Creator campaigns are live in Symphony

Most songs that break right now break under somebody else's video.

A creator you've never met grabs a few seconds of a record, puts it under a clip, and a few days later the song's climbing on Spotify. Labels have known this for a while. The hard part has always been everything around it.

Why this was always coming

Clipping and creator campaigns have gone from a side budget to a big part of how music gets marketed. Teams pay creators to post with a sound, pay clippers by the view, and chase whatever's already moving. Anyone who's run one knows where it gets stuck. Finding the right creators takes days. Their contact info is buried. Rates are whatever someone typed into a media kit. The brief is a doc nobody reads, and paying everyone out at the end is its own job.

So creator campaigns in Symphony were inevitable for us. We just didn't want to ship a directory and call it done. We took those bottlenecks one at a time and built Sage around them.

Sage is our creator campaigns agent, and as of today she runs them two ways.

Discovery mode

Discovery mode is the yellow pages of creators, and the biggest one in music. You search for creators yourself across a network of 350M+ creator pages on TikTok and Instagram, with YouTube, X and Twitch on the way. Make the list as wide or as narrow as you want, every bedroom producer in Atlanta or just the people who post skate edits to R&B.

Pull up a page and Sage finds the contact info, reaches out and negotiates for you. Every creator comes with an estimated rate band, and that band is based on what their posts actually do, the real engagement, not a number someone listed. Sage drafts every message and holds it until you release the batch. She works inside the band you approve, and if a creator asks for more, she brings it back to you before anything's agreed.

This is also where the rest of the roster pays off. Maude, our business affairs agent, tracks your catalog every day, including which creators have already posted with your sounds. So you can build a list from the people who already reacted to a record, point Sage at them for the next song, or bring in new creators like them and keep a trend going.

Quick Launch

Quick Launch is for when you want volume fast. It works like a clipping or CPM campaign. You put a brief out, creators in the network can pick it up and post, and they get paid on CPM for the views their post brings in over a 24-hour payout window. CPM just means a rate per thousand views, so you're paying for reach that actually happened.

You can test with a small budget, since campaigns start at a $250 minimum. You can target by audience age, region and creator size, then segment from there. Sage helps you write the brief too, so creators get something clear to work from.

Doing it on purpose

We could've shipped this earlier as a list of handles and a payment button. We waited because the stuck parts are where these campaigns fall apart, and where artists end up overpaying or buying reach that isn't real. The search, the contact info, the rate band, the brief and the payout are all things a team used to do by hand. Now Sage does them, and you stay the one who says go.

Creators is part of Symphony Advanced. If you want to see it on your own record, book a demo at symphonyos.co/demo.

There's a lot more coming on the creator side. For now, go find the people who already love your song.

Cheers, Chuka