Messages from the Stats... Going Viral with The RAH Band ??

When people use the term ‘Going Viral’, I’ve always thought of it an ambiguous term; something that will never happen without a modicum of planning and money spent to get your track into the right place, at the right time, to the right people.

Well, in 2022 something magical started to happen for one of my clients.

Let me give you a bit of a backstory… I started working with Richard Hewson about 20 years ago when iTunes was first emerging as a force in the music industry.??

Richard, by trade, is a jazz musician and orchestral arranger. He attended Guildhall School of Music in the 60s and one of his first gigs was arranging the strings for The Beatles ‘Long & Winding Road’ - not bad eh?! - This led to 10 years of constant arranging work for the likes of Supertramp, Diana Ross, James Taylor and many more.

But Richard had bigger plans, he wanted to write his own music. In 1977, he formed The RAH Band (RAH = Richard Anthony Hewson). Over the next 10 years he proceeded to have chart hits with ‘Clouds Across the Moon’, ‘The Crunch’ and the lesser known ‘Messages from The Stars’. His dance tracks such as ‘Slide’ and ‘Falcon’ were almost never out of the charts in the 80s. Since then, Richard has built up a 5-album catalogue.

I first met Richard through a mutual friend in 2003. The first single I ever bought was ‘The Crunch’, so I was already a big fan upon meeting him. I was curious as to what he was doing with his recordings now … “nothing really, do you want to come and see them? They are stacked-up in my shed!” he replied. Richard is very unusual of that era, as he kept ownership of all his master rights, whilst licensing his recording to companies such as RCA and DJM Music. I immediately realized that there was an opportunity to collaborate.

My background was in production and instrumental music having formed The Artful Recorded Music Library in the 90s -?and in more recent years?The Gold Leaf Music Library - but I knew that there were untapped opportunities with Richard’s music, considering the renaissance of heritage acts and the emergence of digital downloads.

So, we formed a business arrangement where my role was to get Richard’s music ready for the current market. We kicked off with a very best of The RAH Band compilation, released on CD and digitally on iTunes; we sold the CD through a newly formed website and sat back to see what happened. Almost immediately the sales started to trickle through and interest on iTunes started to build, all with very little promotion as there was no social media then. We relied on existing fans pumping 'The RAH Band' into Google to find us … which they did!

As The RAH Band’s music was now more visible on the internet, requests started to come in from across the globe from record companies, agents and music supervisors, asking if they could license the tracks for compilation CDs and syncs for films and adverts. The likes of Sony, BMG and dance acts such as Horse Meat Disco and Atjazz were regular clients and collaborators.

This dynamic was how it continued for several years, until the beginning of 2022 when our music publisher?SGO Music?got onboard - and what good timing that was!

In February of 2022 things started to hot-up.

The Spotify figures for The RAH Band had been slowly growing year on year, as more people subscribed to the platform. In January 2022, we were comfortably sitting on an average of 12,000 streams a day.??Suddenly, the daily figures started to jump ... 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, all the way up to 100,000+ daily streams within a month. We were now intrigued as to what exactly was happening and how we should be acting upon this.

Pre-social media the thinking was linear; you release a single to promote an album, you arrange press, radio and promotion to your target market and, if the fans liked the record, it would sell …??easy, straightforward thinking.

Zoom forward to now, we were far exceeding the number of streams that would be deemed usual for a band that hadn’t had a ‘hit’ for 30 years. How on earth were we getting so many streams?

Our research eventually took us over to TikTok, where we quickly discovered that ‘Messages from the Stars’ was being used as the audio for a huge volume of user generated videos.?To this day we don’t know exactly how this trend began, but some big hitters used the tune to back their viral videos, which had then been shared or repurposed by hundreds of thousands of other TikTok users. For example, several viral videos contained the track alongside clips of a superhero character called A-Train from Amazon Prime's hit TV show ‘The Boys’; this essentially turned the song and A-Train into a meme which spread like wildfire. As the song got more screen time on TikTok, the more people shared it or searched for it on other platforms (Spotify, YouTube etc.). The big question is, why this track amongst the millions of tracks used on TikTok every day? And most importantly, what do we do next as publishers and rights owners??

As the days went on, we were approaching one million streams and wanted to get to the heart of the demographics that were engaging with the track. From Spotify statistics, we were able to establish that most of the market was based in the US and consisted of mainly 15–25-year-old females …??a completely new market for The RAH Band, whose core market up until now had been 35–55-year-old males, mainly in the UK and Europe. Interestingly, over 70% of streams are coming directly from users’ own personal playlists, as opposed to editorial playlists procured by Spotify. 'Messages' has been placed in over half a million user playlists and counting.?This is one of the key reasons why we are seeing consistent activity a year later; the listeners didn’t disappear into the ether overnight because a Spotify curator refreshed an editorial playlist - something that happens all the time.

Within 6 months, ‘Messages’ started appearing in charts around the world, peaking at #6 in the USA Viral Chart on Spotify in July 2022 alongside huge artists including Kate Bush (thanks to the Stranger Things phenomenon), which was a real thrill.?

To date, 'Messages from the Stars' has had over 50 million streams on Spotify - over 100 million hits across all platforms - and around 90% of this activity occurred within the last 12-months. In the previous 12-month period, the track received 350k total streams on Spotify; when compared with 45 million + streams gained during the current 12-month period, this is an increase of 13,000% - and it’s all thanks to TikTok!

So, how did we capitalise on this success, what was the plan to keep the momentum up, and how do we raise awareness of The RAH Band to this emerging market???

We started with a total rebrand, employing the services of designer Paul Waller who is responsible for much of Level 42’s graphic design. Paul is a big fan of The RAH Band and understood the brief immediately, the logo was instantly fresh and dynamic. This branding was added to all online accounts, creating a recognisable presence and connecting the dots between platforms. The next phase was to set-up a?merch store on Shopify?which consisted of hoodies, t-shirts and mugs, featuring the new branding.?Shopify merges nicely with Spotify, featuring products on the artists’ page and allowing fans to buy within the app. We've also started the process of trademarking in multiple markets, as the logo and name are now a commodity.

We noticed that the majority of TikTok content was using a sped-up version of the track, something that is possible to do within the app. People were uploading this version of the audio to other platforms, such as YouTube, and getting a lot of hits – often into the millions. This was unethical from a rights and ownership point of view, and we were aware of losing out on a big slice of the streaming revenue… with this in mind, we decided to produce and release?our own sped-up version.?Within days of releasing it, we'd received over half a million streams on Spotify and YouTube, which was highly rewarding. To date, the official digital release has gained 3 million streams in less than 3 months, and various versions of the sped-up song have amassed 10s of millions of hits on YouTube.

A constant battle that we never envisaged has been monitoring and reporting illegally uploaded tracks from people looking to make a quick buck.??It’s amazing that Spotify cannot put a watermark system in place to stop this, but I suppose with up to 100k tracks being uploaded every day, some illegal material is going to slip through the net. This will be an ongoing task for the foreseeable future.

OK, so that’s Spotify covered – now on to YouTube! As of June 2022,?The RAH Band's YouTube channel?was chugging away with just 500 subscribers.?It was a rudderless ship to be honest, until we got an audio-visual management company called Aviator on-board. They gave the channel direction (and a blue tick!), started to clean-up the illegal uploads, monetize user-generated content, and suggested new content to bolster interest.?6 months on, our subscribers now stand at over 20k - incredible growth in such a short space of time.

Another highlight of last year occurred in June 2021 - the first ever The RAH Band gig at Jazz Café in London. This was directed by Richard’s son Dan Hewson, who's a successful musician on the London scene.?Dan hand-picked some of London’s best musicians to form a hot new band. On June 11th, with a packed out crowd gathered from Facebook and Instagram promotion, the band performed 90 minutes of pure RAH Band nostalgia.?Richard took to the stage too, alongside original singer Liz Hewson, much to the delight of the crowd.?3 songs from the show are available to watch in full over on YouTube, and we also have a high quality audio recording of the set which we hope to release digitally and on vinyl this year. The wonderful thing about this gig was the amount of younger people in the audience who had discovered the band through the TikTok sensation. We hope that 2023 will bring more live shows for The RAH Band.

Another project that was signed and sealed just before the viral situation was a 5 CD boxset with Cherry Red Records -?Messages from The Stars: The RAH Band Story Vol. 1 - containing albums and unreleased material from the back catalogue between?1977 - 1984. This product was aimed at the established RAH Band market and released in October of 2022. It received rave reviews and now a Vol. 2 boxset is in the works, covering the band’s output from 1985 - 1998.

To top off an amazing year, 1985 hit ‘Clouds Across the Moon’ was used in the top ITV drama ‘McDonald & Dodds’.?This was an interesting sync as the production company re-recorded a live version of the song, and even named the episode after the track.

2023 is looking good! The business foundation for The RAH Band has now been set. The trademarking, the merchandise, the publishing & master rights management, growing socials and active YouTube... It's all set-up for anything that comes along.

All business interests are being managed by a small but dedicated team, designed as a one-stop shop so that all global rights can be controlled from one central point.

And what does Richard think about all this??Take a listen to the podcast where Aaron, Sophia and Richard discuss the madness of 2022.