So why did Lil Nas X’s song Old Town Road become so popular? Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road has since stuck as the longest-charting Billboard No. 1 of all time. And who would have thought that, with an artist so unknown, they could break this enigma of a record – rattle the cage, overtake every wild imagination.
Maybe he does have some truly awesome marketing tricks in his sleeve. Here’s how this genre-bending smash became viral and critics reeled in awe.
Why Did ‘Old Town Road’ By Lil Nas X Become a Hit?
But “Old Town Road” took off because of the most surprisingly absurd mashup of rap and country music: bass beats and literally, horses.
“There’s this great term in psychology called ‘optimal distinctiveness,’ and it’s all about things that are sort of similar and different at the same time,” said Jonah Berger, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
The music industry was incredulous about Old Town Road and how it related to the country genre. A racial struggle for supremacy is one of the hottest, most sensitive topics, ignitable with the lightest of triggers.
And Lil Nas knew where to poke this stick. “In a country that is white cowboy stereotype-dominated,” puts wild country imagery against hip-hop symbols. Old Town Road attempts to redefine country music and make it more racially inclusive.
Old Town Road Leveraged TikTok’s Virality
It began as “Old Town Road” went viral on TikTok, an app mostly used by teenagers to do renditions and memes of popular songs and clips of movies for a 15-second short video. At that time, TikTok was just growing in popularity when “Old Town Road” was released.
A rather short song with simple beats and a hook that just sticks in your head – exactly custom-fitted for TikTok videos. T
These are the days when vines and quick video consumption blow up to meet the short attention span of present-day Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences, and it is greatly increasingly necessary to specifically tailor video formats to work on most trending platforms.
Final Thoughts
One of the first things you will probably notice with “Old Town Road,” other than its earworm of a hook about horses, which is both irreverent and infectious, is how short it is.
It clocks in under two minutes. By the time you start loving the song, it’s ending. Thus, you have only one choice: replaying it and starting all over again.
The beat was originally made by YoungKio, a teenage producer in the Netherlands, who put it up for sale in a beat store offering the Nine Inch Nails track “34 Ghosts IV”.
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