. Then, around 2022, experts began focusing more on “micro influencers,” users with somewhere between 5,000 and 50,000 followers, given they were cheaper and their participation appeared more organic than planting songs with top creator stars.
But by late 2024, with the sheer amount of content on TikTok rising exponentially, digital marketers began to itch for a new type of music marketing campaign online. Why rely on pricey and temperamental creators when anyone can start an account with a decent chance at going viral?
Building pages is one of the tactics Will Morrow, senior vp/head of viral marketing at Warner Records, says helped the label achieve a string of recent breakthroughs, citing campaigns for Sombr, Benson Boone and Teddy Swims as particularly effective use cases. “We were seeing a lot of pages starting to go viral with virtually zero followers,” says Morrow, who began adopting this strategy — which he calls “burner pages” — around 2023, earlier than most. “We’d see pages with 20 followers post content about our artists and they’d get millions of views. It wasn’t just the big creators.”
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“The rise of this trend happened very quickly,” says Adam Tarsia, who in February co-founded Chaotic Good, one of the most in-demand digital companies in this new space. “The foundations of this marking method have been there for a while, but late last year and very early this year, things really reached a critical mass where it seemed like everyone was trying to do this.”
While the 10 marketing experts interviewed for this story all differ in their exact approaches, there are a few common types of so-called burner pages created today. Typically, these accounts do not have personalities or faces attached to them, just a common theme to their posts, which allows marketers to fly under the radar of normal social media users. These pages could be meme accounts, or country-themed pages featuring videos of trucks and ATVs, paired to music the marketer is promoting. Another example is a page that only posts the same image of a coffee cup over and over, overlaying the cup with a new quote on each post that’s designed to be highly relatable — and sharable.
In the case of the coffee cup account, the quotes are all romantically themed. “Couples love sharing sweet quotes with each other, and I’ve found accounts like that do really well,” says the digital marketer behind the account, who requested anonymity. “The more people share the post, the more it juices the algorithm.” The song an artist’s team is pushing is then synched in the background, like a subliminal message.
While it may seem like these campaigns are akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, the trend actually capitalizes on a known psychological phenomenon: the “mere-exposure effect,” which states that the amount of times a person is exposed to something — whether that be music or a shoe brand or an interior design style — the more likely they are to say they like it.
Artist teams can either receive this service in-house at certain digital-savvy labels, like Warner Records, which has invested in the tactic as part of its core offering to signees, or pay external companies like Chaotic Good and its competitors on a per-song basis. Two artist managers told Billboard they have been quoted around $5,000 per song from different companies in the space; although prices vary widely in exchange, these firms often provide a target number of views on posts containing the song.
“With your own accounts you can push out a high volume of content quickly and with precision, instead of having to book 30 accounts run by other people for a marketing campaign,” Range’s Morris says. “When you do that, you often have to wait for the pages to post at different times — some are reliable, some are not.”
These campaigns also vary in their thoughtfulness. Some companies simply focus on getting the song in front of as many people as possible, no matter what the accompanying post is; others are more tailored. The more bespoke approach to “trend simulation,” as Chaotic Good refers to it, identifies a song’s target audience and posts on accounts that tend to attract those demographics; for example, an R&B love ballad might work great on the coffee cup page, but it might not work on the truck page. To further drive home the narrative and audience an artist wants to build, marketers might also run “fan pages,” where they pose as regular fans to recirculate content from the artist’s concerts, interviews and music videos. The hope is to drive fans straight to content and narratives that they want to promote.
“Everyone wants to break a song, but at the same time we want to break an artist, too,” says Jesse Coren, co-founder of Chaotic Good and Mutual Friends, a management company and label. “A lot of our focus is on creating a narrative for an artist on the internet and bringing them into the zeitgeist.”
Instead of building up pages in-house like some of the other marketers interviewed for this story, Hundred Days takes a slightly different approach. The co-founders of Hundred Days, Ben Klein and Sean Kane, were inspired by clipping communities in Discord servers — online communities where creators’ teams gather hundreds or thousands of TikTok users and pay them by the view to repost short snippets from their creators’ Twitch streams — and decided to do it themselves. It was already somewhat common to find savvy music marketers using clipping communities to try to get their clients’ songs synched in the background of videos, but Hundred Days wanted to make their own that was solely dedicated to music.
“We launched our own Discord server with four different types of creators — lyric pages, film/TV edit pages, quotes and aesthetic pages and sports edits,” explains Klein. “We have about 2,000 creators in a server across those categories, and a couple other stragglers in areas like meme or anime edit pages. When we get an inquiry from a client, and they say they want to spend $5,000 across lyric pages and quote pages, we just drop that request in the server and tag the post to direct the request to creators in that category. They get a notification and are told they can participate in the campaign.”
While creating accounts in-house can allow for maximum control, there’s also some danger involved, given there are limits to how many accounts can be made with one phone number or email address. Joe Lim, founder of Floodify, learned this the hard way. “We made around 7,000 accounts when we started,” says Lim, who launched his company in February 2025. “But then there was an error and one of our editors messed up, sending a video across all 7,000 accounts and then all of them got cooked. Their value deteriorated to zero. I think we lost the equivalent of $30,000 on those accounts.”
Lim suspects the faulty video upload caused his accounts to get flagged by TikTok and hurt his ability to get viral view counts from those accounts in the future. Now, Floodify has a renewed approach. He claims to have a “fleet of 20,000 social media accounts” which were created by users around the world. He put out a small digital ad, calling for people to lend their accounts to his company, and users hoping to earn quick cash answered the call, offering up their accounts to Floodify to post on their behalf. The participants are paid per view.
“We will try posting on everyone’s accounts, but we’ll only pay them if it gets above 10 views,” says Lim. “And if we post on your account five times, and they all flop, then we won’t post on the page again. We only post on the best accounts. It’s a forever cycle of bettering the views per account.” Realistically, Lim says, even though he has access to 20,000 accounts, he only uses the best 3,000-5,000. On a daily basis, Lim estimates that his team posts “in the wide range of around 5,000 to 15,000 videos every single day, all promoting music from different artists.”
It’s hard to know how to judge success from these campaigns. Are all views worthwhile? Kane is skeptical. “People go wrong when they place value on empty creates — things that just literally get a post under your sound no matter what,” he says. “If there’s no intent behind it or a plan for how this connects to a target audience, then it’s just a vanity metric.” Instead, Kane and Klein say success to them, like all marketing, is to “create general awareness,” but “it’s always the best outcome when a campaign drives streaming success,” says Klein.
While burner pages were devised, in part, to help artists break through the ever-increasing saturation of TikTok, experts agree that their tactics also contribute to that situation. “I think the point of a burner page is not to combat the issue of saturation. It’s the idea of, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them,’” says Morrow. Now, with the rise of generative AI and automation tools, the future of social content is bound to be even more fast-paced — and those things are key to how many of these marketers plan to continue doing this moving forward.
“AI is already a huge part of this space overall,” Morrow says. But the ways that various marketers are using it today vary. The digital marketer behind the coffee cup account admits that they are currently working on an AI-powered system to generate memes and post them automatically to his various pages without them having to lift a finger, and they are already automating a lot of their posting process. Lim says Floodify offers “adaptable AI influencers” to music clients. “We offer AI influencers that basically create a story around the song,” he says. “For example, if we are hired to do a country song, we’ll have the influencer in a truck, but maybe for the next video we are doing a different song campaign and we have the same AI influencer on the same page doing a different activity like swimming or golf — something that fits the song.”
Chaotic Good and Mutual Friends co-founder Andrew Spelman said that while they’ve “experimented with [AI generated content] personally,” it’s “not a real part of our process currently” — though, he adds, “We suspect it will become a bigger and bigger part of digital marketing in the future.”
Still, every person interviewed for this story can agree on one thing that can stand out in any campaign — the song. “At the end of the day, good music is what ultimately cuts through,” says Morrow. “You can have the greatest marketing strategy of all time, pull out every trick in the book, but if the music isn’t there, it doesn’t really matter.”
from Billboard https://ift.tt/liQvI7e
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