What Is ‘Clipping,’ the Viral Marketing Strategy That’s Taking Over the Music Biz?

In December, rapper Bbno$ posted a message on social media announcing that he was quitting music. “As you guys know, I am for the people,” he wrote. “And the people have asked me to stop making music. Due to the millions of people begging me to stop, I have made the incredibly difficult decision to stop making music for the foreseeable future.”

So when he dropped his single “Diamonds Are Forever” a month later, it wasn’t a surprise that fans were excited for his return. On TikTok, dozens of accounts posted videos that used the track, along with captions that declared “Bbno$ is back!” and, a bit less enthusiastically, “Finally a good song.”

A casual user scrolling past one of these videos might consider it an organic post from an overzealous fan. But one look at the track’s TikTok sound detail page shows a pattern of posts following the same format.

That’s because they were all part of a campaign to seed content across various profiles in a coordinated effort referred to as “clipping,” a marketing strategy used by everyone from Drake and 2hollis to Black Sabbath and John Summit, where paid editors are hired to post any snackable piece of content related to that artist — a meme set to their song, a clipped part of a live performance — to multiple accounts in an effort to manufacture virality. All of this is done without the artist’s direct involvement, easing the burden on the musician to shoulder promotional responsibilities. Over the past year, clipping has become such an integral part of music promotion that many major and independent record companies now offer it in their suite of marketing tools, often hiring outside agencies to run clipping campaigns for both frontline and legacy acts. (Representatives at several major labels contacted by Variety either didn’t respond or declined to comment for this article.)

“I don’t know anybody not utilizing [clipping] who’s actually competitive in the marketplace,” says Sam Alavi, Bbno$’s manager and CEO of Right Click Culture, a management and creative agency. Alavi started running clipping campaigns for Bbno$ after tracking its rise in the livestreaming space, and staged their first successful campaign with the song “It Boy,” which has amassed 142 million Spotify streams since its release in May 2024. “Within six months after ‘It Boy,’ I saw a large adoption. Fast-forwarding to [now], it’s been mass adopted,” he says.

Clipping first emerged as a marketing tactic in livestreaming, where independent contractors, or “clippers,” were hired to pull out the most engaging bits of content from hours-long streams to build a streamer’s presence across social media. (Several people interviewed for this article cited Druski, Andrew Tate, Adin Ross and Kai Cenat as clipping’s first major beneficiaries.) The music industry found a way in by booking artists on popular livestreams, which would then be clipped and seeded across platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram and X. But it quickly evolved into a useful tool for any type of music content — to boost a song’s popularity by attaching it to videos from a popular show like “Stranger Things,” for example, or to plant the idea to attend an artist’s concert after swiping past live performance clips.

The practice has yielded its own viable marketplace where, based on a campaign’s performance, everyone benefits. Clipping campaigns are usually a small percentage of a larger marketing budget — they can run on average anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 — and instruct clippers to follow specific guidelines based on a campaign brief. (In the case of Bbno$’s “Diamonds Are Forever”: “memes are not allowed,” “must tag Bbno$ in the caption,” “on-screen text [that] covers at least a third of the screen.”) Clippers are then incentivized to post as much as possible across whichever accounts they control for a return of, say, $1 to $5 for every 1,000 impressions until they hit a predetermined cap. The more a clip goes viral, the more money the clipper makes. Artists benefit from the exposure and hope for “conversion,” or people clicking over to a streaming service to listen to that artist or song. Agencies often act as an intermediary between clippers and artist teams or labels, skimming off some of the budget upfront.

Thiago Machado, founder and CEO of the digital marketing company Ranked Music, added clipping to his suite of promotional tools after learning how Drake and PartyNextDoor ran a successful campaign for last year’s “$ome $exy $ongs 4 U.” He gravitated toward it for its ability to quickly push out posts that seem organic without requiring the artist to actively capture content. “It’s always about creating a spark of awareness, and eventually that can [create] momentum around the artist,” he says. “It gives you more flexibility and agility to move around with smaller pockets of budget.”

Clipping also allows for a sort of passive marketing that doesn’t depend on the artist to exhaustively promote any given project or song. “Content captures” are regularly baked into a musician’s busy schedule, but clipping removes that need by leaning on footage captured elsewhere, whether it be from red carpet appearances or even a performance from a decade ago. Joseph Larkin, co-founder of the Kursza talent agency, focuses more on fan page management — actively running a handful of fan accounts that appear organic but are in fact strategic — and sees it as a companion to clipping in how they’re able to control the conversation.

“With fan pages, [we’ll do what] we call ‘shitposting,’ because we post so many times a day — we do a little bit of curation because we want to control the narrative of said artist,” he says. “But with clipping, all it takes is one clip to go mega-viral, and then everyone’s reshared and posted it. And if you’re constantly reminding people what’s happening, they can’t help but see clips everywhere.”

Clipping has been streamlined predominantly on Whop, a platform that launched in 2021 as a software marketplace and quickly evolved into a central clipping hub. Over the past month alone, clipping campaigns have been run on Whop for Mumford & Sons’ “SNL” performance, Brandi Carlile’s latest album and tour, and Harry Styles’ appearance on Brittany Broski’s “Royal Court” podcast. Whereas some agencies may choose to operate clipping campaigns independently, developing their own “clipping armies” through Discord channels, Whop offers incentives for people to primarily use their product, including an automated payout system and tools to detect if clippers are using bots to over-inflate impressions.

“If you look at categories that would be really effective in this strategy, you’re going to get the people who don’t necessarily have huge budgets but have a lot of micro fans,” explains Whop co-founder and co-CEO Steven Schwartz. “And because of that, music was one of the first niches that blew up. I remember seeing Drake on the platform, Lil Tecca on the platform. It’s probably the most effective way to explode your upcoming album, because what are the alternatives? You can get a billboard, or you can post yourself and do a couple sponsored posts, but then you get lost in the algorithms almost immediately. So the only way to persist the relevancy is by having an army of thousands and thousands of people.”

One recent Whop success story was the campaign for electronic musician John Summit and his single “Lights Go Out,” which had an initial budget of $1,050 over the span of eight days in January. In that time, the campaign generated 1.4 million total likes and 32.4 million views across 29 approved clips from 13 different unique creators. The top clip had 5.3 million views alone, followed by another from the same account with 1 million views. Both featured the song playing in the background of video clips featuring NBA superstars Steph Curry and Michael Jordan on the basketball court.

Big tech warmed quickly to Whop, as early investors included Peter Thiel and Insight Partners in a $17 million Series A round of funding. Just last month, it raised another $200 million from stablecoin company Tether, bringing its overall valuation to $1.6 billion. But it’s also given rise to a sub-economy of smaller agencies and businesses that find success within the Whop ecosystem, including Scene Society and creatorXchange.

Evan Stanfield and Grayson Peil co-founded their agency Clipping Culture in March 2025, and in the time since, they’ve developed case studies for artists including Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez and the Rolling Stones, generating tens of millions of views across thousands of videos. Stanfield says that Clipping Culture is now working with the “top labels” in the world, and hypothesizes that most of them outsource clipping to agencies because they lack the infrastructure to do so themselves. 

“A lot of the people in this space are very young, and that’s because they understand social media,” he says, noting one clipper making five figures a month who hasn’t yet turned 18. “Most label [staffers are] older people who are used to traditional marketing — they don’t exactly know how it works, but they know it does.”

The rise of clipping, says Schwartz, has leveled the promotional playing field as the record business is in the midst of a larger post-streaming transformation. “The music industry has become more decentralized, more niche, and you have a lot of up-and-coming artists instead of five major celebrities getting all the numbers,” he says. “I look at that as a huge positive and I think that the larger companies really need to understand that the trend is going towards this. Like any new technology, there’s a lot of confusion followed by, ‘We have to get on this right now.'”

Some have likened the growth of clipping to the rise of creator and influencer marketing over the past decade, noting that one won’t necessarily usurp the other and that both have their own benefits. With creator marketing, for instance, a label or agency could pay a single influencer tens of thousands of dollars for one post that uses a song, tapping into that influencer’s follower base for instant visibility. But with clipping, it can flood multiple accounts at a low cost in hopes that the algorithm will pick up the content and disseminate it far and wide.

But there’s a key advantage that clipping has over creator marketing: The ability to run campaigns without strict oversight. Creators are subject to scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, which has its own guidelines for social media influencers on when and how to disclose a paid partnership. The FTC doesn’t have the same parameters for clipping, if any at all, allowing for a sort of invisible marketing that advertises to users without them even realizing it. (The FTC declined Variety’s request for comment on clipping.)

Clipping as an ethical gray area is a recurring topic among the dozen or so music industry insiders consulted for this story, mainly because it prompts existential questions about what is or isn’t real on the Internet. “I think that just feeds into the larger conversation about the desensitization of content and content culture, because there was an [earlier] era when everything was so impactful,” says Alavi. “But today, consumers are being desensitized to what they see and the value of the view is going down — you can ask any brand. In two to three years, a plethora of AI content [will] come out, and it will be almost impossible to determine whether it’s fake or not, and the influence it has on people will dwindle.”

But for now, in an era where virtually anything can be considered advertising, the morality of clipping is of little concern to a music industry always in search of new ways to develop and promote artists and songs. Schwartz, for one, sees it as indicative of how economies on the Internet could shape the world offline.

“I view clipping as act one of what this new internet economy looks like, where you have all these people doing micro jobs for cash, and being part of a bigger movement and business,” Schwartz concludes. “I think clipping is an entry point to show how these brands, artists and music companies can interact with their user base at scale in a way that’s never been done before.”