What is old is new again. Take Kate Bush, for example “Running in that hill.” Revived by “Stranger Things” and spreading the night on social media, the pop anthem is a chart phenomenon (#6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the week ending June 30) 37 years after it was first released in 1985.
While revivals of this magnitude are rare, release dates have been outdated on TikTok for years. Whether it’s Fleetwood Mac’s classic 1977 “Dreams” or Tom Odell’s 2012 single “Another Love,” songs that should have expired come back to life regularly. The question is: What will happen next?
In the case of Kate Bush, Warner Records couldn’t afford to ignore 85 million global broadcasts (this week alone) and reintroduced “Running Up That Hill” to radio. Without syncing on a cultural force like “Stranger Things” to open doors, artists and their bands are approaching this increasingly common scenario in many different ways – from approaching radio stations and digital service providers individually, to releasing new videos and alternative releases. The goal is to extend the viral moment and hopefully have an impact across the broader music ecosystem.
Odile is one of the artists who has successfully capitalized on proliferation. Another love, the acrimonious breakup anthem of the British, went viral on TikTok in 2022, a decade after its release, when the musical was used to record emotional “creations” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Another love quickly hit the global chart, amassing over 900 million streams on Spotify alone. But even with those numbers, breaking the song in the US was tough.
For starters, a lot has changed since Odell first released “Another Love” — including his record label. That left American co-director Joe Retriever, founder of Gold’n Retriever Ent. and former co-chairman of RCA Records, in an unusual position. “Tom is signed to Columbia and licensed to RCA in the United States,” explains Riccitelli. “The song is now a legacy, so it’s a catalog. It’s hard to get the label involved because it’s not front-line music….the sections of the catalog aren’t inherently built for current singles. They just aren’t made that way.”
So Riccitelli took radio promotion into his own hands. “I have to literally do this station by station, programmed by programmer, and try to get someone to take a shot of the song,” he says. “If the artist is not logged into the ecosystem anymore, does it really make sense to get out there and spend money on it?”
Elly Duhé’s management team found themselves in a similar situation with “Middle of the Night,” the 2020 pop music anthem that recently broke into Spotify’s global top 20 after going nuclear on TikTok. Since the song was released relatively recently, they decided to self-fund a promotion when the label showed hesitation. After all, Duhé split from RCA the week it was released. “It was a unique situation,” admits J. Hill, CEO and founder of Not Fit For Society. “We felt we had to pick up where we left off.”
Instead, Hill and Not Fit For Society president and co-founder Tabari Francis has been left largely to their own devices. “We invested our money in the registry,” Hill says. “We found the TikTok team, we found influencers, we hired people, and we connected with Spotify and Apple Music.” When “Middle of the Night” hit the “Today’s Top Hits” playlist on Spotify, Hill and Tabari realized they had made the right decision.
Then the executives brought the song to pop radio but were not so lucky. “We tried [get airplay]Regardless, Midnight has collected over 380 million Spotify streams and charted in countries as diverse as India, Australia, Malaysia, France, and the UK. Moreover, it doesn’t appear No sign of slowing down anytime soon.
Given the current music scene, anything goes, it’s no surprise that the situation often happens differently. Take the New York-based duo Cafuné, for example. They racked up gold with their 2019 single Tek It in early 2022, which caught the attention of Elektra Records. The band was signed to the label and the indie-pop track is now being actively performed on radio and DSPs. “There is often a moment with TikTok, but then the company’s job is to extend that moment,” says Zack Zarilo, co-founder of Public Investment Recording Co – a joint venture with Warner Music.
Johnny Minardi, Vice President of A&R at Elektra agrees. “We listened to what was happening on TikTok,” he says. Knowing the power of alternative mods on the platform, the band worked on acoustic, accelerated, and more popular “slow + echo” versions. However, Minardi also kept his eye on the bigger picture. “We immediately took clients seriously, and we wanted to make sure we passed on the excitement to real fans and touring.”
However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. “Some bands don’t like to release multiple versions,” Minardi continues. In the end, the artist’s decision. Cavone wanted to take “Tek It” to whatever level he could get, “he says. “When we played it for the staff, there was real excitement from every department, including the radio,” which seems to be the final limit to most viral revivals.
There is definitely more room on the radio for the revival of indie rock. Zerillo also directed Vundabar’s 2015 single, “Alien Blues,” to hundreds of millions of streams when it went viral in 2021. “Radio is really hard, these people are just immersing themselves in it,” he says. This kind helped, though. The movie “Alien Blues” was an anomaly. There is usually more pop or excessive pop that spreads quickly. I think this gave us an advantage. There is more room for these songs to succeed when they rarely do.”
For his part, the band’s lead singer, Brandon Hagen, took the viral torch his way. “We’ve always been a slow band,” he says. “People find our music when they find it.” When it came to promoting a late strike, Hagen opted for a conservative approach. “We took the middle path of not pretending it wasn’t happening, but not focusing on it. We obviously want the band to do the best they can.”
Perhaps the true value of viral revivals lies in their ability to promote future projects. “We were really going to roll out a new record,” Hagen says of Vundabar’s 2022 release “Devil for the Fire.” “So we tied the ‘Alien Blues’ into the new record rollout, and we used one to boost the other.”
Odell found himself in a similar situation when “Another Love” exploded as he prepared to release a new single, “The Best Day of My Life.”
“I’m doing both songs at the same time,” Riccitelli says of Odell’s late and current songs. “I have no doubt that ‘The Best Day of My Life’ got off to a better start because of ‘Another Love.’ The streams for the song were very consistent and we had the best ticket numbers ever on the US tour that we just wrapped up.”
Doh also hopes to take advantage of the “Midnight” spread to promote her new venture. Not only that, but Not Fit For Society has secured a seven-figure funding deal for artists from music funding platform beatBread, which will allow Duhé to independently release new music. “It gives us the opportunity to do things right,” Francis says. “[Duhé] She hasn’t released anything in a year, but she still ranks as the 174th or 175th most streamed artist on Spotify. This lets us know that she is building a community around her fan base which is anticipating her at this point.”
That’s Vundabar’s main goal as well, in order to “continue adding credibility to the band,” says Zarilo. We know that another viral moment is unlikely to happen. For me, as a manager, I use ‘Alien Blues’ as my base. In his opinion, playing a viral song is still a small piece of the puzzle. “It was a cheat code forward, but now we need to be smart and get back to that step at a time, one round at a time.”
The independent outfit in Chicago, the Walters family also saw its 2014 hit, “I Love You So”, with unexpected consequences. The band had been estranged for years when the soulful song was taken over by pandemic-exhausted audiences, taking their Spotify tally to more than half a billion streams and reuniting their members for new music and touring.
The general consensus seems to be that viral revivals are here to stay. “I have a feeling this is just the beginning of a trend when it comes to cataloging pieces for an entire generation,” says Riccitelli. Clive Davis used to call them copyrights. That was his word for this kind of song. This is what “another love” means – copyright.
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