Loïs Serre and Josh Chergui will soon celebrate the 10th anniversary of Trinix. With 60 million streams on Spotify in 2021, their career is growing at a rapid pace. Among their assets, a community of more than 500,000 followers on TikTok that they have built with the help of short playful videos. A great lever to develop your career and promote your music. Explanations.

Your beginnings with social networks, it was on Soundcloud, 10 years ago?

Yes, we were releasing one sound per week at the time. It was a little challenge we gave ourselves. We listened a lot to advice and we learned from that first audience, which was mostly family and friends.

What about TikTok ?

You have to be very active today. The algorithms make sure that the more regular and calibrated the content is, the more you will be put forward. On Tiktok, we try to make an average of one or two videos per week.

What kind of videos ?

Very short, very funny, very impressive. On TikTok it’s creativity, dance and of course humor that are valued in videos from 15 seconds to 1 minute. We have to convince a young audience, from the digital generation. You have to get to the heart of the matter right away, get to the point. In twelve seconds, people must think that what you have done is great and that it deserves to be liked.

Are you buying followers or visibility?

No, we didn’t. We have never promoted or spent budgets to boost our videos. We believe in organic, quality content that creates engagement, without advertising. You have to go out and find people naturally.
It must be said that we joined TikTok at the right time: 3 months before the COVID epidemic, which gave us time to understand how TikTok worked. With the containment, when all the artists started using it without knowing how to use it yet, we were ready! It gave us a couple of steps ahead of the game and allowed our community to grow very quickly.

Your videos are often funny, but also quite educational, why?

We try to popularize our approach to music, to explain to people what we do, as simply as possible. Finally, people say “yes, I can do it too”. For example, when we do a remix of Beethoven, it looks easy! People identify themselves…

You are looking for the audience by remixing hits, or credits of successful series!

That’s not the point! We work by heart. We come from pop culture, we remix what we like to reinterpret it in our sauce. Then obviously, there are hits!

But the audience is important anyway!

Basically, making videos is a desire to share cool stuff and that’s cool, but it’s also a strategy because we don’t have access to media. The doors are closed and social networks are a way to get through, to have visibility, to be our own media.

We see that some media have less impact than our own social networks. When we release a new single, it has more impact to announce it on our social networks than on small media.

Is social networking essential today?

If we could do without it, we would. We love music first, composing, producing, and doing concerts. Unfortunately, it is necessary to be present on social networks. It is a necessary evil. Today any artist, even from the older generation, has no choice but to get on Instagram or TikTok. It has become an inescapable communication tool to gain exposure.

Especially since the media doesn’t work like it used to. They won’t talk about you because they like your music, but because you’re making the buzz on social networks.

You are also on Instagram, but less on Twitter…

With Twitter you have to write daily and that’s not our thing. Trinix is on Twitter, of course, because it’s useful, it allowed us to have shares with big media, but we feel better doing videos on TikTok.

And Twitch ?

So far, we’ve never tried to perform live. We’re definitely missing out on something important. But that would be sacrificing something else. Here, we try to concentrate on the essential, the music. There is a question of time, we cannot be everywhere, producer, youtuber, streamer, comedian…

Precisely, how do you reconcile the hours on network management, flow and creation, in the long term?

At the beginning, we worked in a just-in-time mode, but that means that all the time you’re thinking about the next video you’re going to make. That doesn’t leave any time for creation. Today we work in sessions. We shoot 4 or 5 videos in the same day, then we take care of the editing. But it happens, like recently with Squid Game, that we decide to make a TikTok video at the moment. And sometimes, we can make a remix to relax before returning to the production of our sounds in the studio.

Do you use the services of community managers or technicians to produce the images?

No. We do everything, all by ourselves. So we spend a lot of time there, but we are free to do what we want, when we want, how we want. It’s a chance!
In fact, we know the reality of social networks, we know what will work and why it will work.

Don’t you need anyone?

For social networks, we do everything, all by ourselves. We don’t need any help. We know how to do, we even give advice to some community managers! On the other hand, to accompany us in our professional development, yes, we need a team.

This success, it is also your professional entourage, Wiseband for example?

We arrived a year after the creation of Wiseband, so we learned everything with them and they learned everything with us! It’s a fusional relationship between Trinix and Wiseband! They manage to offer services worthy of the biggest companies while remaining 100% independent. They have helped us build our career, while remaining free, with no constraints.

Wiseband never stopped us from doing anything. They’ve done a great job of moving us forward. They helped us to develop on platforms like Apple, Spotify or Deezer. And we did the rest in terms of communication. Today, it’s thanks to Wiseband that we can make a living from our work.

You also have Cocto working on your radio promo?

Cocto is one of those people with whom we like to work, in a frank and human way. We understand each other, it’s rare. There aren’t that many people with these qualities. That’s why it’s difficult to surround yourself with people, to find a good manager for example. Our biggest wish is to have a real professional team with us, but we have to find one that is as good as the one we already work with. Otherwise, we’d rather be alone than be badly accompanied.

Soon the stage?

We are preparing a tour with Christophe Bosc from 3C. We already worked with him 4 years ago and they are at the top. It is planned for March 2022. We still have a lot to do to build the show, the scenography.

Would you like to do a concert on Fortnite or Roblox ?

Yes, definitely. We grew up with video games, we are geeks! Already, when Sony offered us to do a remix with the Playstation it was a great experience.

By the way, how do you manage the rights on remixes and mashups?

A mashup where there are 60 sounds, we wouldn’t try to clear it with 60 labels or 60 publishing houses. So we don’t file. On the Internet, you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t claim the rights.

Any advice for artists on how to manage their networks?

You have to be present everywhere, try.
From there, build a homogeneous communication universe on all the networks…