90 Days of Tory Lanez: Inside the Magic of Quarantine Radio

Urska Jaksa

Jun 29, 2020

The last few months have been a test for musicians worldwide. Whether they were venturing into livestreams, locking themselves in the studio, promoting their projects, releasing new stuff… the question we thought worthy of some further deliberation was:

Is it possible for an artist to grow during the lockdown? 

Well, if you look at the graph of fanbase growth below – hell yeah!

Tory Lanez is a Canadian rapper-slash-R&B singer who sure did crack the code and proved you can blossom when the going gets tough – if you interact with your fanbase. 

This is how it went down:

1) End of March, Tory Lanez started Quarantine Radio, a raunchy show on Instagram Live, featuring music, fans tuning in for twerk competitions, and chats with heavyweights like Drake and Lizzo. Yes, there were a lot of ladies involved, there were prizes, and you can also check by yourself why Strawberry Milk was trending on Twitter. He even got temporarily suspended because of nudity.

2) What started as pure entertainment grew into a strong platform. Besides peaking at 350K viewers (and setting an Instagram Live record at the time), the show scored him 3M new IG followers in April alone (a 46% increase in total following, btw), and an offer to take it to TV. He even used it for a Covid-19 relief fund later on.

3) To top things off, he's managed to turn the social media attention into views and plays as he's been dropping new music. See the spillover to Spotify, SoundCloud and especially YouTube in the graphic below, where you can compare the engagement on his music channels during the 3-month period.

Rounded up with his recent “free agent” status and his Social Distancing Tour, which livestreamed on YouTube on 1 May, he’s been making lemonade out of lemons.

Cover photo: James Bridle/Wireless Festival 2019

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We dived into the case with the newly released beta version of Viberate analytics. It enables music pros to make smarter decisions with data-based insights. You can scour the Charts for information exactly like above, as well as check more specific information on Artist Pages.

Here's how you can start. If you're a musician, your page, automatically updated with all your latest stuff, is probably already on Viberate. You can send it to promoters, talent scouts, and A&Rs, and use the time you'd otherwise spend updating your onepager on making music. Check it out and sign-up to claim it.

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