How to make a remix become one of the biggest dance records in the world
Track: Chrystal “The Days (NOTION Remix)”
Released: 8 November 2024
Label: Chaos
Chaos, part of Polydor Label Group, launched in 2023 as a dance imprint and has quickly become a tastemaker in the electronic scene, elevating names like Jazzy and Confidence Man while also celebrating track-focused progress. When the team signed Chrystal’s track “The Days”, no one was prepared for the remix’s viral success.
Silas Howison-Waughray (Director of Dance Marketing at Polydor & General Manager Chaos Records), Paddy McLean (General Manager at Polydor Label Group) and Dulcie MacKechnie (Head of Creator Marketing at Universal Music) explain the story behind Chrystal and NOTION’s hit remix to Music Ally.
Metrics
- ‘The Days (NOTION Remix)’ reached the Spotify Global Top 50
- Has charted in Top 5 UK OCC, Australia and New Zealand, Top 10 Ireland and climbing the US Billboard 100 (one of only two Billboard-charting dance tracks)
- Has hit 750m streams this year — far surpassing its projection for 500m by year’s end
- Over 5.6m short-form video creations and 5.2b total views
- Top 20 Global All Genres, #1 Global Dance
- Radio takeover: 10 weeks on the BBC Radio 1 A-list
Core Marketing Drivers
- An organic TikTok trend propelled by the artist’s friends and community
- Hyperlocalised creator marketing and investment in other regions
- DJ social content
- A series of remixes focused on the hook
- A pop-up in Nottingham
- Dance page seeding
- Snapchat filters and boosting
- Reels meme campaigns
Actionable takeaways
Compiled by Music Ally’s team of marketing experts, these condensed action points are to help you get started and apply them to your own work:
- Tap into the artist’s existing network. Huge moments can spark from an engaged community around the artist. Whether it’s aligning on where they’re from, passions or musical tastes — start niche and grow from there.
- Don’t grow wider too quickly. Recognise the audiences that have created momentum for an artist or their music and invest in them. Whether it’s through dedicated remixes or involving them in new content that’s being rolled out — don’t overlook where it all started.
- Understand what drives growth on different platforms. The Chaos team invested in Snapchat, pushing the Mazza_l20 remix where the artists’ audience is most active. On Reels, they invested into meme campaigns. Content buckets on TikTok were suitable for YouTube Shorts.
Phase 1 — A Hyperlocalised Viral Moment
Signing and redelivering the track
Silas Howison-Waughray recalls how it all started: “The song had existed since 2015 , released independently through Ditto. Chrystal is a producer & singer-songwriter from Bolton and has been releasing independently for years. She released “The Days” in 2015, which sat on DSPs as she carried on working.”
“Then her daughter used it on TikTok last year and out of the blue, it went viral in the north of England. It was incredible to work on a track that had been released for so many years, before it went viral out of nowhere and kicked off. We signed it, taking it from Ditto and redelivering it through Chaos.”
As an English northerner with a strong community base, the song likely connected due to Crystal’s roots and the enthusiasm by her daughter and friends to make it an explosive local record, says the team.
“In all my time working records in a viral capacity, I’ve never seen something so hyperlocalised in that it was just a region of England — and that’s where almost all of the content was coming from.”
PaDDy mClean
Dulcie MacKechnie: “I think we signed it when it was already on 20k creates on TikTok. It was very much the northern punters absolutely hammering it, there was no real clear trend to begin with. But we started to test different verticals and potential trends and then worked on amplifying those.”
The Chaos team redelivered the track around two to three weeks after they first discovered it having traction on TikTok. “From experience we know that these kinds of viral records can have quite short windows. This bucked the trend in a massive way when it took on another life,” describes McLean.
Amplifying the existing momentum
Silas Howison-Waughray: “We dived straight into TikTok as that was clearly where the wind was. At the time, Chrystal was very much a singer-songwriter. Obviously since then she’s gone on to do huge things, and had a #1 single with MK.”
“But at the time she didn’t really use socials, so we didn’t want to put pressure on her to do anything she was uncomfortable with. Although she wanted to be involved as much as possible, we weren’t relying on her to be a front-facing artist and push the record by herself.”
Since it was clearly Northern UK TikTok where everything was happening, the team doubled down on those areas.
Dulcie MacKechnie: “On the original, I think the track has a very nostalgic feeling, so in terms of the type of creators we were going after it was very much focusing on that area initially. I think our first big viral post was a creator using a green screen and sitting at the back of a bus, recreating memorable things from their school days.”
“Creators really started to move after that,” continues MacKechnie. “Obviously, we wanted to build it out of the north of England but we didn’t want to overlook those audiences either. So we were also looking for similar types of communities across other parts of England, like school kids in Essex.”
Paddy McLean: “I think it was at the end of September that we fully ingested it. Dulcie was continuing to blow things up in the north of England and we soon hit the UK Top 40 singles chart. In all honesty I think we felt like that was an achievement and that was the result that we’d get with it.”
“As a label we were looking at remixes, and it was the NOTION remix that got people asking when it would come out — which never happens,” continues McLean. “We were slowly starting to get this idea that it was about this hook. With the remix, that’s when the north of England wasn’t the only place that was bubbling.”
Phase 2 — The Remix Strategy
Simultaneous remixes with the NOTION remix taking over
While the original was entering the UK charts, the Chaos team has been working on a remix strategy.
Silas Howison-Waughray: “We put out a DnB remix first. For context, we sat down and said the hook is the key bit. Let’s get ten remixes in and put out a remix every week. We sent out all the remixes to everyone and the US label reps were texting us about NOTION.”
“We got a remix before NOTION which was done by the artist Jamezy, we waterfalled it and kept things moving. Then Zulan the DJ played the NOTION remix in a set, and suddenly it had done around 3m views on Reels and TikTok. Then Sammy Virji played it which also blew up. And actually those two things alone connected on streaming in quite a big way. “
“We then seeded all that content to dance pages and that’s what kicked off the initial momentum. That was the initial spike, the first bit of real life content.”
Silas Howison-Waughray
Paddy McLean: “The fact that it went into Billboard top 100 in America – we’ve never worked on a dance record like that. That’s incredible, that’s such an achievement.”
“It also made you realise: this is going to be a dance classic now for the next few generations, which is kind of amazing. This song is so well received by so many different kinds of people. It’s probably going to go down as one of the UK’s best dance exports.”
Learnings
Paddy McLean: “Never underestimate the power of the remix.”
Silas Howison-Waughray: “Sometimes when you’re dealing with viral trends it’s more about the visual element, but this was all about the hook of the record. We are trying to identify the audio hooks that keep people engaging on short-form platforms more often in new releases, instead of pushing visual trends and content.”
Paddy McLean: “I worked on so many UK dance records at Polydor Label Group and through Chaos. When the NOTION remix really took off, what ended up happening was there were so many trends and angles, and what we started to learn was that there were certain trends that worked for certain regions in the world.”
“The snow sports stuff was huge in Europe, America and Australia, and in South East Asia there was a slowed-down version which was trending. So this very British record sung in England was translating itself into different cultures through these different visual trends.”
Dulcie MacKechnie: “The verticals also work differently in different territories. CarTok for instance, it was 4x4s in Australia that seemed to move, but it was motorbikes in Ireland. It was interesting to see just how much you can hone in on one vertical in each different territory.”
Paddy: “Another takeaway — for a few years, there was a lot of conversation about how well the UK can export artists and songs these days. Have TikTok and Instagram and social media made it not possible for British artists because of scale?”
“This thankfully and a couple of other recent examples is just showing that if the record is good, and presented in a way that can connect on a human level, actually yes the UK can do this. And that’s invigorating for us at the label.”
I came into this industry without any prior knowledge or connections. I learned so much from Music Ally’s articles and the Sandbox magazines – so I owe Music Ally for that. Sung Cho — Founder and CEO, Chartmetric
