What Artists Should Know About Breakr

Until recently, I only dabbled in influencer marketing. It seemed promising but daunting.

To do it right, I’d need to research influencers across multiple platforms and determine which ones align with my brand.

Then I’d have to figure out how to reach them. A cold DM? Comment spam?

Next comes the really awkward part: negotiating a price. Is there a going rate? I don’t want to insult them or waste their time.

Do I pay first? Half upfront? Who’s to say they won’t take my money and block me, or worse, misrepresent me or my music?

Breakr solves all these problems and more. A friend introduced me to the CEO, who let me test drive the platform with a $1000 influencer campaign on their dime.

To get the full experience, I also signed on as an influencer, sharing Breakr users’ music with my 2.3M Twitter followers.

How Breakr Works

You can search for campaigns to submit your music to based on platform, price range, date, and a variety of other tags.

The entire platform can be explained with a single screenshot (click to enlarge):

At the moment, most of the action is on TikTok, which is great because I previously had zero presence there.

When you submit to a campaign, you first have to confirm that your music is already on TikTok.

In my case it was, but only the first 15 seconds of the song. I reached out to my distributor, who confirmed that 15 seconds was their max. So I hastily submitted it again using DistroKid and a one-minute clip was live the very next day!

You can communicate directly with the influencer every step of the way, to ensure your vision of the campaign aligns with theirs.

The money is held in escrow until the influencer submits proof of delivery and the Breakr team confirms it. Campaigns all use the hashtag #MusicBreakr plus a hashtag specific to the campaign.

Many TikTok influencers also share their videos as Instagram Stories or Reels at no extra cost.

My Breakr Results

Seven TikTok influencers created content using my recent single “Mages” in a wide range of contexts.

Here are two examples:

@mery_badaliann @colortheory #ColorTheoryMages #MusicBreakr #MusicBreakrAd #art #draw ♬ Mages – Color Theory

https://www.tiktok.com/@sirabiola/video/6927755665884597510

Everyone was supposed to use the hashtag #ColorTheoryMages but a couple used #ColorTheoryMusic instead.

As of this writing, the campaigns have over 300K views on TikTok and over 100K views on Instagram.

My Breakr Influencer Experience

I’m also running a campaign as an influencer, sharing one song per weekday with my 2.3M Twitter followers (click to enlarge):

Things are just as straightforward on the influencer side. Each of my submissions has a big play button next to it and options to download the full song, view the submission, or accept it.

I don’t need to explicitly turn anyone down. If I don’t accept a submission before the deadline, then that’s that.

The plan is to create a new instance of the campaign every week. As long as people keep submitting and finding value in it, I’ll keep doing it for $125 a week minus Breakr’s 10% cut.

To Breakr or not to Breakr?

Was my campaign a success? You tell me.

I don’t have any hard numbers beyond the views themselves, 400K and counting. That’s just the nature of a brand awareness campaign.

I’m impressed with those numbers, and that’s with a campaign that didn’t exactly blow up. The potential to “go viral” is always there and part of what makes Breakr so exciting.

For example, this campaign cost less than $200 and resulted in 357 videos being created from the (admittedly very catchy!) song:

@coc_ht @rachelpanchalmusic #singer #singersongwriter #originalsound #originalsong #breakupsong #rachelpanchal #123weeks #MusicBreakr #MusicBreakrAd ♬ 1,2,3 Weeks – Rachel Panchal

It’s also fun and somewhat surreal to see popular TikTokers lip-syncing and dancing to your music!

Don’t forget that TikTok will pay my distributor for the use of my music. The details are fuzzy, but it’ll certainly be less than Spotify pays for the same number of streams. That could cover the entire campaign!

Some reports say that payouts are based not on views, but on the number of videos using the song. We’ll see! I’ll try to remember to update this post when I get paid by DistroKid, which could be as soon as April.

Have you tried influencer marketing? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments!