FEATURE

Viral Success and a Music-First Campaign: Mitski’s “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”

It’s been two months since Mitski unveiled her seventh studio album “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”. From impressive chart performance to social media virality, those two months have seen plenty of wins for the Japanese American singer-songwriter.

This week, we’re sharing insights from Max Thomas, Label Manager APAC for Secretly Group, home of Mitski’s label Dead Oceans and covering the album’s organic momentum and the label efforts that have complemented it in the AUNZ market.

Success So Far

“The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” charted at #13 on the ARIA Album charts and #5 on the NZ Official Top 40 Album Charts. The focus track from the release - “My Love Mine All Mine” - has been in the ARIA Singles charts for seven weeks - currently at sitting at #22 with a #19 peak - and it’s been in the NZ Top 40 Singles charts for nine weeks, peaking at #5.

In two months, Mitski has gained over 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify, with 33 million monthly listeners currently. She’s the 105th biggest artist globally on the platform, and “My Love All Mine” is the #2 track on the Spotify Global daily stream charts.

The Campaign

“It was really important to Mitski that the campaign for “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” was music-first,” Thomas explains. “The quality of the album really speaks for itself, so we wanted to create as many opportunities as possible for fans to engage with the music.”

The album release was announced on July 23 via Mitski’s newsletter. This left a relatively short, seven-week timeframe before the album dropped worldwide. During those seven weeks, Mitski and Secretly unveiled their music-first campaign, that effectively engaged fans both existing and new.

Global Listening Parties

Mitski and Secretly opted for listening parties as key pre-release touchpoints for “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” in Australia and New Zealand. Thomas explains that two weeks before launch, Mitski curated multiple cinema events for venues around the globe.

In Australia, that included Melbourne’s Lido and Sydney’s The Ritz. Fans listened to the album in full in the dark, and it was followed by a film personally selected by Mitski for each event.

“To keep this fan-focused, we set aside spaces at each venue for fans to meet each other before and after the event; and distributed exclusive name tags and posters too to make the event extra special. Feedback was great, and resulted in plenty of organic chatter happening in Australia and worldwide about the album leading into release week.” Thomas says.

Continuing with their music-first theme, the team also worked with indie record stores to host over 200 listening events for fans worldwide. In Australia, this included Red Eye Records in Sydney, Rocksteady Records in Melbourne and Jet Black Cat Music in Brisbane.

“We also distributed special keepsakes - name tags, wristbands and exclusive posters - at these sessions all over the world, to connect fans both locally and worldwide,” Thomas says.

For the Australian market, these listening events proved particularly effective for connecting Mitski’s fans.

“These became really lovely community events which brought in fans from far and wide to indie retail, bringing a lot of communities together who in Australia previously only existed online. Since Mitski hasn’t made it down to Australia in a while, it was crucial for us to have this offering for local fans who haven’t been able to see her live in years; or for fans who came on board more recently to create their own experiences and relationship to Mitski’s music.”

Trending With “My Love All Mine”

We couldn’t cover Mitski’s release without diving into the global digital presence of “My Love All Mine”, the third single from the album, released on October 3. Thomas talked us through the track’s popularity on TikTok. He notes that, interestingly, “My Love All Mine” didn’t rise to popularity alongside a particular trend, joke or video format. Mitski’s single trended organically, with TikTok users using it to soundtrack a variety of content.

The initial organic momentum has since been supplemented in Australia and New Zealand with direct creator outreach to TikTok creators and beyond. “...but some of our favourite early videos were made by local fans. A highlight was a post by Hobart indie store Suffragette Records with the legendary Derrick Gee. We saw some of the earliest viral moments emerge from ANZ, which was a real testament to how anticipated the record was down under,” Thomas says.

suffragetterecords

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“Almost immediately after the album came out, we noticed significant organic momentum on TikTok for the focus track “My Love Mine All Mine”. This was reflected pretty quickly in spiking streams, which are still rising over two months post-release - “My Love Mine All Mine” actually hit a new global streaming peak this week,” He says.

“Mitski has always streamed well, but this was another level - before the release of “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”, Mitski had around 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Today, it's 33 million. We saw these fans coming not just from her traditionally strong markets like the US and UK, but also growth in territories where she’s previously seen less engagement like the Philippines and Indonesia. In fact, the track saw some of the first signs of organic TikTok virality in Australia and New Zealand.”

“What’s great is the listener uplift isn’t coming just from “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” streams - new fans in these previously smaller territories for Mitski are discovering her catalogue, with some older tracks seeing new record stream days in the last few months.”

For Secretly, the viral status of “My Love All Mine” provided additional collateral, to bolster other elements of the release, Thomas revealed:

“Of course, a viral moment wouldn’t be as impactful without conversion to actual streams - so it was really important to us to keep key partners updated with all activity happening across socials. From this activity, we saw post-release additions to Hot Hits Australia & Breaking Hits from the Spotify ANZ team, as well as a triple j playlist addition, which kept momentum going in spaces outside of social media.”

The Takeaway

The AUNZ campaign for Mitski’s “My Love All Mine” is a fantastic showcase of how labels can create a meaningful experience around marketing activations and organic virality.

“These results boil down to the music,” Thomas says. “The massive success of the album has resulted from fans’ immediate connection to the project and “My Love Mine All Mine”, and we helped amplify the already huge overwhelmingly positive response.”

As Thomas noted, with the album recently released, this campaign is only just getting started, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on what other marketing activities are in store for Mitski.

^{Written by Olivia Gliku}

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