Why a B2B tech company dropped an album featuring professional artists

You might recognize ClickUp from the regional Super Bowl ad it ran last year. Maybe you use its project management software at work. Or perhaps it sounds familiar because you’ve listened to its album.

Earlier this year, the B2B tech company dropped an album called Work Flows, featuring 21 tracks by ClickUp employees and professional artists, as part of a marketing push, according to Chris Cunningham, a founding member of ClickUp and its head of influencer marketing.

“My goal is to always get creative, to make ClickUp look cool, and to always find eyeballs coming back to us, because, at the end of the day, we need more attention,” he told Marketing Brew. “Our goal is just to make people work more efficiently, but I think showing them that in a more cool, fun way is how we get ahead.”

Almost famous: ClickUp’s founders have roots in the music industry, according to Cunningham. When he and founder and CEO Zeb Evans were in college, they managed an artist that Cunningham said toured with Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller. The artist, Kenneth Harkness (who goes by K.J.) made “a song or two” at Cunningham’s request to be used for purposes like morning meetings. Cunningham eventually hired him as a creative coordinator at ClickUp.

When employees started asking where they could find those songs, Cunningham uploaded them to Spotify, which led to the idea for the album, he said. Cunningham had resources and connections, and Harkness has his own studio and made all the beats, which meant that the team didn’t spend any money on recording space for him or licensing.

However, ClickUp did spend money on studio time for a few artists, as well as commissioning one of the bigger ones: Clever, an Alabama rapper who’s worked with Justin Bieber, Post Malone, and Juice WRLD.

Credits: A lot of the songs on the album feature ClickUp employees, including Ricky Ruckus, who does design work as a contractor for the company, and Recruiting Coordinator Lyndon Enow, Cunningham said. The star power was meant to give it “a little more bang,” he said, but the album started with the fact that technically, the ClickUp team had the know-how to do it themselves.

Artists who worked on the album include singer-songwriter Michael Minelli; rapper and actor GaTa, of the FX show Dave, who’s worked with ClickUp on music before; independent artist Jiggy Tone; and country singer Phillip Good.

Cunningham and Harkness worked with the artists to “get a feel for what they wanted,” Cunningham explained, then Harkness went to work. All the songs on the album have something to do with work (not in a “cheesy” way, Cunningham noted), so they also collaborated with the artists on the lyrics to help make sure they stuck to that theme.

All in all, it took about six weeks to make, Cunningham said.

Results: About two months after its official release, timed to coincide with ClickUp’s LevelUp user conference, the album has almost 1 million streams across Spotify and Apple Music, according to Cunningham. Songs from the album have been featured on playlists like No Cap that have hundreds of thousands of streams, ultimately performing “beyond what I would have ever expected,” he said.

“We always have KPIs,” he explained, but for something like an album, they weren’t as clear cut. The company promoted the album on social and some of the artists involved promoted it as well.

Cunningham wanted to generate attention for the brand but also said in a worst-case scenario, at least the songs could be used in ClickUp’s social content, most of which features music.

“The song ‘Midnight,’ our most popular song, is doing pretty well as a sound [on TikTok], and we will continue to push that,” Cunningham told us. “We see people on Instagram tagging us in stories. My overall goal was to get 10,000 listeners, and I thought that would be incredible, but we [reached] five times that just with monthly listeners.”