As a label or management team, how can you do more with video on social media without pushing your artists to burnout point trying to provide it? Clipping may be one answer.
A session at this week’s Music Ally Marketing Week, our new online event, delved into what clipping is and how it works, and the benefits it can bring for artists and music.
Ranked Music CEO Thiago Machado was joined by his colleagues, head of strategy Adriana Holzmann and market lead Alec Karageorges, to explain all in the session, which was moderated by Music Ally’s director of marketing and strategy Marlen Hüllbrock.
Holzmann kicked off with a clear definition of clipping in this context. “It’s transforming long-format content such as music videos, behind-the-scenes [footage], long-format interviews, performance videos – anything that is longer format – into short, snackable content,” she said.
Holzmann also distinguished clipping from traditional influencer-marketing campaigns.
“It’s more fan made content. It is the content that naturally and organically surfaces around a song or a cultural moment, and it is less about a select group of curated creators producing content around a release,” she said.
“Big-reach, high-volume content that’s better for awareness and visibility… So, when you are scrolling through your feed and you’re getting that same podcast interview clip over and over, or that same bit from a scene from a TV show, that’s clipping.”
When did clipping become popular?
Karageorges set clipping into a historical context of music marketing, from radio promo to the shift towards music bloggers in the early 2010s, then the Spotify-curator era later in that decade, before TikTok started to explode in 2019-20.
“And there were trends that would take off for everyone. If you had something that was hitting on the app, whether it was a CapCut trend, whether it was the Mannequin Challenge, whether it was songs like ‘Old Town Road’, all of that was centrally on TikTok,” he said.
“It wasn’t just hitting one niche of people; it was hitting the entire ‘For You’ page. But I think now… the app has changed. I don’t think it’s any secret that one thing doesn’t hit the entire ‘For You’ page any more. Now everyone’s in their own niche,” he continued.
“You can no longer just pay an Addison Rae to do a lip sync and then everyone on the platform is going to see it… Clipping really allows you to have an understanding of the song, both sonically and for the actual lyrical content, and then pick out those niches on TikTok where you really think it has the best chance at hitting.”
“And then you really nail those niches, whether it’s TV edits, anime edits, concert edits… It really allows you to tackle each of those pockets of the internet and see where your content is going to hit the hardest.”
He added that the first people to make use of clipping to build their profile were creators like Adin Ross and MrBeast, who “would employ this army of thousands of clippers” to share clips of their gaming and reaction videos.
When did musicians start using clipping?
Karageorges pointed to rapper ian, with his ‘Magic Johnson’ track, as one of the first musicians to follow this playbook.
“I could not scroll YouTube shorts or TikTok without seeing all these clips showing music videos of ian, saying ‘this kid is the king of aura’. Literally couldn’t escape it for a few months,” he said.
“Now he’s in the XXL Freshman list, he’s got over 100 million streams on Spotify, a full career as an artist. That was the first time I really saw it organically hitting my FYP [For You page].”
“And now we’ve seen mass adoption from everyone, from indie artists like Russ to Drake and Partynextdoor with their most recent album release, getting over 100 million views on their clipping campaign.”
What music content works for clipping?
Holzmann cited several examples of music content that works well for clipping above: performances, interviews, appearances at awards shows and more.
“The beauty of it is that it firs pretty much anything an artist is already doing,” said Karageorges. “Maybe it’s an old sync and now a there’s a new season [of that TV show] coming out.”
“It can be concerts, whether you’re performing at the Super Bowl, or an artist from the 60s who had killer performances, but maybe Gen-Z hasn’t had a chance to be introduced to them yet,” he continued.
How do clipping campaigns work and how much do they cost?
A clipping campaign often involves the agency (or label / artist team if they’re doing it themselves) creating clips from long-form footage, and then distributing those to ‘clip accounts’ on platforms like TikTok, who then post them.
“People get paid based on how many views they are able to generate,” said Karageorges. “A rough CPM that we estimate is [that] $1,000 is a million views. That’s a good gauge as far as what you get from a clipping campaign.”
“There is nothing as effective as a clipping campaign when it comes to the amount of dollars that you pay for each impression you’re getting,” said Machado later in the session.
Ranked Music usually recommends a minimum spend of $1,000 for this aspect of wider campaigns. A typical campaign can involve anywhere from 100 clipping accounts to 2,000, depending on the size of the budget.
The clippers are given guidelines about which hashtags and locations to target, although they are given some leeway in which clips they want to use from the selection provided by the agency.
“We usually provide anywhere from four to 10 different clip options for clippers to choose from with a specific campaign. Of course, if it’s one specific moment and we need everyone to use same specific moment, then that’s an exception,” said Holzmann.
“But if we’re talking about performance footage or something, we’ll grab maybe the most viewed or the most hot moments of the performance, and have clippers grab those. We want to give them a few options.”
How can clipping avoid artist burnout?
One of the big advantages of clipping is that it doesn’t rely on the artist to create the posts.
“We don’t have to have the artist creating something new to be pushed, which makes everyone’s life much easier,” said Machado. “Everyone’s had that pain on a daily basis to rely on the artist to create new content. And they’re mad at us! So this is a way out.”
“It’s very stressful and overwhelming to have artists creating content every single day. So we don’t need anything else from the artists in most of the cases [in campaigns] to get things started.”
Clipping is also fast: Machado said that a typical campaign can be up and running in between 24 and 48 hours, which is speedier than traditional influencer-marketing campaigns.
Karageorges also suggested that time-stretched marketing teams can also be as involved or hands-off creatively as they want.
“If a digital marketer is super-set on ‘this is the podcast, these are the three time-stamps we want to use’ we can do something like that. Or [it can be] as simple as ‘hey, we’d love to test out clipping, here’s the song’ and we can research from there.”
The fact that fans are shooting a lot of the footage themselves feeds into this pitch.
“If you’re a digital marketer and your artist is on a killer tour where they’re selling out every show, and you’re not clipping out the thousand Instagram videos that you can download every day through Cobrand that are tagging you, I think you’re doing your artist a huge disservice,” he said later.
“They’re already crushing it on that live performance. From there, you don’t have to ask them to do anything. You can just spread that and emphasise what they’re already doing.”
Is clipping just for the biggest artists?
No. In fact, that was one of the key points the Ranked Music team wanted to make during the session.
“I actually see this as a fantastic opportunity for smaller artists. I work with everyone from lie the Travis Scotts of the world to a producer for obscure rap projects who has $1,000 for their entire album rollout,” said Karageorges.
“When you’re a small artist, you really need to see some ROI for that spend. Spending that entire $1,000 on [getting] someone with two million followers to dance to your song once? It’s really just not going to have that much impact.”
“But when you put $1,000 towards a clipping campaign, you’re going to get minimum 60 to 100 videos, it’s going to be completely inside your niche, and it’s going to populate your ‘Sounds’ page [on TikTok] so that it no longer looks like ‘oh, this artist only has two creates on their Sounds page’. There’s actually some volume there.”
Holzmann agreed. “It’s huge for developing artists. It’s low risk, high reward, low cost, low CPM, high volume.”
Is clipping just for new music releases?
“We’ve found that clipping is a great tool to help with rediscovery campaigns, and for artists to reignite catalogue,” added Holzmann.
Signal-boosting syncs is one of the obvious opportunities there, but Ranked Music is finding other options too.
“We’ve started to also propose it for artists that might be celebrating an album anniversary. Maybe it’s the 40th anniversary of an album, or they have a seasonal album for the holidays,” said Holzmann. “It’s a great way to come up with content that we can use around those albums.”
Christmas clipping is also a thing, according to Karageorges.
“On TikTok there’s a lot of snowy content during Christmas season, with animals, landscapes, decorating your house, whatever it may be. You’ll probably be seeing a lot of that type of content with Christmas songs,” he said.
“While some of it’s organic, a lot of it will also be coming from clipping campaigns.”
How are clipping campaigns measured?
Karageorges admitted that it can be hard to measure the specific impact of a clipping campaign around a new music release – “because on top of our clipping campaign, there’s maybe also some playlisting campaigns or some paid media they’re running”.
However, when working on songs that have been out for a while, streaming analytics are the key to understanding the impact.
“We’ve seen upticks anywhere from 8% two weeks after compared to two weeks before, to 30%,” he said.
“Another thing that we look at is the growth of the actual sound, whether the campaign’s on Instagram or on TikTok, if it started with five videos on the sound page and it’s up to 180, we know that they’re getting some movement… and we’ll keep track of that growth too,” added Holzmann.
Is clipping just a TikTok thing?
As her comment shows, clipping campaigns are running on different platforms, but the practice is most associated with TikTok. Is that still the best platform for clipping?
“I think it works best on TikTok personally. The algorithm there is just designed to go to random people and not your followers, versus something like Instagram, where it’s mostly going to hit your followers first,” said Karageorges.
“But that being said, we’ve also done it on Instagram, and it has worked pretty well. Particularly when you’re targeting a slightly older demographic: instead of teenagers, going to 25 and above. And then YouTube Shorts? Honestly, very hit or miss, but sometimes it’s super hit as well.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
