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Iñigo Quintero is a 22-year-old singer from A Coruña and author of the world’s number 1 song. He is the 249th most listened to singer in the world. But a few weeks ago no one knew him.
I don’t know if the song is better or worse. I’ve heard everything, but I’m sure there will be something. Also that there is a cycle change from reggaeton to pop. But the topic that interests me most in a technology newsletter is virality. Why and how did it happen? The cynical temptation with such unexpected success is to believe that there is a black hand behind it, holding the reins of our taste.
It is more likely, as often happens in exceptional cases, that not just ONE THING happens, but several at the same time. These are the basic facts.
Quintero released If you are not on Spotify in September 2022. It was his first song on the platform. He released another in February. None of them went viral at the level we are at today. And a year has passed. It is therefore easy to argue that something strange happened between then and now when it exploded. An important detail is that Quintero has signed with Acqustic, a digital label dedicated to promoting emerging music.
Acqustic did its job: place the song better on all platforms and try to promote it with digital strategies. But there is another important detail. When Acqustic signed Quintero in March, he had about 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. It’s enough for an unknown musician with two songs and no networks. Who was listening to him? The most likely answer lies close to Christianity.
On February 9, the YouTube channel 10 Minutes with Jesus released a video titled “When You’re Not Here.” This is how the video begins: “My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with deep reverence, I ask you for forgiveness of my sins and for the grace to do so. “Time of prayer.” Immediately afterwards, the announcer asks the “guardian angel” for intercession and adds: “Listen to the The beginning of this song.” And it plays If you are not here by Iñigo Quintero.
In this video prayer they declare, “I want to see you, see you, see you,” the final verse of Quintero’s song coinciding with a psalm by Teresa of Calcutta. 22,000 people have seen this video. 10 Minutes with Jesus has its own app and is shared on WhatsApp and other platforms. The actual audience was much larger. The majority of priests recording the 10-minute virtual prayers with Jesus are from Opus Dei, says one of its supporters here. And he adds that the idea behind 10 Minutes with Jesus happened to come from a “mother of a large family” from a Fomento school in A Coruña, the same religious institution and city where Iñigo Quintero studied.
Three weeks later, on March 1, Radio María’s show and podcast El hombre de hoy y Dios talked about a song that “we discovered by a young man named Iñigo Quintero.” One of the speakers added: “This topic is becoming more and more popular.” [en marzo]. The texts have great meaning and have been used in some meditations.” They also spoke about Teresa of Calcutta, but left open that the real meaning is human love: “Every person, what inspires him,” said the priest who led the program presents.
Photo of the “Young Catholics” page showing Iñigo Quintero as an interpreter of the Christmas carol “Déjamelo 10 minutes with me”.
But religious inspiration is the most likely meaning. Iñigo Quintero’s career was linked to religious songs and songs of Opus Dei. In December 2022 he collaborated with me on the Christmas song Déjamelo 10 minutes with vocals and piano. This song comes from Luispo, a musician-priest with 44,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and a quote from Josemaría de Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, in his biography. Quintero had already collaborated with Luispo in December 2022 on a tribute to another priest of the Orvalle school entitled “Alma, calm,” where he was a piano player and music editor. The review of this song is linked to Quintero’s Spotify page, which was a remote corner of the platform in December and is now that of the author of the most listened to song in the world.
This Christian vitality was able to give If You Are Not the starting signal. Quintero didn’t start from scratch. There were people who listened to him. The theory behind virality is that it’s possible to start at the bottom, but for it to explode you need a small network with lots of connections. Religion could play this role, at least in part.
Then came the digital stamp. And it kept growing. In June, singer Javi Chapela, who released a collaboration with Quintero, said: “[Quintero] “He’s a guy from A Coruña who uploaded a song and rocks it.” If in June “I rocked it,” what happens now?
A boom on TikTok, but not just for couples
Between this better distribution and today, there has been a TikTok boom in between. It’s easy to find religious connections. In August, viral videos emerged, some of which were from a concert he gave at the Galileo Galilei Hall in Madrid. But others came from Christian influencers. This week, this video of a young influencer who wanted to see Quintero live at Cadena 100’s joint concert went viral. He was obviously excited, but he was laughed at on Twitter/X for his passion. But he, Marcos Ricbour, writes in this Tiktok: “The people who follow us know how IMPORTANT this is for us, we know all his songs and we have been following him since before he became so famous.”
He has been releasing songs by Quintero since August: “He’s already one of my favorite singers,” he said in a video with almost 1 million views. To understand the importance of a community in the emergence of virality, Quintero’s sister, a university classmate (Villanueva, in Mirasierra, also from Opus Dei) or a schoolmate appear in the comments on this video. In other videos, Ricbour dedicates Quintero’s song “Jesus” and talks about his trip to World Youth Day in Lisbon in August to visit the Pope with the DJ-priest.
TikTok’s subsequent boom was linked to a trend for couple photos. Could be. This success is not based on a single pillar. Many things are happening at the same time. It’s also obvious that there was a human role on the platforms, but the song’s appeal is also real. The difference from other times is that before you had to wait for the radio to rebroadcast the song or buy it: it was a single signal, now every new listen counts. The hits are more democratic because listeners are constantly voting with their listeners.
Spotify takes this into account. Playlists are essential to discovery: “A playlist’s curation strategy has two communication channels,” says the company. “Listening is an action. The person listening sends very strong signals through their actions, from pressing play to skipping a particular song within a particular list,” he adds.
Then comes the matter: Which songs are on our playlists? Well, the ones that other people like us like: “The playlists are created thanks to precise human selection by Spotify’s team of music experts, with comprehensive data analysis from millions of users in real time.” “Spotify doesn’t choose which artists to promote,” says Spotify. And they add: “We dive into hundreds of songs to select which ones are suitable for inclusion in a playlist.” The word “dive” there probably means “which one gets heard more” rather than “which one gets liked more.” .
Virality is not just magic
Quintero’s case is another example of how virality is not magic, but neither is it possible to easily create it. Signs of the appeal of a topic are crucial. And that happens or it doesn’t happen. When it happens, the people behind the artists are pulling all the strings: One easy way is to call the people at Spotify to see exactly how the song is getting likes and being saved to personal libraries. The goal, as always, is to get it as high as possible. However, no one would have thought that “If You Are Not” would reach such great heights.
These cables that started moving and are supposedly dark are something normal in the industry: they are called a pitch or proposal. A pitch is a mix of data and reasons why a platform should prioritize that song and put it on more playlists, recommended playlists, so that the algorithm shows it to more users. Is this happening for some unclear reason? Maybe someone has, but the clearest reason is the simplest: more and more people are hearing it.
A platform wants interactions. If this song is driving historic highs in listening on Spotify or video creation on TikTok, then why not promote it humanly and algorithmically? The human role becomes clear when you see it growing in Spain, for example, you have to start talking to the platform teams in Latin America and the rest of Europe and Asia. Or if you see it’s a hit on Spotify, you need to run out and talk to the people at Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, or Tidal. With the data behind them, everyone strives to show the song more often because it generates a larger audience.
Then there are specific problems. There is no video clip for the song, so it didn’t initially receive much response on YouTube. Apple Music ranks 100th overall because it has a smaller implementation in Spain and arrived late. There are probably more explanations than meets the eye.
What platform will limit the growth of a song to the point where people listen to it 100 times on a loop? If the origin is more or less Christian, who cares now?
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