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Iñigo Quintero is a 22-year-old singer from A Coruña and author of the number 1 global song. He is the 249th most listened to singer in the world. But no one knew him a few weeks ago.
I don’t know if the song is better or worse. I’ve heard everything, but I’m sure there will be something. Also that there is a change of cycle from reggaeton to pop. But the topic that interests me in a newsletter technology is above all virality. Why and how did it happen? The cynical temptation with such unexpected success is to believe that there is a black hand behind it that pulls the strings of our tastes.
It is more likely, as often happens in extraordinary cases, that not just ONE THING will happen, but several at the same time. These are the basic facts.
Quintero published If you are not on Spotify in September 2022. It was his first song on the platform. In February, she posted another. Neither of them went viral at the level we are at today. And a year has passed. It is easy, therefore, to argue that something happened queer between then and now, when it has exploded. An important detail is that Quintero signed with a digital label that is dedicated to promoting emerging music, Acqustic.
Acqustic did its job: better place the song on all platforms and try to promote it with digital strategies. But there is another key detail. When Acqustic signed Quintero in March he had about 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. It’s enough for an unknown musician with two songs and no networks. Who was listening to him? The most likely answer is close to Christianity.
On February 9, the YouTube channel 10 minutes with Jesus published a video titled If you are not here. This is how the video begins: “My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here that you see me that you hear me, I adore you with deep reverence, I ask you for forgiveness of my sins and grace to do this time of prayer.” Right after, the announcer asks the “guardian angel” to intercede and adds: “Listen to the beginning of this song.” and it sounds If you are notby Iñigo Quintero.
In that video-prayer they explain that “I want to see you, see you, see you,” the last verse of Quintero’s song, coincides with a psalm by Teresa of Calcutta. 22,000 people saw that video. 10 Minutes with Jesus has its own app and is shared on WhatsApp and other platforms. Its actual audience was much larger. The majority of priests who record virtual prayers of 10 minutes with Jesus They are from Opus Dei, says one of its promoters here. And he adds that the idea behind 10 minutes with Jesus Coincidentally, she comes from a “mother of a large family” from a Fomento school in A Coruña, the same religious institution and city where Iñigo Quintero studied.
Three weeks later, on March 1, the Radio María program and podcast Today’s Man and God He talked about a song that “we discovered by a young man named Iñigo Quintero.” One of the presenters added: “This topic is becoming more and more known.” [en marzo]. The lyrics have a lot of meaning and have been used in some meditations.” They also talked about Teresa of Calcutta, but they left it open that the real meaning was human love: “Each person what inspires him,” said the priest who presents the program.
But religious inspiration is the most probable meaning. Iñigo Quintero’s career had been linked to religious and Opus Dei songs. In December 2022 he collaborated in the carol Leave me 10 minutes with voice and piano. That song was by Luispo, a musician priest with 44,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and a quote from Josemaría de Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, in his biography. Quintero had already collaborated in December 2022 with Luispo on a tribute to another priest from the Orvalle school titled Soul, calm, where he was a piano player and music editor. The review of that song linked to Quintero’s Spotify page, which in December was a remote corner of the platform and today is the author of the most listened to song in the world.
That Christian vitality was able to give the starting push to If you are not. Quintero did not start from scratch. There were people listening to him. The theory behind virality says that it is possible to start from very low, but for it to explode you need a small network with many connections. Religion could play that role, at least in part.
Then came the digital stamp. And it continued to grow. In June, the singer Javi Chapela, who released a collaboration with Quintero, said this: “[Quintero] “He’s a guy from A Coruña who uploaded a song and is rocking it.” If in June he was “killing it,” what happens now?
A boom on TikTok, but not only for couples
Between that better distribution and today, there was a TikTok boom in between. It’s easy to find religious connections. In August there began to be viral videos, some of which were from a concert he gave at the Galileo Galilei hall in Madrid. But others were from Christian influencers. This week this video of a young influencer who was going to see Quintero live at the Cadena 100 collective concert went viral. He was logically excited, but on Twitter/X they laughed at him for his fervor. But he, Marcos Ricbour, writes in that Tiktok: “The people who follow us know how IMPORTANT this is for us, we know all his songs and we have followed him since before he was so well known.”
Since August he has been releasing songs by Quintero: “He is already one of my favorite singers,” he said, in a video with almost 1 million views. views. To understand the importance of a community in the origin of virality, Quintero’s sister, a university classmate (Villanueva, in Mirasierra, also from Opus Dei) or a school classmate appear in the comments of that video. In other videos, Ricbour dedicates Quintero’s song to “Jesus” and narrates his trip to WYD in Lisbon in August to see the Pope, with the DJ priest.
The boom later on TikTok was linked to a trend of couple photos. Could be. Such success is not based on a single pillar. Many things happen at the same time. It is also evident that there was a human role on the platforms, but the traction of the song is also real. The difference with other times is that before you had to wait for the radio to broadcast the song again or buy it: it was a single signal, now each new listen counts. The hits are more democratic because listeners continually vote with their listeners.
Spotify takes this into account. Playlists are essential for discovery: “The curation strategy for a playlist has two ways that communicate,” says a company spokeswoman. “Listening is an action. The person listening sends very powerful signals through their actions, from pressing play to skipping a specific song within a specific list,” she adds.
Then comes the dip: What songs do they put on our playlists? Well, the ones that other people like us like: “The playlists They are made thanks to precise human selection by Spotify’s team of music experts, with extensive data analysis from millions of users in real time. “Spotify doesn’t choose which artists to promote,” Spotify says. And they add: “We immerse ourselves in hundreds of songs to choose which ones are suitable to enter a playlist.” The word “dive” there probably indicates more “which one is being listened to more” than “which one is liked more.”
Virality is not just magic
Quintero’s case is one more example that virality is not magic, but it is not possible to simply manufacture it either. Signs of traction for a topic are crucial. And that happens or it doesn’t happen. When it happens, the people behind the artists start pulling all the strings: a basic one is to call the people at Spotify to take a good look at how that song gets likes and is saved in personal libraries. The goal, as always, is to take it as high as possible. Nobody dreamed, however, that “If You Are Not” would reach so, so high.
These cables that began to move and that are supposedly dark are something normal in the sector: they are called pitch or proposal. A pitch It is a mix of data and reasons why a platform should prioritize that song and put it in more playlists, in recommended ones, so that the algorithm shows it to more users. Is this done for some obscure reason? Maybe someone has it, but the clearest reason is the simplest: more and more people are listening to it.
A platform wants interactions. If that song causes historic peaks in listening on Spotify or video creation on TikTok, why shouldn’t it be promoted humanly and algorithmically? The human role is evident, for example, when you see that it is growing in Spain, you have to start talking to the platform teams in Latin America and the rest of Europe and Asia. Or when you see that it is a hit on Spotify, you have to run and talk to the people at Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer or Tidal. With the data behind them, everyone runs to show the song more because it generates a larger audience.
Then there are specific problems. The song does not have a video clip, so it did not reach YouTube strongly at first. Apple Music is 100 overall because it has a smaller implementation in Spain and arrived late. There are probably more explanations than meets the eye.
What platform is going to limit the growth of a song that there are people listening to it on loop 100 times? If the origin is more or less Christian, who cares now.
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