Which musician have you found the most inescapable in 2024? Who seems to follow you around the internet, 24/7? Whose name do you see when you’re asleep, seemingly tattooed on to the inside of your eyelids? Easy: it’s Taylor Swift, isn’t it? And yes, that’s probably true for most people. But for me there’s someone that trumps even Taylor in the inescapability stakes: I’m talking, of course, about Solar Heavy.
Who? Well, quite. Solar Heavy, according to his bio, is a New Jersey-born electronic musician who, as far as I can tell, has never received any press coverage, isn’t on a label, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page and has never performed live. Yet without fail, every day for the past six months or so I have encountered his name more than any other artist by some distance, Swift included. That’s because I am a hopelessly inveterate user of X (formerly Twitter). And just about every time I log on to X (formerly Twitter), I am greeted with an advert for Solar Heavy’s latest track, accompanied by some hot pink-hued artwork and a usually garbled tagline: “spacelaced music just landed”; “Night Life Driving Music”.
Solar Heavy is one of those who has taken full advantage of the advertising situation that has opened up on X (formerly … let’s just call it Twitter from now on, shall we?) after the purchase of the social media site by Elon Musk in autumn 2022. Musk’s, ahem, eccentric management prompted a number of major companies, including Mars and Unilever, to quickly pull their ads from the site (Musk, rather ambitiously, is suing some of those companies for not advertising with him). Into that ad vacuum have stepped a number of scrappy upstarts looking to use the grand digital billboard that is Twitter to get their names out there: online casinos, cryptocurrency firms, violent mobile games and, of course, budding EDM musicians.
Solar Heavy isn’t the only artist who advertises on Twitter – I also get incessant ads for a Christian prog-metal artist called Hope Bloom – but he definitely seems to be the one who most assiduously content-bombs my timeline. I just spent the past five minutes scrolling, and I saw a Solar Heavy advert on at least three or four occasions. Say his name and my brain will immediately summon up the gaudy pinks and purples of his artwork. There is no escape at this stage. And I’m not alone: look at the replies to one of his adverts and you’ll see at least a couple of replies on a variation of “please leave me alone”. “Who are Solar Heavy and how much they spending on Twitter ads?” is a common question on Twitter, even from actual famous, headline-topping electronic acts.
Is the music any good? Well no, obviously not. It’s hideous – EDM by committee, lift music for the influencer age, completely devoid of any sense of context or place. (One song I just listened to is called Miami, but it sounds less Miami, more the reception of a PureGym.) Solar Heavy boasted in a tweet that he saves a fortune by using AI to make his artwork and videos, and I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out that extended to the songs, too.
Still, I doubt that matters all that much to Solar Heavy if the advertising is working and enough people are listening. Only it’s hard to tell if that’s the case. On Spotify he receives about 38,000 plays a month – not terrible but minuscule numbers when it comes to making money through Spotify’s notorious royalty rates. On Bandcamp, where stream numbers aren’t made public, his songs rarely seem to be “supported” (the term used for fans who bought a track or EP) by more than a handful of people. On YouTube meanwhile, he has 21,500 subscribers and more than 1m views for his videos, which again are solid enough numbers for an independent artist, but – even though YouTube’s royalty rates are more generous than Spotify – still not a huge income, especially if it’s not being subsidised with touring, merch and the other usual avenues available to bands and artists.
Maybe making money isn’t the immediate aim for Solar Heavy. Maybe at the moment he’s purely looking for exposure. It’s unclear how much he spends on this endless barrage of Twitter adverts (although he claimed it was roughly the cost of a meal at the Cheesecake Factory), but – with some of his ads getting upwards of 60m views – it is clear that they’re getting his name out there. It’s a bold gambit for an up-and-coming independent artist, and I wish him well. I just personally can’t bear to see one of his ads again. Next time one pops up I’m pushing the mute button.
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