Behind The Single: Mitski – “My Love Mine All Mine” - Music Ally Pro (2024)

Track: Mitski –“My Love Mine All Mine”
Released: 15 September 2023
Label: Dead Oceans

Overview

When Mitski released “My Love Mine All Mine” as part of her new album in September last year, no one knew it would become a massive mainstream hit that would become the artist’s first Billboard Hit 100 song (and still charting on Billboard’s TikTok Charts six months later). Secretly Group’s Alexandra Murphy (International Marketing Director), Hannah Carlen (Senior Director of Marketing North and South America) and Robby Morris (VP Creative Marketing) provide us with an inside view of how the artist and her team achieved this.

Phase 1 – Launching as the album’s focus track

Creating a standout music video

“My Love Mine All Mine” was released alongside Mitski’s new album “The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We”. As the album’s focus track on release, it arrived with a music video the same day. Robby Morris explains that videos have been an important part of Mitski’s entire career and since she is less focused on social media, they are important tentpole moments for her campaign: “The videos are also important for everything we’re doing when it comes to marketing because those are going to be our primary assets in addition to the album cover and photos. The videos have become what demarcates each part of the campaign. We knew the song was impactful. We knew it was going to align really well with the album launch. So we wanted to make a video with a pretty tall ambition to match it. It’s the second music video from the campaign that we released.”

While Mitski has a cohort of video directors she’s worked with throughout her career, for this record the team introduced her to AG Rojas who directed the music video, Morris said. “I think there had been mutual fandom between Mitski and AG for a long time and it never came together before because of scheduling. Mitski sees a video director much more as a collaborator,or even a partner, rather than someone that you commissioned to make a music video. She’ll usually put together a statement of what the song means to her. But she really does allow the creative to interpret the song in their own way.

“She views the videos as separate pieces of art. We look at videos in different ways: sometimes they’re a commercial for a song, sometimes they’re a short film that stands on its own.”

By working with Rojas, the team ended up with what they see as an iconic video for Mitski: “The director wrote a treatment for the video, sent it through and we loved it, Mitski loved it. A couple weeks later he said he had a new idea for the video. He said he listened to the song and just something else came about when he was listening to it. This idea with the chairs popped into our inboxes a couple of weeks before the video shoot. It was a bit of a pivot from the original idea but we all loved it. And the video continued to take on a life of its own. The chairs in the video have become iconography for the song. I think I saw them appear on some socks that she will be selling on the tour and her web store. So, the video is very deep and laden with meaning. It’s very personal for AG Rojas.”

Serving the ravenous fanbase

The team used the first bit of the video as a teaser as its opening scene provided a sense of mystery, and did a YouTube Premiere around the launch. These always work really well for Mitski says Robby Morris, “just because the fan base is so ravenous”.

Hannah Carlen adds: “From a fan community perspective – one thing that is worth noting about Mitski is that –alongside a relationship to social media that’s been very on and off in terms of how much she’s comfortable engaging –when it comes to music videos, she is not afraid. She is not hesitant at all to really be front and centre in those and, especially set against this complex relationship to her visibility on social media, one of the reasons that her videos are so exciting to fans is because they know they’re going to get a lot of Mitski.”

Ali Murphy agrees: “And it’s one of the few places that they really convene. [In the comments] are people writing theses about what they see about these music videos, and what they mean – and that’s been something that’s been built up over time, maybe since “Nobody”. People are looking at every little detail. They go in there to allow catharsis, but they also go in there to interact with each other. One of our favourite things is watching that build up in the 24 hours before the music video, everybody checking in on each other before they’re going to school and all that. And it’s really global.”

Seeing traction over release weekend

The team describes how over the release weekend, they saw the track picking up momentum and TikTok creations surging. Hannah Carlen: “We saw both fan and content creation picking up at a pace that was exceptional and conversion to streaming as a consequence of that picking up from release at a pattern and pace that was exceptional. I think it was quite literally by Monday that we were like: okay, this is different. What are we adjusting?”

Almost immediately after noticing this momentum, the label’s fan and community marketing manager started doing outreach to some key creators. Alongside that, the team looked for high-performing content to boost. Hannah Carlen: “We and Mitski take it very seriously that there is a sanctity to that fan community that we don’t want to disrupt or start treating like marketing puppeteers. So engaging with that subset of fans without being disruptive was really important. The correct outreach was key to that, finding the right ways to work with influencers and again boosting key content.

“We also have a digital team who are incredible. They immediately got to work not just on US and UK streaming concerns, but really looking globally, really looking at the full worldwide map of: Where are fans responding quickly? Where are we seeing that kind of growth? Who do we need to be in touch with across all of that?”

It’s not the first time that Mitski’s music is having a viral moment on TikTok. During the pandemic, her songs “Nobody” and “Strawberry Blond” went viral, bringing in a new audience for Mitski and laying the groundwork for what was to come with “My Love Mine All Mine”. And similar to her previous viral tracks, it’s important to mention how the moment that emerged around the song across social media platforms was never attached to one trend.

Hannah Carlen remembers: “Mitski tracks, in the way that they go viral, have always been a little bit anomalous because oftentimes there isn’t one trend. A number of her tracks that have had that type of virality have done it not through one focal trend but through a number of sort of niches of her community or even just like other cultural communities connecting with the song and then because these are such emotional songs just going back and back and back and back to them. It really is that people and communities and genres and identities find their songs and they build. There’s a whole garden of trends and ideas and sort of patterns of what they’re making.”

According to Billboard data, the track had been used in over 300k TikToks and 13k Instagram Reels by early October, about two weeks after its release. Murphy sees the strengths of the track and its success on short-form video platforms in the songwriting: “It’s really lyric based. It’s the rawness of it. I think that’s what really connects people to it.”

As pointed out in this Chartmetric article, the song was immediately picked up by artists such as Laufey or Clairo, who posted their own videos to Mitski’s track which also helped connect the track to the audiences of those influential young artists. Soon other artists followed suit – including Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams, Lyn Lapid and Alfie Jukes, and many more users uploading various types of covers onto TikTok and YouTube – from Spanish translations to sign-language versions.

Phase 2 – Taking a non-conventional pop song mainstream

Consistent monitoring to inform the strategy

While audiences naturally started connecting with the track, Secretly quickly had to get to work to maximise its growth, says Murphy: “I think it was the first time that we’ve been this reactive where it’s been a literal 24-hour turnover informing what we’re doing next. It was constantly monitored and information was being fed out per team per country and it’s been really interesting to watch those spikes go up and then work directly on the Philippines, for example, making sure that we’re activating all the things that can be activated in those regions.

“In that particular instance mostly creator campaigns, but also targeting certain radios or TV stations or where can we get more impressions of the song. We’re still seeing peaks now, Hannah’s been closely looking at Latin America and the radio streams there and it kind of continues. But it’s been a wild ride from that initial moment until now. In early October Mitski was, I think, 493th in the world on Spotify and she’s peaked at 71st during the campaign. The excitement was so real for those initial moments, we were watching things happen in real time and reacting.

” One thing that I’ll mention in particular is in the UK, this was Dead Oceans’ first Top 40 single, but it ended up being a Top 10 single. We were really reactive between working the single at DSPs, but also at radio, and constantly monitoring those things and tweaking our plans, the creator campaigns, and just making sure that all those sides were kind of talking to one another.”

Strategically working different markets and partners

The UK and Australia were the two markets which saw the strongest reaction from the start and were leading the momentum, from there it went to the Philippines, Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly. Latin America was catching on a little slower than what the label would typically see for Mitski and some of their other acts.

Carlen: “We work with a great team there and it took going back around to streaming teams and starting radio in Mexico and Brazil. It wasn’t as simple as ‘okay, there’s a digital fire, pour gas on.’ This also means you’re going back to radio, you’re going back to your ad strategy. It was getting back into some of the more traditional sides to build up that growth in other territories. It was still going really well, but not caught up pace-wise to leading territories. We were looking globally: where are things really strong? Where is there still room to grow or a gap to cover? The more breadth we brought to the campaign, the more we see those results bear out and catch up.”

Morris: “ The song is not a conventional pop song but the numbers put it right next to pop songs on various charts. Whether that’s the Billboard TikTok Chart –where it was number one – which then pulled over to the viral charts on Spotify, you’re up there with these huge pop songs with tons of top 40 radio and whatnot. And although it’s unconventional and maybe sonically different, the audience is there and the audience is keeping it as high as it is on those charts.

“So I think with that data and that volume it gave us enough to go back to the partner where the numbers weren’t matching the other places. It was doing well on radio in one territory, but we weren’t seeing playlisting. We’d be able to point to radio and then vice versa in another territory. So I think although on its surface maybe there was a challenge with the sonics, but I think the numbers gave us the leverage with our partners.”

Keep pushing the boundaries

At the time of our chat with the Secretly team, Mitski’s touring in the US had just begun –which the team saw as a new booster to everything, says Morris: “She’s now out performing in front of around 280,000 people in the US. This is now the moment where fans can commune in real-time, whether they’re recording on their phones or they’re just talking about it online or talking to their friends about it.”

Alexandra Murphy expands on their ambitions: “There are still markets where we are still actively working at radio. There is mainland Europe, for example, where we’re starting to see peaks. We’re still monitoring stuff.”

Carlen says that growth is still coming: “The goal is to keep growing, keep breaking the rules for what a track like this can do. I mean, this track is top four. This track is charting US Top 40 top radio. That’s a crazy thing for this song to be here. There’s innumerable people who do the good work of making sure that all roads really lead back to Mitski the artist and the full body of work – and I think that’s on everyone’s minds here, too.”