We Should Talk About Bruno

Somewhere on this platform there is another thought piece being penned about why Encanto is this huge boon for creativity.

They're not wrong. But they're possibly missing the point of how the "Wisdom of Crowds" and "Community" got "We Don't Talk About Bruno" to the top of the music charts. A feat that wasn't possible 20 years ago in the early stages of Web 2.0.

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Let's rewind for a second here while also not taking away from the talent who wrote all the music for this film. That talent is a big reason for why the movie has done so well. But talent alone isn't the reason why a non-traditional song topped the charts. Radio has been a huge promotional vehicle for music. We know this and even with the likes of TikTok, YouTube and Spotify it is still a necessity for songs and artists to push mainstream. Just ask any big artist even in the past five years how they truly tipped. It wasn't solely the usage of social media. It was a combination of factors and it relied on the big machinery that we know of as traditional or terrestrial radio.

If it were 2002, the label that released Encanto (in this case, Walt Disney Records) would have sent promo reps into specific radio stations that program Contemporary Hit Radio or CHR to push the song to be added to the playlist. This usually required a ton of data and information exchange. Here's where the song is trending. Here is where it is big. Here is where it was added. Here is the reason you should add it. It was pure barter economy. Maybe the program director would take the risk and add it into late nights for a few spins to see how it would do. Maybe they would program it on a voter listener time slot. When they play the song against another and if it gets enough "phones" it would then be added to the official playlist.

It was a long slog. It would take sometimes a year for a song like "We Don't Talk About Bruno" to maybe ever hit the charts. But now things have changed what tips radio programming. It's called the community sharing effect.

Now we know this isn't news. Lots of things tip because of social media. Lots of things go viral. But there is a combination of "killer data," as I like to call it, stats that program directors and other curators or gatekeepers cannot deny. "We Don't Talk About Bruno" got used in millions of TikToks and tens of millions of views on YouTube and streams on Spotify. It made an undeniable case that if program directors didn't add it into rotation they were denying reality. They're opinion mattered little. The voice of the people is what matters here. And how the crowdswell really helped push this to more people and forcing the hand of gatekeepers who have relied on "data" forever. People wanted the song programmed and they weren't going to take no for an answer. And when it was added and ended up being regularly programmed on big stations like New York's Z100 and Los Angeles' KIIS-FM?

The song just got even bigger.

How? Because it reached even more people who may have not watched the movie. They now heard it and wanted to hear it more.

Radio is now a jukebox taking requests from us via social media. Program directors still think they have power but some artists and songs on the fringe are going to go mainstream whether they want it to or not. As a result it's giving us more interesting, not less interesting artists.

This is why the era we live in is more, not less creative than ever before. Yes, we hear tons of essential reporting about how technology is terrible and used to kill democracy and make big tech even bigger. But then there are stories like Bruno. A little song that in the past would have just been another track on a movie soundtrack. Now it's a Number 1 chart topping hit.

We should be talking about Bruno.

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