Cloherty’s team focused on enticing a very specific swathe of TikTokers to adopt the second choreography: Users who were not necessarily widely known on their own, but who had, according to Cloherty, a “noticeable relationship [to] and influence over larger macro influencers” on the app. In mid-August, the dominoes started to fall, a number of TikTok’s biggest names used “Freak” in videos, and the track is currently on its way to becoming Sub Urban’s second hit, with more than 3.
But Songfluencer has a very specific pitch — and an appealing one for a music industry increasingly obsessed with data: The company has built and continues to perfect software that collects data from TikTok, allowing it, in theory, to quantify the value of influencers on the app and analyze the paths of a host of TikTok hits. In the app’s early days, marketers would throw money haphazardly at influencers and cross their fingers.
Cloherty was just a “lowly assistant at William Morris” when he met Sean Pace, who was working at the time with an unknown but digitally savvy country singer named. “The very first show I booked for Kane, the club promoter called me and said his ticket site went down because his website wasn’t used to the traffic,” Cloherty recalls. “It was in Indiana, a state Kane had never set foot in.” This was Cloherty’s crash course on the importance of a killer digital marketing operation.