Charlie Davis grew up on the music business and technology, sitting around the table at a Chinese restaurant on Sunday nights listening to the conversations between his grandfather, the legendary Clive Davis and father, Fred Davis, a lawyer-turned-tech entrepreneur who has worked with the likes of Spotify, Shazam and SoundCloud.
After learning how to code at Cornell and working at Spotify for Artists while going for his Master there, Charlie wanted to create the “ultimate marketing solution” for independent as well as established artists. The result is Preffy, which helps break songs at TikTok and Instagram by holding online competitions, rewarding the creators who garner the most likes for their videos using portions of the track with cash prizes.
Acquired earlier this year by the Nashville-based Songfluencer, one of the leaders in the influencer marketing space, Preffy offers clients a bargain price of anywhere from three to five cents per 1,000 views, preferring to spread the marketing budget to a variety of micro and nano TikTok influencers with smaller followings, rather than just one or two macro individuals, democratizing the process.
“Tik Tok is genre-agnostic,” says Charlie. “It doesn’t care if your song was released 30 days or 30 years ago, whether you’re a legacy artist or one just coming up. It’s a way of creating the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time, a platform where the artist’s marketing dollars can be best spent.”
Among the songs currently holding TikTok competitions are Calvin Harris’ “By Your Side” (offering a 34% chance at winning at least $50), Skrillex’s “Don’t Go” (38%) and Ariana and the Rose’s “Every Body” (50%).
Preffy’s innovation is paying influencers only on the actual likes garnered by their posts, rather than a guaranteed upfront flat fee, which can cost in the six figures for the most followed TikTok stars. The company works closely with the record labels’ digital marketing department in establishing budgets and contest, sometimes even before the music is officially released.
Davis admits the connection between TikTok activity and the more lucrative streams on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Shorts and actual radio airplay can’t quite be quantified.
“The end goal of any TikTok campaign is to lead to consumption,” he says. “But that’s difficult to track at this point. For us, views and likes are solid indicators of engagement across all short-form video applications.”
Is this just the 2021 version of the old radio promotion pay for play, or does setting up a competition preclude that?
“If you create engaging content, we want you to do it over our music,” says Davis. “And let TikTok users decide its quality. It’s a meritocracy. Our research shows, for an artist, it’s more beneficial algorithm-wise to get 100 posts accumulating 1,000,000 likes than one post that gets the same.”
Davis is bullish on the future of TikTok as a music discovery platform, just as he says his illustrious grandfather is. “We’re still in the platform’s infancy, but I believe it’s here to stay,” Charlie says. “I don’t want to speak for him, but \Clive definitely understands the importance of TikTok as a new medium.”
And yet another member of the extended Davis family makes his mark on the music business.