The Secret of Creating Viral Content from J. S. Bach and DJ Earworm

What does a guy who’s been dead for almost 265 years have to do with Social Media and creating viral content?

Let’s start with J. S. Bach. Johann Sebastian Bach was a brilliant composer who not only composed his own music, but he also augmented it, which in musical terms is called a “Variation on a Theme”. Think about it, Social Media is all basically a “Variations on a Theme”. Classical music composers would write a simple harmonized melody that either the original composer or other’s embellished upon.

This is similar to the way that we all use social media or our blogs to share information. When Facebook’s reach and engagement fell off a cliff we all composed tweets, blogs and Facebook posts on the subject. The information was the same yet it was shared by countless people via different social portals therefore it was a modern day ‘Variation on a Theme’.

Fast forward to present day modern music and the brilliant and talented DJ Earworm. He’s not a composer yet he has a huge fan base for his music. If you aren’t familiar with DJ Earworm his claim to fame is his compilations of popular music from the previous year into one amazing “song”. DJ Earworm does not compose his own music. What he does is take audio and video clips from the top musicians, for example, of a particular year to create his compositions.

Here is his tie in to social media, a vast number of social media experts that we all know and love have created entire businesses repurposing OPC – Other Peoples Content. They know just which content to share to fully optimize their fan’s experience again similar to D.J. Earworm.