By Artem Shargin, Co-Founder and COO of 0to8
Let's admit it. Music doesn't sit still anymore. There was a time when you had to go somewhere specific to hear a song – a concert, a record store, a friend's house with a decent stereo. Now music finds you from every direction. Every time you scroll, on every app, through every video you watch.
The life cycle of a song has changed too. Tracks used to live for years, played often on the radio and lingered in people's collections. Now they're shorter, consumed faster, and forgotten quicker. If you want a track to last today, you have to give it new life, share it widely, and keep putting it out there over and over again.
This incredible speed-up is clear to see. Songs now go viral faster than ever. The time required for a track to reach 100,000 TikTok posts dropped from roughly 340 days in 2020 to just 48 days in 2025. Trends don't slowly build anymore; they simply explode. Being fast is essential to how things work now in this environment.
At 0to8 (Zero to Infinity) we've built our entire approach around this new reality. We focus on helping artists grow significantly, using smart data, especially through social media like TikTok and other digital platforms.
I want to talk a little bit about how we got here.
It Started With Roblox and Micro-Communities
For us specifically, everything started inside Roblox. We quickly learned something important: the young audience inside that world was more engaged than just a general audience anywhere else. They weren't just listening to music. They were creating, sharing, and building culture around the songs they loved.
So, we began with niche, high-impact content – early narrative-style videos built around Roblox tracks. That's when we figured out how it all worked. When a new song comes out, we look for its potential. We tag it strategically, find the smaller groups of people who would likely enjoy it, and then share it with them. Then the track scales, spreads, and goes viral. That's the model.
+Read more: "Which Music Genres Work Best in Which Months? Our Full Breakdown."
Moving Into TikTok and Other Platforms
Now when a track comes out, our first step is to instantly figure out where it truly belongs. Does it work with anime edits? Car content? Soccer clips? We then make sure to push it specifically in those directions.
If the algorithms start picking it up and we see it gaining popularity, we move fast. We quickly launch remixes, pushing into genres tied to our artists. Because if a track works in one style, chances are it can work in others too. So instead of treating a track as a single product, we view it as raw material.
The old model looked like this: a track drops, gains popularity, racks up millions of streams, and then slowly fades away. Then the label says, "Let's do a remix." After that, it's time to chase the next hit.
Our approach is different. One piece of content turns into multiple tracks that extend its overall lifespan. Songs today often run just 1.5 to 2 minutes long, and they disappear just as quickly. You have to extract everything from them while they're still alive.
Virality Is the New Gold
Virality has become a direct predictor of chart success. In 2024, 84% of songs that entered the Billboard Global 200 went viral on TikTok before they ever charted. In addition to being a promotional support, short videos became the ignition system for mainstream hits.
That's why the viral moment among content creators is everything. One creator sees an edit using your track. They think it's powerful, and create their own version. Then another creator picks it up and makes their own edit. That's organic viral promotion – momentum that costs nothing. As an example, one of our strongest cases: a fragment of our track "Heavenly Jumpstyle" was paired with a dance on TikTok and went viral.
At the same time, a new season of a popular anime dropped on Netflix, and the track was picked up by the anime edit community as well. It started spreading organically, breaking through via the dance trend to a majority female audience that watches TikTok dances, while simultaneously reaching anime fans who consume those edits.
The track took off not because of a traditional push, but because of cultural timing, remixability, and creator adoption — and it remained on the Billboard charts for six consecutive weeks.
+Read more: "Why No One Is Reviewing Your Album"
The Age of Musical Abundance
More music is being created today than ever before. With this huge amount of new stuff, you have to develop strategies that expand a track's reach through multiple versions and remixes - and you have to do it quickly.
Songs are often released not only in their original format, but alongside four or five alternative versions at different speeds. This has become the new standard. From there, tracks extend into adjacent genres, where they're again released in adapted versions.
And that's exactly what we do here at 0to8. We produce music that is ready to be quickly enjoyed and shared. We give young artists a real chance to break through. We identify micro-communities and distribute content within them so those communities can carry it forward themselves.
In a fast-music climate, the task is not just to release a track. The main goal is to ignite creators and communities that will multiply your content for you.
The Bigger Picture
The global rise of independent labels working with emerging artists reflects something real. Small independents keep gaining ground because they move faster and think more flexibly. And their success now pushes major labels, the wider music industry, and digital culture to keep evolving.
The fast-food music era has arrived. The question now is simply how quickly you adapt.
Artem Shargin is a co-founder and COO of 0to8 (Zero to Infinity), a next-generation music label that builds scalable, data-driven artist growth systems through TikTok and other digital platforms. Today, the project is expanding in the MENA region with a strong focus on international growth. Prior to 0to8, Artem was a co-founder and CEO of Virtual Rags, a U.S.-based digital fashion company founded in 2020.
