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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A session at this week\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s director of marketing and strategy Marlen H\u00fcllbrock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Holzmann kicked off with a clear definition of clipping in this context. \u201cIt\u2019s transforming long-format content such as music videos, behind-the-scenes [footage], long-format interviews, performance videos \u2013\u00a0anything that is longer format \u2013\u00a0into short, snackable content,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Holzmann also distinguished clipping from traditional influencer-marketing campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\u201cBig-reach, high-volume content that\u2019s better for awareness and visibility\u2026 So, when you are scrolling through your feed and you\u2019re getting that same podcast interview clip over and over, or that same bit from a scene from a TV show, that\u2019s clipping.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd 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 \u2018Old Town Road\u2019, all of that was centrally on TikTok,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t just hitting one niche of people; it was hitting the entire \u2018For You\u2019 page. But I think now\u2026 the app has changed. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s any secret that one thing doesn\u2019t hit the entire \u2018For You\u2019 page any more. Now everyone\u2019s in their own niche,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou can no longer just pay an Addison Rae to do a lip sync and then everyone on the platform is going to see it\u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd then you really nail those niches, whether it\u2019s TV edits, anime edits, concert edits\u2026 It really allows you to tackle each of those pockets of the internet and see where your content is going to hit the hardest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He added that the first people to make use of clipping to build their profile were creators like Adin Ross and MrBeast, who \u201cwould employ this army of thousands of clippers\u201d to share clips of their gaming and reaction videos.<\/p>\n\n\n
Karageorges pointed to rapper ian, with his \u2018Magic Johnson\u2019 track, as one of the first musicians to follow this playbook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI could not scroll YouTube shorts or TikTok without seeing all these clips showing music videos of ian, saying \u2018this kid is the king of aura\u2019. Literally couldn\u2019t escape it for a few months,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNow he\u2019s in the XXL Freshman list, he\u2019s 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].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd now we\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
Holzmann cited several examples of music content that works well for clipping above: performances, interviews, appearances at awards shows and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe beauty of it is that it firs pretty much anything an artist is already doing,\u201d said Karageorges. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s an old sync and now a there\u2019s a new season [of that TV show] coming out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt can be concerts, whether you\u2019re performing at the Super Bowl, or an artist from the 60s who had killer performances, but maybe Gen-Z hasn\u2019t had a chance to be introduced to them yet,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A clipping campaign often involves the agency (or label \/ artist team if they\u2019re doing it themselves) creating clips from long-form footage, and then distributing those to \u2018clip accounts\u2019 on platforms like TikTok, who then post them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople get paid based on how many views they are able to generate,\u201d said Karageorges. \u201cA rough CPM that we estimate is [that] $1,000 is a million views. That\u2019s a good gauge as far as what you get from a clipping campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere is nothing as effective as a clipping campaign when it comes to the amount of dollars that you pay for each impression you\u2019re getting,\u201d said Machado later in the session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe usually provide anywhere from four to 10 different clip options for clippers to choose from with a specific campaign. Of course, if it\u2019s one specific moment and we need everyone to use same specific moment, then that\u2019s an exception,\u201d said Holzmann.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut if we\u2019re talking about performance footage or something, we\u2019ll 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n One of the big advantages of clipping is that it doesn\u2019t rely on the artist to create the posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have to have the artist creating something new to be pushed, which makes everyone\u2019s life much easier,\u201d said Machado. \u201cEveryone\u2019s had that pain on a daily basis to rely on the artist to create new content. And they\u2019re mad at us! So this is a way out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s very stressful and overwhelming to have artists creating content every single day. So we don\u2019t need anything else from the artists in most of the cases [in campaigns] to get things started.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karageorges also suggested that time-stretched marketing teams can also be as involved or hands-off creatively as they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf a digital marketer is super-set on \u2018this is the podcast, these are the three time-stamps we want to use\u2019 we can do something like that. Or [it can be] as simple as \u2018hey, we\u2019d love to test out clipping, here\u2019s the song\u2019 and we can research from there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that fans are shooting a lot of the footage themselves feeds into this pitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you\u2019re a digital marketer and your artist is on a killer tour where they\u2019re selling out every show, and you\u2019re not clipping out the thousand Instagram videos that you can download every day through Cobrand that are tagging you, I think you\u2019re doing your artist a huge disservice,\u201d he said later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey\u2019re already crushing it on that live performance. From there, you don\u2019t have to ask them to do anything. You can just spread that and emphasise what they\u2019re already doing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n No. In fact, that was one of the key points the Ranked Music team wanted to make during the session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI 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,\u201d said Karageorges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re 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\u2019s really just not going to have that much impact.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut when you put $1,000 towards a clipping campaign, you\u2019re going to get minimum 60 to 100 videos, it\u2019s going to be completely inside your niche, and it\u2019s going to populate your \u2018Sounds\u2019 page [on TikTok] so that it no longer looks like \u2018oh, this artist only has two creates on their Sounds page\u2019. There\u2019s actually some volume there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Holzmann agreed. \u201cIt\u2019s huge for developing artists. It\u2019s low risk, high reward, low cost, low CPM, high volume.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve found that clipping is a great tool to help with rediscovery campaigns, and for artists to reignite catalogue,\u201d added Holzmann.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Signal-boosting syncs is one of the obvious opportunities there, but Ranked Music is finding other options too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve started to also propose it for artists that might be celebrating an album anniversary. Maybe it\u2019s the 40th anniversary of an album, or they have a seasonal album for the holidays,\u201d said Holzmann. \u201cIt\u2019s a great way to come up with content that we can use around those albums.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Christmas clipping is also a thing, according to Karageorges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOn TikTok there\u2019s a lot of snowy content during Christmas season, with animals, landscapes, decorating your house, whatever it may be. You\u2019ll probably be seeing a lot of that type of content with Christmas songs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile some of it\u2019s organic, a lot of it will also be coming from clipping campaigns.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n Karageorges admitted that it can be hard to measure the specific impact of a clipping campaign around a new music release \u2013\u00a0\u201cbecause on top of our clipping campaign, there\u2019s maybe also some playlisting campaigns or some paid media they\u2019re running\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, when working on songs that have been out for a while, streaming analytics are the key to understanding the impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen upticks anywhere from 8% two weeks after compared to two weeks before, to 30%,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnother thing that we look at is the growth of the actual sound, whether the campaign\u2019s on Instagram or on TikTok, if it started with five videos on the sound page and it\u2019s up to 180, we know that they\u2019re getting some movement\u2026 and we\u2019ll keep track of that growth too,\u201d added Holzmann.<\/p>\n\n\n 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI 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\u2019s mostly going to hit your followers first,\u201d said Karageorges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut that being said, we\u2019ve also done it on Instagram, and it has worked pretty well. Particularly when you\u2019re 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\u2019s super hit as well.\u201d<\/p>\nHow do clipping campaigns work and how much do they cost?<\/h2>\n\n\n
How can clipping avoid artist burnout?<\/h2>\n\n\n
Is clipping just for the biggest artists?<\/h2>\n\n\n
Is clipping just for new music releases?<\/h2>\n\n\n
How are clipping campaigns measured?<\/h2>\n\n\n
Is clipping just a TikTok thing?<\/h2>\n\n\n