The Birth of ZABO
From starting the year producing in his bedroom waiting for his opportunity to play his first show to ending the year headlining one of the largest festivals in the country, this is the birth of ZABO!
It was early February when scouring through the DSP’s I discovered ZABO, a mid-tempo producer based out of Toronto, Canada with a song called “Drown” that had gone viral in China with over 10,000 comments (For reference, anything above 999+ comments is generally viewed as a well-received song).
Working at SHFT. at the time, a promoter based out of Shanghai, China I figured it was worth the risk to see if this viral growth would amount to any ticket sales as generally the correlation between the two is questionable and something I’ve explored in depth.
A few conversations later, the journey began!
Soon after, we immediately kicked things off by announcing a 3 city tour hitting 3 key venues known for being staples in the underground music scene, as well as creating social media pages, playlists, and other mediums of Zabo’s profile to localize himself in the market and start engaging with his key audience since nearly all western profiles are blocked in China (On hindsight, i now realize social media in China doesn’t deliver the value I expected, find out more here.)
To our surprise, the tour performed really well selling on average 200 tickets per shows which for China standards are above what most underground or even commercial artists can do. The even bigger surprise though was the number of fans waiting to take pictures after his set. Generally, most artists have maybe 10-20 fans who want pictures, Zabo has over 75+ yet he has never done any marketing or engaging his profile with the Chinese market. So, organically he has been able to do this without any one’s support demonstrating a clear opportunity that just needed the right team to capitalize and deliver on the road ahead.
Any idea who that team is?
Shortly after, I proposed to Zabo’s team that he join my extended management program. Under this, I along with my team would develop his profile as If I was his manager within the Chinese market and report back to him with valuable opportunities whether that be sync, touring, collabs, pr & radio opportunities, etc.
Through this extended management model, we base our income solely on what we deliver within China which I believe works best for nearly all parties. Not only do we put our money where our mouth is and provide no financial risk to our client, but it aligns all parties on the same team bypassing the client-business relationship as our means of generating revenue are based on creating value for the client and more than anything developing long term opportunities and growth so 2-5 years down the line they’ve grown from a small underground act to someone who is doing the festival circuit within China.
Needless to say, Zabo’s team agreed and off we were.
Often with International artists, we find gaps in songs that were distributed to the DSP’s here and one’s that weren’t. With Zabo, he was missing around 10 songs from his worldwide catalog on his Chinese account, so we picked one called “Whisper” and did a local release. There are tremendous benefits to releasing with a local Chinese label or team, you can find more here & here).
While the song didn’t do as well as previous songs, it did get key homepage placements on NetEase allowing Zabo’s profile to reach millions of listeners through out China!
In addition to releases, we would go on to get Zabo placement on the largest original radio on NetEase and one of the 30 most influential accounts as ranked by the platform called PurpleBattery Radio. With over 100,000 followers, ZABO would be the 1st international artists to do a mix for the radio and to date is the most successful with over 94,000 streams of the mix.
Only a couple months after his last tour, and one month since his release “Somber”, we got an offer for ZABO at PEC, a massive festival in Chengdu that has been around for numerous years. Not only was this a massive proof of concept that people are seeing his name more and more to the point that they are reaching out, but we also managed to negotiate his fee drastically higher resulting in a per-show fee increase of 500%.
At this festival, we grabbed tons of footage for his DouYin and other channels so we have local content to push and further resonate with the market.
One of the major elements that helped build ZABO’s profile before we came aboard was the virality of a few of his songs on Douyin, so we decided for his next release to place a massive emphasis on picking a track that we believe would become viral on Douyin.
What did we pick? A song called “Somber”
While “Somber” got key coverage from NetEase with them posting official tweets from their NetEase and Weibo account in addition to push notifications to all users on the app, the larger element of the release was our focus on Douyin where we utilized our Douyin influencers we manage to push the track, as well as other media content management companies in addition to our relationship with the Douyin team to achieve homepage coverage.
What was the result?
Over the course of three weeks, “Somber” went from charting on the Douyin Music Charts at #29 with 29.5K uses to a week later moving to #14 with 67K uses before ending up as the #1 song in all of China on Douyin with 135.9K uses.
To date the song would go on to achieve over 196.6K videos created using “Somber” and over 370M streams of the song on Douyin paving the way for exponential growth moving forward.
Following the “Somber” release and Douyin campaign, things would change drastically for Zabo as he took China by storm playing a massive 5 city tour across two weeks along with being presented with two other festivals opportunities in November including one in Thailand at Lana Sky.
Since joining Red Republic 9 months ago, Zabo would grow from 14,000 followers to over 38,000, his streams on NetEase would rise from 50M to 91M on NetEase, and he would reach atleast 400M people within China.
Summary
From bedroom producer to festival headliner
Zabo would close out 2019 with a bang headlining ISY Festival in Sanya alongside the likes of DJ Snake, Armin Van Buuren, Like Mike & Dimitri Vegas, and others creating a massive testament to the opportunities Red can create for artists and the power of a localized team integrating international artists within the market.
We look forward to further developing Zabo in 2020 and are extremely grateful for Zabo believing in us and giving Red a chance to showcase what we can deliver.
