On my first day researching Old Town Road I read a quote from Nas:
On my first day researching Old Town Road I read a quote from Nas:
A lot of people like to say “a kid accidentally got lucky”. No. This was no accident.
The more I learned about Nas the more I believed him.
A key moment in Old Town Road's rise was a video of a man standing on a galloping horse going viral on Twitter. The audio was set to Old Town Road. Different versions of the video were viewed millions of times.
I wanted to know how the video spread, so I did some digging and found it first posted on the 24th December: (see tweet)
I asked the Twitter user why he made the video. He told me that Nas sent it to him. But it doesn't end there.
Aware that people watching the video would search for the full song, Nas changed the song title on YouTube and SoundCloud to include the lyric from the viral video — “I got the horses in the back”.
He also posted on the NameThatSong subreddit which ranked on Google. Now, anyone searching from the video had an easy route to the song.
Things didn’t happen to Nas. Things happened because of Nas
Virality is not mystical. The story of Old Town Road is not magical.
Look behind the curtain: Nas is sitting in his underpants, on his sister's couch, iPhone in hand, making the whole thing happen.
No one knew him. No one wanted to check out his song. No one promoted anything for him.
He made friends, made them laugh, and built an audience. Then he packaged his song in a way that fit into their life. The rest is history.
A final quote from Nas to end:
u can literally scroll down my account and see my promoting this fuckin song for months. each accomplishment it gets just makes all this shit feel so worth it. i can’t stop taking about it.