Behind the Single: Tinashe – Nasty

Track: Tinashe “Nasty” 
Released: 12 April 2024
Label: Nice Life

Tinashe’s song “Nasty” has been everywhere in the last few months and is the artist’s highest charting single as a lead artist since her track “2 On” which was released in 2014. Her management team at Roc Nation (Simonne Solitro, Manager / Krishan Narsinghani, Digital Marketing / Justin Feldshon, Artist Marketing Manager) and her label team at Nice Life (Becky Lopez, Director of Marketing / Katie Kaiser, Digital Marketing Manager)  tell us about how both teams worked together with the artist to turn this release into a summer hit, and grow Tinashe’s brand.

Phase 1 – Launching part two of a three-part project

Always-on Marketing

Tinashe has been releasing music for over a decade and was in the major label system until 2021. She partnered with her new label Nice Life about a year ago. Her manager Simonne Solitro explains to us how the team set the strategy for Tinashe’s new music: “We had come to the table with a handful of music. We had decided as a team that what is actually more impactful with the way that people are digesting music these days is to break it up into three different projects and to find ways to constantly fuel content to the fans. Fans love a narrative and it’s also way more exciting for an artist to constantly find new ways to stay in the media, stay active on socials, stay connected to the fans, and continuously feed all of the music platforms.”

The first part of this series of projects was the album ‘BB/ANG3L’ which was released in September 2023. For the second part, all of the music had already been created, but Tinashe and her producer Ricky Reed went back into the studio to create an additional song for project two, which was ‘Nasty’.

Simonne Solitro tells us: “In the timeframe, we had also gotten the offer to perform at Coachella.  This was a dream for Tinashe! […] the timing was really great. So, as a unit, we were all like “we need to use Coachella as a really huge kickoff point for this epic project ‘Quantum Baby'”. It made the most sense to use ‘Nasty’ which is just such an incredible track and definitely a summer bop to release on the first Friday of Coachella literally during her performance to maximise our audience and create so much excitement.”

However, in between the first part of the project and ‘Nasty’ being released during Coachella, there was a lot of back and forth and shifting of plans.

Simonne Solitro remembers: “[…]. We had actually planned to release this project a lot sooner but we had an issue with a tour that pushed us into the new year. And then with that shift is where the addition of this new song came into play, and they were back and forth between a couple of tracks. This was pre even knowing there was going to be a Coachella. We knew we are going into the next half of the year, we knew we want to collect pre-saves and stay active off the ‘BB/ANG3L’ train and keep it alive. For example, Tinashe created this dance experience video for the songs of ‘BB/ANG3L’, which she conceptualised, choreographed and executed in ten days. Using all those tools, before we even knew it was ‘Nasty’, before we even started marketing, we were still marketing.”

Krishan Narsinghan adds: “We use this company for pre-saves called Symphony. We’ve started collecting pre-saves before we even had picked out a song. We did this pop-up for her ‘BB/ANG3L EXPERIENCE’ where fans could come watch it with her first. […] On Symphony you can have people pre-save and it tracks their IP addresses so we picked out winners that were in L.A. and we had them come to that back in January. That’s when we started racking up pre-saves, because you don’t have to have an ISRC or UPC ingested yet, and we started collecting their email addresses at the same time. […] And then we had her start teasing the song on Instagram Live at a show that she was at on Valentine’s Day, and we saw fans starting to rip that and use it on socials saying ‘What’s this next song? She’s going to start putting out music again!’”

According to the team, instead of telling her fans that this was going to be her next single, Tinashe kept it quite lofi and just played the song in the background, so fans were starting to guess what this was going to be. About two weeks before the song came out, the team started to focus on TikTok with posting and teasing.

Seeding via the DJ community

Another key part of the team’s strategy leading up to the release was to seed out the track to tastemakers early on. Justin Feldshon credits how having an open line with the artist where the team was able to send her ideas, and the artist being open to doing it, was crucial here.

“It’s been super helpful how open Tinashe is with her interests and her personality, which leads me into how we tapped in with DJs. Before working with Tinashe, I researched her and learned how she self-produces a lot of her music, DJs, and engineers. She’s involved in all facets of music. While songs blow up today through TikTok and it influences what people listen to – it’s important to look deeper into who creates the culture, who’s playing it in the club over and over, who’s in charge of setting the vibe, to where everyone in the room is wanting to Shazam… so little by little it compounds into a hit. 

“I had this idea of getting the stems and loading it onto custom flash drives and having a special curated package for DJs in L.A. and New York where they are recognised and feel seen like ‘oh shit Tinashe has her eyes on us, she’s part of this culture, let me make a remix to this, let me spin it in the club.’ And once again I had the help of Nice Life helping me get the stems. I reached out to this brand called Joggy and they helped me fund the project, they created the boxes. And then I reached out to my network […] and they have been going crazy making the remixes and posting.”

Thanks to this strategy, the song started trickling down into more and more DJ communities. One of the first bigger DJs to remix ‘Nasty’ was Alex Chapman (the sound has more than 24k creates on TikTok and is now officially available on his SoundCloud too). He was throwing a party in New York which Tinashe helped host and the team invited people out for it too.

Becky explains: “Everyone working together brought amazing ideas to the table including The  Lot Radio bringing her on with Machinedrum [on 9th June] which was a huge moment. This was an opportunity for Tinashe to intimately connect with her fans and be out. Other events that connected Tinashe to her fans were Everyday People LA and Black on the Block. All a part of promoting ‘Nasty’ and connecting Tinashe with the community. We also had activations on the fitness end with Y7 Yoga classes in NY & LA, Peloton class in NY and Soulcycle NY.” 

Launching the track at Coachella

While the team had already been busy teasing the track, from the marketing side they were thinking about when to best release it and what the perfect moment would be.

Becky says: “Tinashe was scheduled to perform at Coachella before we started planning a roll out for ‘Nasty’ – so it seemed like a perfect moment to release the song of the summer on the first day of her very first solo Coachella performance. We had a very strong release day by landing some playlist covers like R&B Weekly on Spotify, Fresh R&B on Amazon, New Arrivals Hip-Hop & R&B on Tidal and more!

“Some might have seen it as a risk performing something unfamiliar less than 24 hours after release but it was a success. Seeing the crowd so hyped when she performed ‘Nasty’ was all worth it!  After that it was so fun creating different activations around ‘Nasty’. “

Simonne Solitro adds: “We were also offered to be part of Coachella’s global livestream, which put a lot more pressure on the digital marketing team but in exciting ways. Obviously we had created this amazing music video […], so we were thinking about what we can do to pitch to partners or bring influencer campaigns or activate around or create content with. Choreography for her is always extremely important but she was thinking about it in a way of: ‘Ok it’s summer. What’s on stage? What can be cut down? What’s easily digestible for somebody else who wants to mimic it? Who is this choreographer? What are they like on their socials? What kind of dancer community do they bring in?’ It goes so much wider than just ‘I just want to dance’. She thinks about it in a whole collective way.”

The music video came out that same day. Simonne Solitro explains: “We were asked to be part of their global livestream […]. So knowing that and knowing we were going online afterwards, it was a huge moment of the first initial phase of this brand new song. Not only choosing that date of release, using that platform and the entire collective of an audience, to perform a song, to debut the choreography and literally immediately after that, all pressure was on the digital team.”

Katie Kaiser adds: “That same weekend, we had billboards in L.A. and in New York. Anywhere you were, you couldn’t avoid hearing about Tinashe and ‘Nasty’. Once the song was out Tinashe also started posting on TikTok with her own choreo, and we saw UGC starting to grow that included her original choreo.” 

Phase 2 – Twitter and TikTok Virality

Leveraging a viral moment

The team was planning to focus on working with Tinashe’s choreo, but everything flipped when a meme to the song went viral. Katie Kaiser says: “The first time we all heard this song we knew it was special. […] But with that in mind, the last thing that I expected was that we would strike gold with this viral moment. We had this viral moment– it was a video of this kid @nate_di_winer dancing to a song that wasn’t even ‘Nasty’, but a Tinashe fan saw this video, thought it was hilarious, and had heard ‘Nasty’ from our strategy of leaking a snippet on TikTok. They had ripped that audio and put it on this video that ultimately went viral on Twitter.”

The video was posted on 27 April, about two weeks after the song came out. The team noticed it a few days later. Katie Kaiser explains: “The tweet went viral, and we were all like ‘What’s going on?’. At this point, it was just a viral tweet, so we got our heads together to think critically about how we amplify this beyond Twitter, then, eventually how we expand this beyond TikTok and into the larger story of Tinashe. Beyond the viral dance, we were aiming to show people who Tinashe is: the amazing dancer she is, the amazing performer she is, the amazing singer she is by utilising the hook to continue to push the song outside of that viral moment that ignited the fire.”

Krishan Narsinghani remembers: “Right when we saw Nate’s video move over from Twitter to TikTok and everyone was using it as a green screen, me and Justin were like, ‘We have to have her use it. We have to have her use that on TikTok’. So we were sending her ideas and she just went for it herself and posted three of them and that was the viral jump, that’s when we saw the creates spike every single day after she jumped on it herself. After that she posted really almost every single day, continuing to push the song, engaging with fans. She’s really good with doing all of her socials on her own, she goes into her comments, resharing videos so all of her followers see every big viral video.”

Katie Kaiser says: “In those early stages, we were hitting all platforms at every angle. We wanted to go as hard as possible. The success of the song from that point onward has been largely due to how much the artist has been leaning in. […]. We also leaned in on the creator campaign side working from micro influencers to macro influencers, utilising CapCut, TikTok, and Reels, and making sure Tinashe’s short-form content was living on all platforms.

“The biggest aspect was digging in on the creator side and connecting as a digital team every single day and thinking: ‘Ok. What should we do today? And how can we redirect today?’ Because when you have a viral moment, you want to do everything in your power to expand beyond that. So, we were constantly analyzing the marketplace, strategizing our next move, and making sure our timing and how we were spending our resources were very calculated, smart, and strategic.”

Simonne Solitro explains: ‘When you have a moment like this, we look at each different person on the team and rely on their expertise in their field. […] Because when you have a moment, it’s not about throwing all your eggs into this one second, it’s about how do we look at this as a long-term campaign. And then the marketing side, visually, we did wheat pastings – really kind of thinking about all the different places you might be seeing the lyrics for the first time, you might be hearing the song snippet for the first time and trying to physically attach it to her. We always want to bring it back to the artist […]. Everyone on the team is going out and doing their individual things and then we’re grouping together and making sure how do we spend and make sure everything is effective.”

Expanding on a viral moment

About two weeks after the meme went viral on TikTok and the team had been running some creator marketing, they started to see a new trend pop up. Katie Kaiser explains: “Krish and I were starting to see more focus on “match my freak” on the internet as text-on-screen on a video or in Tweets. Eventually it became a Twitter trend on its own and eventually a TikTok trend.”

The team were thinking about integrating Nate from the original viral meme into Tinashe’s performance at Jimmy Kimmel Live, but by the time that came around, the moment had already continued to evolve, with the “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” line of the lyrics taking centre stage. Three or four different renditions of this meme were becoming popular.

Simonne explains: “We really started to lean into that. We actually licensed the ‘Match My Freak’ for all of her merch, which was also Tinashe’s idea. It was really cool to see not only the song have it’s own life, and the music have its own life, but the lyrics resonate in their own way. […] I was seeing this Netflix show that said “this show is about two people matching each other’s freak” and then Apple Music created a whole sub-genre where two people match each other’s freak.

We were just at Cannes Lions and this is where the conversation started about the fact we keep seeing it in places, we need to license this so it’s ours because it’s becoming more like a staple in the culture.

“We were trying to compare it to Hot Girl Summer, you know its Megan Thee Stallion, but people use it way beyond that.”

Culturally relevant IRL events

The team tells us how Tinashe came to them and wanted to do more stuff that’s being out and about with the community and visibly having fun. Simonne Solitro explains: “Nice Life was amazing and came with some incredible ideas, such as her going to Black on the Block which is a massive festival here and helping set that up for her. And that was really cool because it wasn’t necessarily her main demo, it was a family friendly event so it was getting in front of new potential fans.

“Another event was Everyday People. There’s so much natural press coverage there because it’s just a culturally relevant thing that was really cool in the way the team showed up and put her in marketing places but IRL marketing places. And Becky was definitely a huge part of that too.”

Having Tinashe be present at these IRL events plus the work the digital team has been doing online played a huge part in the continued success of the song, according to Katie Kaiser: “We’ve seen a lot of parallels between the audiences for this track on socials and on streaming. The marriage of amplifying her brand beyond the song in online spaces and in mass spaces simultaneously really had an impact. Online, on streaming platforms and in real life.”

Simonne Solitro says: “We know that, and we see that from her ticket sales, whereas a lot of artists have a really hard time dominating mass cities, she crushes there. Her homes are Atlanta, New York, L.A., Chicago. We have such strong fanbases there so we expected that but then other parts of the world, shot up as two and three and four as the strongest streaming markets. Australia has continuously been top two, especially Sydney, with people just being obsessed with this song. […] New York was always really strong but again Brooklyn exploded, and her being in Brooklyn showing up doing the thing. The UK has shown up and been a huge supporter and we’re even seeing DJs and producers we’ve worked with in the past coming forward and wanting to do their own renditions of the song.

“Every day, we’re seeing things like Top Hits Taiwan, number one viral song in Cairo we’ve seen the other day, Hot Hits Philippines. It’s been great to see it translate not just in the US or Europe. We’re not spending our ad dollars in Cairo but it’s naturally a global hit.”

Most recent activations

A strength of this campaign is how everything ties back together. On the 5th of July, about three months after the release of the track, Tinashe released a remix EP of the track called ‘Match My Freak EP‘. It capitalises on the now popular key phrase of the track and ties it back to the early stages of the campaign, and the way she worked with DJs. Tinashe has also teamed up with SoundCloud and Fadr to allow fans to remix ‘Nasty’.

“Visit the SoundCloud page of Tinashe and you’ll see an extra ‘Remix’ button on her track ‘Nasty’. Clicking on it takes fans and musicians to a service called Fadr, where they can use its tools to remix the song, or download the stems to use their own kit. The remixes can then be uploaded to SoundCloud, with the promise that Tinashe will be “listening, liking, and engaging with the uploads” as they come in. It’s the first high-profile SoundCloud / Fadr integration since the two companies announced their partnership in January.

Krishan Narsinghani highlights the importance of adaptability during a campaign: “We talked about this activation with them before ‘Nasty’ came out. It’s nice to brainstorm as much as you can but then while you’re in it you have to be able to change.”