Jain, the rebirth of “Makeba” and the past, indistinguishable from the present

We live in an age where all songs consistently succeed, reach goals, dominate the charts. As a result, we are so close to registering a gap between what we hear and what we are told, what we are listening to. Only to discover that over time we ended up listening to what we were told we were listening to.

Embarrassed? Take Makeba, the song “Makeba ma qué bella”. You have probably heard about it, heard, maybe even sang. Perhaps in 2015, when it came out, it helped to bring fame to a 24-year-old French multi-cultist named Jane (at the time it was another single from her album, How). You will most likely hear it in the summer of 2023, when a song dedicated to Miriam Makeba received an unexpected resurgence. This story is related to the marketing of the past and the distortion of time caused by the Internet.

The spark that revived popularity the song went viral (sorry for the swear word) on TikTok, where Makeba it has to do with millions of videos (the press release said the 13th, which was July). So here are the endless articles on the “viral article eight years late”, the power of TikTok, who Miriam Makeba will ever be, for those who were born after the singer’s death and have an internet connection but don’t use it. . Google. Everything is a little more complicated.

“Automated systems allow for continuous monitoring of any song,” explains Luca Fantacone, catalog director at Sony Music, the label that oversaw the comeback. Makeba. “Of great interest may be the growth of the audience, modest in absolute terms, but significant in relative terms. And at the beginning of May, we realized that something was moving Makeba

there has been an increase in the number of streams and content created on TikTok using this work.”

TikTok is one of the platforms where old songs are given new life. In some cases, this is the main starting point for new success stories, in others it may be inclusion in a series or rediscovery directly on streaming platforms. “The activation of this type of revival is always organic,” says Fantacone. “It creates an audience, it can’t be faked.” However, even spontaneous revival must be encouraged so that it does not dry up and turn into something big. “After making sure things were going well, we kept the trend going by building classic online promotional companions on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and commissioned content from influencers to try week after week to see what the potential of the song would be in the future. Streaming terms.

Keyword – conversion, or the transition of users from social networks to streaming platforms, or if you want to see it differently, from using a work as a meme to enjoying it as a real song, from passive to active listening. It is the transition that ensures that the product will be successful and really bring money. “For this, we went to digital partners for negotiations Makeba like it’s a new item. When we realized that this was how the public perceived it, and that there were results on the conversion front, we continued trying to find out which week of July was the best in order to restart it on radio exactly as if it had just come out.”

A billboard with an announcement also appeared in Milan in July. Makeba as “the hit of your summer 2023”. It was deliberately presented as a newly released song, even though it is not. In truth, it wasn’t even a hit. At that moment there was hope for a boom, perhaps probable or even safe for those who worked on it, but not established: the song was behind the seventieth place Top of the Music. It also came in third on the Italian Shazam ranking, which records how many people open the app and wonder, “What is this piece of art?” Today, fewer and fewer people are asking for it. “So far, it has generated about 270 million streams worldwide, 150 million of them since the beginning of May 2023. From 60,000 threads a day, it has gone up to nearly 2.5 million. Italy is the fifth market in the world for Jains, even ahead of France.”

However, in our ranking Makeba it has never gone beyond position number 49, which was confirmed two Fridays ago. This is a very high figure for a song of 2015, especially since at that time it was in the bottom of the Italian top 100. But perhaps this is not the boom that one can imagine? “Meanwhile, I must say that the ranking is dominated by the Italian repertoire,” Fantacone replies. “It is by definition difficult for an international song to get into the top 10. She must be a mega hit or a superstar while Makeba

it’s not a simple thing that everyone likes Flowers from Miley Cyrus. Our goal was to be in the top 50.”

The small resurgence sparked a marketing campaign that in turn accelerated the resurgence, marking the transition from being an algorithm-driven piece of music to being a song that people actually listen to on Spotify and other streaming services. Not to mention it’s a hit Makeba it has become. In a way, his success after eight years is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Getting used to: there will be more and more cases such. “The use of music as an instrument, even unconsciously, can affect any artist and any repertoire, see the case of Magic love story“. This is a very old work by Gigi D’Alessio that was one of the most used on TikTok in Italy during the summer. Makeba, My love, Italodisco. “These incidents are becoming more frequent and have already changed the face of the catalog,” says Fantacone. For this to happen, the song must have certain characteristics. It will not be a hit “larg”, but with its stubborn nature, a cry of “oooh” and a refrain-claim, Makeba basically, it was a TikTok friendly thing before TikTok was around.

One might wonder what place will ever be left for old songs in a marketplace that releases tens of thousands of new songs a day, sometimes crafted specifically to be reduced to snippets that can be recycled by social media. “There is a space that can be conquered. The biggest problem is the limited time the public has: you have to find the right combination to get their attention. The combination of elements also matters: sometimes a good work is not enough, what is needed is an organic activation of the public and publicity.” As well as the artist’s willingness to delay planning and the pride of working on an eight-year-old song, despite the fact that he, like Jain, has an album released in 2023. Okay, you didn’t know Jain existed, you did Makeba

, now look what he did, other things. It’s hard to do, but not impossible.”

At a time when songs become shorter, and sometimes their function is exhausted by those 10-15 seconds, which is enough for a microvideo, the perception of the flow of time is also changing. Until yesterday, the discography accepted the idea that after 18 months, songs are no longer new (the so-called Front line) and turned into a catalog of, let’s say, a rapid downgrading, also due to the speed at which songs are consumed and the amount of new music that hits the platforms every day. The time warp caused by social media is redefining record-breaking news that, paradoxically, could have been released even three, four, five years ago.

Boom Makeba it is important to change the very idea of ​​the catalog, “so much so that in record companies, increasingly, those who deal with it come from the cutting edge and use the logic that applies to the new ones.” So, today’s catalog means two radically different things: on the one hand, an anniversary, a reissue, a box set, a memory sold to an extremely loyal public that controls the physical format, on the other, new discoveries that travel digitally.

For those who open Spotify and have no historical memory, Makeba it’s as new as Fool, the title track of Jain’s latest album. The post history no longer automatically determines the hierarchy. “Young audiences, Generation Z, in short, don’t care at first whether a play is two, three, or five years old, whether it’s a single or taken from an album. Sometimes they don’t even question who the artist is. All parts are in the same timeline: today’s.” The past can be resold because we no longer know or do not want to distinguish it from the present.