Behind The Campaign: Fcukers
Fcukers are a New York-based electronic duo made up of Shanny Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis. They formed in 2022 and their first EP, Baggy$$, was released by Ninja Tune in September 2024. Manager Simon Parsons met Jackson when they both worked at the Pianos venue in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and he went to their first show. Simon partnered with Danny Rogers to manage the band, building up to the release of Ö, their debut album, on 27 March.
Alongside the team from Ninja Tune (Camila Leon, senior manager of global streaming; Ashley Yun, head of artist strategy; Hannah Silk Champagne, senior product manager; and Ramona Venturanza, senior digital marketing manager), they discuss how the group was developed, why live was the biggest motor of growth for them, how adhering to “the three As” guided every release and project, where videos defined and amplified their aesthetic, how shows became parties with their own real-world and digital momentum, and why fans were integrated from the off.
Table of Contents
- Actionable takeaways
- Discovering and developing the group
- Making the live plot central to everything
- Having unique merchandise items for each show
- AAA and making releases an event
- Getting DSPs and social platforms on side
- Ensuring the band’s videos reflect their aesthetic
- Nurturing a loyal fanbase through social media and fan accounts
- Building into the album
- Physical products and in-stores/parties ahead of album release
- Slipstreaming the album
Actionable takeaways
Compiled by Music Ally’s team of marketing experts, these condensed action points are to help you get started and apply them to your own work:
- Prioritise live development: Don’t skip steps around live; use early club shows to build organic culture.
- Try the “AAA” framework: Ensure every single release has a clear Announcement, a physical Activation, and a strong visual Asset.
- Leverage international windows: Use unexpected opportunities, like fashion week bookings, to seed the act in global markets early.
- If you’re DIY… then DIY: a consistent and true-DIY visual identity sells authenticity and connects with underground fan sensibilities.
- Sell show-specific merch: Create ultra-limited merchandise runs exclusive to single dates or locations to reward physical attendance.
- Balance high/low bookings: Mix massive arena support slots with gritty dive bar headlines to preserve the “cool” factor
- Court cultural relevancy: Focus on word-of-mouth and artist-to-artist endorsements to drive industry buy-in and streaming growth.
Discovering and developing the group
Being work colleagues gave Simon the earliest introduction to what became Fcukers, stepping in to offer guidance from day one.
Simon: I went to their first show just as a friend. I knew it was very good. The turnout was amazing. It was like nothing I’d seen for a band that had literally announced four days before that they existed. Over 300 people turned up.
That was a free show. The second show they played I wasn’t at, but they sold 310 tickets and had 150 people on the guestlist. That was really impressive to me, and that’s when I put them on Danny’s radar.
Fcukers got booked to go to Paris Fashion Week and to DJ for [French fashion house] Céline. At that point, I said to them, “You’re getting two and a half grand to go over. Why don’t you let me book you a couple of shows in London and just see how it goes? I’ll put you with some cool promoters.” Lots of A&Rs got wind. That’s when we started working with them.
Danny: Simon had moved to New York and had worked with us for seven years. I had asked him if we could find an amazing artist as he was in the heart of New York.
In the first 30 seconds of talking to Jackson and Shanny, I thought, “These guys are so authentic. And they have got the right attitude in terms of just being good humans.” You have an instinct on this stuff after a while.
It’s a big deal taking on an act from scratch. It’s a huge investment of time as a manager over a period to really build it up to there. You really are invested in it.
Simon: It’s just been letting the project develop organically and – this sounds so clichéd because I read a lot of managers saying this – making sure we didn’t skip any steps in terms of the development on the live side. Just making sure there was a narrative built around the culture. They had to develop their music as well.
Hannah: Throughout the campaign, it has been taking every single release, every moment that we can, to connect the music and connect what they’re doing on socials, and what’s happening at each point, connecting it back to that live in-person feeling, has just helped to drive their momentum in every other area.
Making the live plot central to everything
They started as a live act and their shows became the centre of gravity for everything that followed, playing small shows and generating FOMO that worked to create enormous buzz around them.
Simon: Three years is still such a short amount of time. So many projects probably only hit the stride that Fcukers are hitting now after five or six years; and three years is usually spent in the 100-cap clubs. The interesting thing that we found with Fcukers was all the festival promoters came on board really early because they were so strong live. That meant that we were able to have the band in a lot of interesting spaces really, really quickly. It also meant that other parts just had to be slowly developed – which is the story and the music. They’re building into their first headline runs and there’s a fanbase connected there.
Danny: In the first three months, we did a world tour! Simon saw that Céline window and went, “How about we go to London?” We saw there was an opportunity to come down and do some shows in Sydney and Melbourne.
We’ve seen, on many occasions over the years, how markets down here [Australia and Asia] can light up projects in a different way. We stopped over in Tokyo, doing that work of hitting markets early. Off the back of those things, we started getting festival offers.
Ashley: What really started to catapult this momentum for them was live. They’ve come out of this burgeoning scene in New York that is almost a revival of the New York downtown scene [from the early 2000s].
In the beginning it was releasing a couple of singles and then announcing an EP, doing more shows around that, doing a white label, which sold out quickly, doing merchandise.
Hannah: The live shows are getting bigger. They’re playing with LCD Soundsystem. They’re opening for Justice. They’re opening for Dom Dolla.
Camila: Part of what made their live show resonate so much is that they were doing this very New York, cool, alternative live performance. For example, their EP release party was in an abandoned dumpling house in New York.
Ashley: They opened for Tame Impala and did a run of dates in the US, including three Madison Square Garden dates. They’re supporting Harry Styles [for four nights in São Paulo in July], but they’re also playing with LCD Soundsystem and they just did a Soulwax feature. They can straddle different genres and worlds.
They’re going to make sure that there’s a balance. You’ll have the big arena tours, but you’ll have the dive bars and the more low-key things. That’s the spirit of Fcukers, and we’ll continue to see that evolve.
Having unique merchandise items for each show
The shows are unique, so it follows that the merchandise for each show has to be unique, underlining their special nature.
Ashley: On 27 February there was a teaser event for the single ‘If You Wanna Party, Come Over To My House’. It was in Pearl St Co-op in Austin, Texas and was a student-run party. That was specifically to promote the single and they brought Dylan Brady along with them.
They made a run of 50 T-shirts that you could only get at the Austin party.
The band want to be physically there, so listening parties without them wouldn’t work. Instead, they threw a release party in New York in the week of album release. In New York, it was on home turf, with Kenny Beats and The Dare on the lineup.
AAA and making releases an event
Any new project had to become an event in its own right, with announcements, activations and assets being the guiding principles for every part of the campaign.
Simon: One thing Ninja Tune nailed into our heads early was the “A-A-A” idea.
Hannah: Something that we like to focus on around each single is having something to announce, having an activation, and having a strong asset. They are the three tent poles whenever you’re doing something.
In 2024, a lot of the focus was in New York, although they played shows in other places. When we released a song, we made sure there was a killer event around it that everybody in the city felt like they had to be at.
Just before we dropped the first single, we did one of these events. It’s probably the most stressful event we’ve been involved in. We did a show in a rooftop pool that was half built – so we had 600 kids in an empty pool. That set the tone for the year. It meant that every time Fcukers threw an event and put music out, there was this big fanfare around it. That really helped build the culture. Because of the assets that came from that and the social media, you could see kids in other territories getting excited about what was going on with them in New York.
Simon: It was a lot of word of mouth. There were clips going around and you could tell that the cool kids in other big cities knew what was going on. Then we would go and do that in London, in LA, or somewhere else, and people were excited to experience it as well.
Hannah: Especially around the EP and with all of the single release parties and events that we did with them, it ran contrary to normal release marketing and pop-ups. These weren’t pop-ups that were driving towards heavy data collection. It wasn’t, “Sign up to the mailing list and find out the address, blah, blah, blah.”
It was just the band posting a Story on Instagram saying, “Tonight at this place, come down – here’s a party.” It was purely just getting the fans out. It had nothing to do with collecting data or telling people to save this song. It was about getting kids down to a party to have fun.
Ashley: It’s been a lot of building. We’re very much in this development phase with them; but, at the same time, things are really taking off. For us, in trying to plan the campaign, it’s been a balance of not giving too much away, but also building that fanbase and giving the fans some music.
Getting DSPs and social platforms on side
While physical releases are important, the group had very clear ambitions in streaming, with DSPs courted from the early days and bold growth targets set ahead of the album release.
Camila: When we started working with the band, they had under 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. They had under 5,000 Instagram followers. They were developing. They now have close to 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 80k followers on Instagram.
We hit a million monthly listeners with the album announcement. That was a really big moment for us. The album announcement was also the biggest moment they’d ever had on streaming. That was exactly what we were going for.
The approach that we took early on was to really meet this band and present the cultural relevancy to all of our partners. There really was so much going on with them in the scene that was worthy of capturing people’s attention from the early days.
We had really early buy-in from DSPs, which doesn’t happen all the time for developing artists, especially an artist of their size at the time.
We brought our [DSP] partners to producer Kenny Beats’ personal studio, and we had playback sessions with the band and Kenny. We also sent exclusive merchandise packages to our partners from the very beginning.
“They have had so much hype around them that we really wanted to translate all of that hype into tangible results”
Amazon and Spotify both put them in this year’s Artist To Watch classes. Last year they were on Zane Lowe’s 25 Artists To Watch For 2025 on Apple Music. Deezer also made them their Artist To Watch in March, coming alongside the album release.
It speaks to the early buy-in that we had from all these partners. They have had so much hype around them that we really wanted to translate all of that hype into tangible results. And those Artists To Watch classes are a really tangible way to get long-term support from our biggest partners.
They did an Apple Radio takeover and went into Zane Lowe’s studio on album announcement day and announced the album live on Zane’s show. They also had multiple tracks in Apple’s Keynote presentations.
Ramona: Key social platforms TikTok and Meta came in with prime support throughout the album campaign. Through TikTok US, the band landed the #NewMusic banner and playlist support, which is TikTok’s flagship playlist on the app. For album announcement, Fcukers were featured alongside 10 other major artists for this exclusive spot on the #NewMusic playlist banner. In conjunction, Fcukers also landed the Sound Page banner on TikTok UK.
From Meta, leading up to release, the band landed a total of $30k’s worth in Reel amplification support around the album. This amplification drove massive follower growth and usages for the singles.
Ensuring the band’s videos reflect their aesthetic
Echoing back to the New York underground scene of the early 2000s, the video assets all had to communicate a very specific lo-fi aesthetic to sell their authenticity. Glossy videos were an anathema here.
Hannah: The first video that they did for ‘Bon Bon’ was Shanny and Jackson in front of a rollercoaster photo booth background, and it looked just like it was made for $0. The next video, for ‘Homie Don’t Shake’, is on a bus in New York.
Throughout this entire album campaign, the videos have all maintained this very DIY, lo-fi, and incredibly Fcukers aesthetic that fans have come to recognise. Fans will joke in the comments, “Oh, looks like the video budget went up another $20!” Or, “Oh, the label splurged for a pizza budget!”
They have a belief in their vision, and the vision is what is always going to bring the fans in. It’s what has brought all of these other big artists into their world and who wanted to bring them into theirs. That is what has made them such a special group. And what’s really driven a lot of the momentum throughout the campaign is just striking that balance of the high and the low.
“People pay attention to what’s happening in culture.”
Nurturing a loyal fanbase through social media and fan accounts
Staying true to the fanbase throughout was critical in the campaign – only doing things that would sit well with their fans’ perception of them and the scene they came from.
Hannah: There’s been a strong consciousness of maintaining who they are and maintaining that connection to the core Fcukers fanbase, which is still, at its heart, kids in New York who want to have that feeling of the gritty New York underground, where they come from.
Whether you are someone who lives in New York, or you’re someone who’s never been to New York and you live in suburban Ohio, or 10 miles outside of Sheffield, or in the middle of nowhere, wanting to have that feeling of connection to New York. That is something we’ve been very conscious of with the visuals and the videos.
We are working on building fan accounts for the band and growing their own socials.
Ashley: The strategy has been about amplifying the content that we have around the band already. On the band’s socials, they are very particular about the way that they portray themselves. They don’t like to post too much. They don’t like to be too sales-y. They like to keep their socials very “them”.
The fan accounts are a way for us to amplify what’s already going on and to help build this narrative around the band. The fan accounts are not trying to create a moment. They’re not creating a niche. The band already live in this space. They’re just helping to amplify it.
Building into the album
Each release and project was there to steer everything towards the album release, making a bigger step forward each time.
Simon: Last year was a huge focus on touring. The band did 100 performances. It was building that story around the band on a much larger scale. There were a lot of connections and positionings with other artists.
That did a lot of leg work to get to the album announcement in January. By that point, when we were announcing the album in January, we had a lot of exciting tent pole moments around them. So announcing the debut headline tour in the US, then the Harry Styles shows went up. On the next single, we announced the UK and European tour. Then some Rüfüs Du Sol shows went up. We’ve just had really exciting things around each announcement.
Physical products and in-stores/parties ahead of album release
With the build up to the album being heavily digital, physical product now becomes a priority.
Ashley: Physical is a key component of the campaign. With the first EP, we pressed a limited run of white labels that sold out immediately. We were trying to test the demand that they would have physically. We knew off the back of that that they do have a strong buying fanbase. They sell out their merchandise instantly. We knew going into this album campaign that physical would be a key component.
The week before the album they did three UK shows – a mixture of in-stores and outstores. They did an indie variant that was assigned an art card exclusively for the indies.
They signed a bunch of albums and we did a pre-order and pre-save competition. We were careful with this because it’s Fcukers and the way that they position themselves and what they offer to their fans is really important. This was to drive both pre-orders and pre-saves. We did a pre-order for pre-sale access for the UK tour. It’s definitely a big focus for us.
After the UK in-stores and outstores, they went straight to New York and did their release party there. They went on their headline US tour, which is the biggest run that they’ve ever done. Then straight into their UK/EU headline tour.
Slipstreaming the album
Everything had been building to the album release, but everything after is intended to pull the album into its slipstream.
Ashley: For us, it’s really about how we are developing and cultivating the fanbase. You’re going to see more merch drops and prizes giveaways. Live is going to be the biggest part after the album release.
Hannah: This album campaign feels like it’s built organically from the moment that we signed them and put out the first EP. With the momentum that we see on streaming and their growth on socials, everything is just a constant push forward. What we are constantly doing as a label is just harnessing all of that and finding ways to keep connecting the dots and growing that.
Danny: You have a strategy: take the opportunities from all the live moments and lean in on those. But you’ve got to be proactive and reactive.
There are some really exciting things in the pipeline that will talk back to the record and keep the band’s profile moving through the next six months. We’ve got a very busy live schedule that takes us through to the end of October.
There has been a lot of support and fandom from artists. That bit, to me, is the most important thing. The biggest sign is when artists are responding to what you’re doing in a really positive way. It’s been interesting with Fcukers. Everyone’s doing all these bits and pieces to build it, but it’s also the actual word of mouth in the background. People pay attention to what’s happening in culture.
