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3 Reasons Why Lil Nas X is a Marketing GENIUS - Part 1

6 Jul 2022 · 1 min

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A short narrated piece examining how Lil Nas X used memes and social media strategy to turn minimal musical output into massive commercial success. It traces his transition from living as a college dropout posting memes on Twitter (growing to ~30,000 followers) to creating a deliberately short, catchy, and funny song — Old Town Road — paired with a viral dancing-cowboy video (shared 3 Dec 2018) that launched sustained chart dominance.

Questions this video answers

3 December 2018.

About 30,000 followers.

He broke Mariah Carey’s record for the most consecutive weeks at number one.

Chapters

The Marketing Genius of Lil Nas X Lil Nas X with a college dropout sleeping on his sister's couch with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account. Five months later, he broke Mariah Carey's record for the most consecutive weeks at number one. This post tells the story Most musicians think like failed startups too much time creating, not enough time promoting, and Lil Nas X dropped out of college to pursue music. He didn't create much. Instead, he lived on Twitter, made online friends, and got popular posting memes. His account quickly grew to 30,000 followers. The plan was to use his following to promote his music, but it wasn't that simple. In Nas's words, I'd post a funny meme and get 2000 retweets. Then I'd post a song and get 10. So Nas got creative. He stopped tweeting SoundCloud links and started writing a song he could promote through memes. In his words, it had to be short, it had to be catchy, it had to be funny. Old Town Road was the result, and on 3rd December 2018, NAS paired it with a video of a dancing cowboy and shared it with his followers. The video went viral, so Nas stuck to this formula and the views.