Interview with Songfluencer Co-founder – Johnny Cloherty
There are so many words I could use to describe Johnny Cloherty and his company Songfluencer. Intelligent. Lucid. Innovative. And just downright cool.
Songfluencer co-founders Johnny Cloherty and Sean Pace officially started the company almost two years ago, but the company has been a few years in the making. Songfluencer began with Johnny and Sean’s early involvement with Kane Brown. In 2015, Sean was working for Jay Frank at UMG’s DigMark when they discovered Kane. Sean and Jay helped propel Kane into the Nashville Music Row crosshairs. Kane signed to WME, and Johnny was at WME and the assistant to Kane’s agent, Braeden Rountree. After realizing the power of digital marketing’s impact on touring, Johnny was hooked. Sean and Johnny quickly became friends and rallied around the idea of starting a business together spirited in using new technologies to help artists careers.
They thought about starting an influencer marketing company months before they actually started Songfluencer. Neither of them took it seriously until realizing that there wasn’t a company offering influencer marketing that specialized in the music space. That was really the “a ha!” moment. It’s one thing to represent influencers (Talent X, etc) or have an influencer opt-in platform (Grapevine, UpFluence, etc), but it’s completely different when the people running your influencer campaigns have real-world industry-specific experience. That’s where Songfluencer found its lane. Having an in-depth and extensive knowledge of how marketing music works, release strategies, fan acquisition, etc and seeing that these skills were not inherent with other offerings is really what paved the way for our entrance into the marketplace.
Although Songfluencer created an innovative roadmap for artists and labels to participate in influencer marketing, it was a concerted effort to double down on custom software that caused their business to really take off. Heavy investment in technology provided Songfluencer the tools to track influencer and campaign effectiveness in real-time, and interpret and contextualize the data. This led to unparalleled campaign results, reporting, and insights for their clients. The technology ecosystem also allowed Songfluencer to significantly scale their operations, maintain relationships with thousands of influencers, and effectively serve their growing roster of impressive clients.
After we got in pretty deep into what exactly Songfluencer is, I was curious about the back-end structure. Johnny tells me, “One of the biggest advantages we had early on was we invested a lot of money in 2018 into different technology systems for us to not only manage these campaigns and run them at scale but also.. We invest a lot of our profits into analytic tools, research tools, programming efforts, coding efforts that gives us, once again, not only do we have a huge technology ecosystem that helps us manage these campaigns at scale where we can work as many campaigns as we want without having to stretch our individual bandwidth. Also gives us insight into how posts are performing, how influencers are trending, which you can make certain assertions about what is happening based on what your seeing with the data.”
Johnny continues to make sure he makes one thing very clear. He says, “I want to make sure that I’m not saying that we know what exactly the algorithm is doing because we definitely don’t. That’s certainly a trade secret. But you can make general assumptions if you’re actually looking at data as opposed to just throwing darts against the wall and hoping they stick.”
You can hear much about this visionary and interesting company as well as my entire conversation with Johnny by clicking on the link to your favorite place to listen to podcasts.
-Tommy Marz
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