fan fiction
These days, many in the music business are trying to harness the power of the “superfan” — the highly engaged segment of an artist’s audience that regularly shows up to concerts, buys t-shirts, orders physical albums and obsesses over the artist online. In the digital marketing space, that has meant agencies are increasingly turning their attention to fan pages, hoping to capture the attention of that top tier of listeners online.
“The TikTok influencer campaign has been front and center for marketing songs for a while,” says Ethan Curtis, founder of PushPlay, a digital marketing agency that has promoted songs like “Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy, “Golden Hour” by JVKE and “Glimpse of Us” by Joji. “But as it’s gotten more saturated and more expensive, we found there was interest in creating your own fan pages where you can have total control of the narrative.”
“Fan pages” made sneakily by artists’ teams may have become the digital campaign du jour in the last year or so, but the idea isn’t new. Even before TikTok took over music discovery, management and digital teams quietly used anonymous accounts to pose as fans on sites like Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter, sharing interviews, videos and other content around the artists because, as Curtis puts it, “It is a space you can own.”
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Curtis is now taking that concept a step further with his innovative, albeit controversial, new company WtrCoolr, a spinoff of his digital firm that’s dedicated to creating “fan fiction” pages for artists. To put it simply, WtrCoolr is hired to create viral-worthy fake stories about their clients, which include Shaboozey and Young Nudy, among others. While Curtis says he is open to creating videos with all kinds of “imaginative” new narratives, he says he draws the line at any fan fiction that could be “negative” or “cause backlash” for the people featured in the videos.
The results speak for themselves. One popular WtrCoolr-made TikTok video that falsely claimed that Dolly Parton is Shaboozey’s godmother has 1.1 million views and 121,500 likes to date. Posted to the digital agency’s fan account @ShaboozeysVault, Curtis says that the popular video was made by splicing together old interview clips of the artists, along with some AI voiceovers.
“We are huge fans of pop culture, fan fiction and satire,” says Curtis. “We see it as creating our own version of a Marvel Universe but with pop stars.”
All of the TikTok accounts made by WtrCoolr note in their bios that their content is “fan fiction.” The videos on these pages also include “Easter eggs,” which Curtis says point to the fact that the videos are fabrications. But plenty of fans are still falling for it. Many viewers of the Parton video, for example, took it as gospel truth, posting comments like “how many god children does Dolly have and where can I sign up?” and “Dolly is an angel on Earth.”
In the future, Curtis thinks this novel form of “fan fiction” will be useful beyond just trying to engage fan bases online. He sees potential for the pages to serve as “a testing ground” for real-life decisions — like an artist choosing to collaborate with another — to see how the fan base would react. “Traditionally, you don’t get to look before you jump,” he says. “Maybe in the future we will.”
What was the first “fan fiction” post that took off for WtrCoolr?
It was the video of Shaq being a superfan to the rapper Young Nudy [10.4 million views, 1.7 million likes on TikTok]. We had been working on [promoting] the Young Nudy song, “Peaches & Eggplants,” mostly on the influencer side. We had dances and all sorts of different trends going. It was becoming a top rap song by that point and then we sold the client [Young Nudy’s team] on doing one of these fan pages where we just tested out a bunch of stuff. The first narrative video we tried was this video where we found some footage of Shaq — I think it was at Lollapalooza — where he was in the front of the crowd [for a different artist], vibing and head banging. It was a really funny visual. We just got clever with the editing and created the story that Shaq was showing up at every Young Nudy show, and then it went crazy viral.
It was really exciting to see. It brought fans to Nudy and also made existing Nudy fans super excited that Shaq was engaging. Then there was tons of goodwill for Shaq that came from it too. Lots of comments like “protect Shaq at all costs” or “Shaq’s a damn near perfect human being.” It was all around a positive experience. We put on our pages that this is a fan page and fan fiction. We don’t really push that it’s the truth. We’re just having fun and we let that be known.
There was some pickup after that video went viral. Weren’t there some rap blogs posting about the video and taking it as truth?
I don’t know if they were taking it as true necessarily. We didn’t really have any conversations with anyone, but it was definitely getting shared all around — whether it was because of that or just because it was such a funny video. Even Nudy reacted and thought it was funny. I think the label may have reached out to Shaq and invited him to a show, and he thought it was funny but was on the other side of the country that day and couldn’t make it.
I’m sure there’s some people who thought it was true, but a lot of the videos we’ll put Easter eggs at the end that make it obvious that it’s not true. Then in our bios we write that it is fan fiction.
Do you think that there’s anything bad that could come from fans and blogs believing these videos are real — only to later realize later that it was fake?
I don’t know if anything is really bad. We don’t claim for it to be true, and we’re just having fun, weaving stories and basically saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if?” or, “Wouldn’t it be heartwarming if?” I don’t think we’re really ever touching on stuff that’s of any importance, that could lead to any negative energy or backlash. We’re just trying to make fun stuff that fans enjoy. Just fun little moments. It’s no different from taking a video out of context and slapping meme headings on it.
Do you see this as the future of memes?
I do. I also think there’s a future where what we’re doing becomes sort of like a testing ground for real-life collabs or TV show concepts. I could see a label coming to us and asking us to test how a new post-beef collab between Drake and Kendrick would be received, for example. They could say, “Can you create a post about this and we can see if people turn on Kendrick for backtracking, or if fans will lose their shit over them coming together?” We could see if it’s a disaster or potentially the biggest release of their careers. Traditionally, you don’t get to look before you jump. Maybe in the future we will. But even now with the Shaq video, it basically proved that if Shaq went to an unexpected show and was raging in the front row people would love it. I mean, if it’s been so successful on socials, why wouldn’t it be so successful in real life?
It seemed like the Shaboozey and Dolly Parton video inserted Shaboozey’s name and other new phrases using an AI voice filter. Do you rely on AI in these videos a lot or is it primarily about careful editing?
The majority of it is just clever editing. Every now and then we may change a word up or something [using AI], but the majority of it is just collaging clips together.
How time intensive is it to create these videos?
The process has been changing. It used to be much more time intensive back before we realized that clever editing was more efficient. In the beginning, we would write scripts for the videos, run them through AI and then try to find clips to match the scripts and stuff like that. You have to match the edit up with the artist’s lips so it looks like lip synching. That’s just super time intensive. Then we started realizing that it’s easier to just define a basic objective, go out on the internet and see what we can find. We develop a story from there so that we only have to do a few fake [AI-assisted] words here and there, and then we’ll cut away from the video, show some footage from a music video or something like that. It makes it more efficient.
As far as you know, is WtrCoolr the first team in digital marketing that is trying to do these false-narrative, storytelling videos, or is this something that is seen all over the internet?
We were definitely the first to do it. There’s definitely people that are imitating it now. We see it generally in the content that exists online, especially on meme pages. It’s becoming part of the culture.
Do you run your ideas for fan fiction narratives by the artist before you do them?
We’re working with them, and we’re talking through ideas. There’s as much communication as they want. Some artists want to know what’s going on, but some artists just don’t care to be involved.
It seems like, so far, no one has had any issues with being used in the videos — they even see this positively — but are you concerned about the legal implications of using someone’s likeness to endorse an artist or idea that they haven’t really endorsed?
We’re not claiming it to be true. We include disclaimers that it’s just fan fiction. So, I think if we were claiming for it to be true then that’s a different story, but that’s not what we are doing.
That’s listed on all the page bios, but it isn’t listed on the actual video captions, right?
It’s listed on the profiles, and then a lot of videos we just do Easter eggs at the end that make it sort of apparent that it’s a joke.
I found the idea that you mentioned earlier to be interesting — the idea that you could test out collaborations or things without having to get the artist involved initially, whether it’s Drake and Kendrick collaborating or something else. It reminds me of when people tease a song before they slate it for official release. Do you feel that is a fair comparison?
Totally. What TikTok did for song teasing, this has done for situation teasing.
This story was published as part of Billboard’s new music technology newsletter ‘Machine Learnings.’ Sign up for ‘Machine Learnings,’ and Billboard’s other newsletters, here.
Over the past week, the feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake has entered into a new, more modern realm than any rap beef before it: AI.
As the back and forth has escalated, and fans wait to see what each of the hip-hop heavyweights will say next, a number of fan-fabricated diss tracks began circulating on social media using AI voices to mimic the emcees. And while some were obviously not real — and, thankfully, were voluntarily labeled AI by their authors — others were more convincing, leading to widespread confusion.
People questioned if Drake’s “Push Ups” was real (it was), and if Lamar’s supposed reply, “1 Shot 1 Kill” was real, too (it wasn’t). YouTube is rife with more AI replications, and some are amassing big audiences, including one called “To Kill A Butterfly,” which has amassed 508,000 views to date. To make matters even more convoluted, Drake himself took part in the trend, employing AI to replicate the voices of West Coast legends Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg on his diss “Taylor Made,” released on X and Instagram on Friday without their permission, prompting Shakur’s estate to send Drake a cease-and-desist letter.
The phenomenon has illustrated the sizable impact that AI has already had on modern fandom, as impatient fans use generative AI tools to fill in gaps in the conversation and imagine further storylines with a type of uncanny accuracy that was never before possible. And for better or for worse, it has become the most prominent use-case of generative AI in the music industry to date.
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This trend in AI use has its origins with Ghostwriter, the controversial TikTok user who deepfaked Drake and The Weeknd’s voices on his song “Heart On My Sleeve” one year ago, in April 2023. In a cover story for Billboard, Ghostwriter and his manager first compared AI voice filters to a form of “fan fiction — a fan-generated genre of music,” as the manager put it.
Traditional, written fan fiction has been a way for fans to engage with their favorite media for decades — whether that’s franchises like Star Wars, Marvel or Twilight, or the music of stars like Drake and Lamar. In it, fans can expand on details that were never fully fleshed out in the original work and write their own storylines and endings. AI fan creations inspired by Drake and Lamar’s beef are doing something similar, letting music fans imagine the artist’s next move and picture collaborations that haven’t happened yet.
Historically, fan fiction is great for the original artist from a marketing point of view. It is one of many forms of user-generated content (UGC) on the internet today that can engage superfans further with the original project without its author having to lift a finger.
But with traditional fan fiction, fans could easily tell where the official canon started and ended, and the writing was often relegated to superfan hot spots like Watt Pad, Discord, Reddit or fan zines. This new form of ‘AI fan fiction’ makes this distinction a lot less obvious and spreads it much wider. For now, trained ears can still tell when AI voices are used like this today, given the slight glitchiness still found in the audio quality, but soon these models will be so good that discerning AI from reality will be virtually impossible.
There is still not a good way to confidently figure out which songs use AI and which do not, and to make matters worse, these fan-made songs are more commonly posted to general social media platforms than written fan-fiction. In a search about this rap beef on X or YouTube, listeners are likely to run into a few AI fan tracks along the way, and many lack the expertise of a superfan to sniff out and differentiate what’s real and what’s fake.
In a time when fans demand nonstop connection to and content from their favorite talents, it is especially common for fans of elusive artists to take matters into their own hands with AI tools — including voices as well as other generative works like images, videos and text. In the absence of a Kendrick response to Drake last week, for example, “1 Shot 1 Kill” was produced by a 23-year-old fan who goes by Sy The Rapper. In an interview with Complex, Sy said he used the tool Voicify to imagine Lamar on the track. (Notably, the RIAA recently reported Voicify to the U.S. government’s piracy watch list).
Followers of famously elusive artist Frank Ocean also had fun with generative AI in the last year, with one fan, @tannerchauct, showing others on X how to create their own alternative forms of Ocean’s album artwork using DALLE-2, an image generator. A Cardi B fan, @iYagamiLight, even dreamed up the creative direction for an entirely fictional Cardi B project with AI, earning them thousands of retweets in October. The user’s cover art rendered Cardi B in a bedazzled corset and posing in a clawfoot bathtub, peacock feathers fanning out around her. They also created a fake tracklist and release date.
The downside of fan-made works has always been the same: they have the tendency to infringe on the artist’s copyrights, to use an artist’s name, image, voice or likeness without permission, or to generally profit from the artist’s work without sharing the spoils. This new age of AI fan fiction and UGC makes all of these pre-existing problems exponentially harder to police.
The Cardi B fan, for example, did not disclose that their work was AI-generated or fictional, and instead paired their creative direction with the misleading caption “Cardi B just announced her long awaited sophomore album “Mayura” coming out Friday 12th January 2024!”
In a recent music law conference at Vanderbilt University, Colin Rushing, general counsel of the Digital Media Association (DiMA) downplayed the commercial impact of AI in music so far, saying that, since Ghostwriter, “one of the things we really haven’t seen in the [last] year is an epidemic of ‘fake-Drakes’ climbing the charts. We’re not seeing popular examples of this in the commercial marketplace.”
Rushing is right — that hasn’t happened yet. Even Drake’s own AI-assisted song is not on streaming services, and thus is not eligible for the charts. (and if the lawyer for Tupac’s estate has his way, it will soon be removed from the internet entirely.) But this rap feud has revealed that while it hasn’t impacted the charts or the “commercial marketplace” all that much, it has impacted something possibly even more important to an artist today: fandoms.
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