Why I Started Making Songs About Marketing

Let me tell you about a freelancer.

Not a bad person. Not incompetent. Just... gone. The kind of gone where you send a message and you can see they've read it. The kind of gone where three days pass and the social media post that needed editing is still sitting there, wrong, collecting dust on a client's feed. The kind of gone where you finally get a response - and the excuse is so magnificently, impressively stupid that you almost respect it.

I was sitting with a group of fellow marketers. We'd all been there. We all knew that specific mix of helplessness and dark comedy that comes with being let down at the worst possible moment on the most replaceable possible task. Someone told the story. The room groaned. Then someone laughed. Then everyone laughed. And for a few days, that story became our shared folklore - the kind of thing you reference in passing, the kind of shorthand that bonds a professional group together through shared trauma.

That story became my first song.

I didn't plan to make a music brand out of it. I didn't sit down one morning and think, what this industry needs is an AI-generated discography. It started the way most good things start: with a room full of people laughing at something painful, and a nagging feeling that the pain was worth preserving.

I've Always Been Wired This Way

Before I tell you what Clicks & Swagger is, I need to tell you something about myself that most people don't know: music has been important to me my entire life - just not in the way most people assume.

I never became a musician. I tried instruments. Several of them. I don't have the patience to build a skill that slowly. There's something about holding a guitar and knowing that the sound you want is months of practice away that makes me want to put the guitar down and go do seventeen other things instead.

But music? Music in my body? That's a different story.

I grew up in Bulgaria, and folklore dance was part of the culture before I could form an opinion about it. Then came swing. Then c-walk. Then popping and other hip hop styles. My relationship with music has always been physical - it lives in movement, in rhythm, in the way a beat changes how your feet want to hit the floor. I don't make music. I feel it. I express through it.

So when people hear "Clicks & Swagger" and picture some marketer who stumbled into audio content as a growth hack, I want to correct that image. This isn't a content format I picked because it tested well. This is what happens when someone who has always used music to express themselves finally finds an entry point that doesn't require two years of practicing scales.

AI gave me that entry point.

What Agency Life Actually Feels Like

If you've never run a marketing agency - or worked inside one - let me describe a Tuesday.

It begins with something marked URGENT. Caps. Bold. Sometimes an exclamation mark. The client needs something immediately. Not tomorrow, not end of day, now. You drop what you were doing. You brief your team. You rearrange the afternoon. You deliver.

And then, mysteriously, the urgent thing stops being mentioned. It happens so quietly you almost miss it. No acknowledgment. No "thank you, that's perfect." Just silence, and the implicit understanding that the crisis has passed and everyone should move on.

This happens roughly three to five times a week.

Meanwhile, you're managing relationships, chasing invoices, keeping up with algorithm changes that nobody asked for, GDPR compliance that feels like it was written to punish people for trying to do their jobs, and the perpetual existential question of whether what you're doing is actually working or whether you're just generating professional-looking reports about numbers that don't matter.

It's a strange career. Genuinely creative, often thrilling, full of real craft and real strategy - and also full of small indignities that nobody outside the industry would believe. The clients who disappear when it's time to give feedback and reappear when it's time to complain. The platforms that change their rules mid-campaign. The metrics that look great until someone asks the one question that makes them fall apart.

We laugh about it. That's how you survive it.

And I started writing the jokes down in the form of lyrics.

The Moment It Became Real

Early 2025. The freelancer story was still fresh. I was already tinkering with AI tools - generating images, automating pieces of the workflow, seeing what the technology could actually do at the edge of its capabilities. And I had this moment of pure curiosity: what if I wrote this story as a song?

I wrote the lyrics. Fed them into Suno. Waited.

What came back was - honestly - better than I expected. And funnier. The kind of funny where you listen once and your shoulders drop with relief, because the absurdity you'd been carrying around in your chest had finally been named and set to a beat.

I played it to four or five people. Marketing people. People who had been in that room, who knew that freelancer story, who had their own versions of it. They laughed. Not politely - actually laughed. The kind of laughter that means you've captured something true.

And then something happened that I didn't expect: it became a trendmark. Not in a viral, algorithmic sense - in a human sense. People started referencing it. Started asking if I was going to make another one. The song became shorthand for that whole category of professional experience: the ignored message, the ridiculous excuse, the shared exhaustion of expecting reliability from people who think disappearing is a strategy.

I made another one. And another. Within 48 to 72 hours of an idea landing, I could have a finished track.

Why It's Called Clicks & Swagger

The name took about thirty seconds to feel right, and I've never wanted to change it.

Marketers live for clicks. Not just as a metric - clicks are validation. Clicks mean someone stopped, noticed, cared enough to press. We chase them, measure them, optimize for them, and quietly despair when they don't come. Clicks are the currency of attention, and attention is the only resource we're actually competing for.

Swagger is something else. Swagger is the confidence that what you're doing is worth paying attention to. The marketers I respect most have it - not arrogance, not performance, but a genuine belief in their craft. The ability to walk into a room and make a case for something creative without apologizing for it.

Clicks & Swagger is both of those things. It's a project designed to earn attention and carry an attitude. And there's a second layer: the songs themselves are built from the vocabulary of our industry. Every title, every lyric, every reference - this is content about clicks. This is music with swagger. The name is the thesis.

The Gap That No Real Band Would Fill

Here's the question I asked myself when this started getting real: why hasn't anyone already done this?

Marketing is one of the most documented, meme-ified, complained-about industries in the world. We have conferences, podcasts, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, subreddits, Slack groups. We process our professional trauma through every medium imaginable.

Except music.

And I think I understand why. To make music about marketing, you'd need a band willing to care deeply about bounce rates and cookie consent and Google Analytics 4's particular brand of chaos. You'd need musicians who find the absurdity of GDPR as funny as the people living inside it. You'd need someone who thinks "lead gen lullaby" is a concept worth developing into an actual song - and then actually develops it.

No real band was going to do this. Not because it's beneath them, but because it requires a specific combination of industry knowledge and creative impulse that doesn't naturally produce musicians. It produces marketers.

Technology closed the gap. AI didn't replace a musician - it gave a marketer with a background in dance and a head full of industry frustrations the ability to make something that didn't exist before.

That felt worth doing.

What It Has Become

I want to be honest about what Clicks & Swagger is and isn't.

It is not a music career. I am not a music producer. I have no illusions about competing with artists who have spent their lives developing craft in that direction. AI-generated music is its own thing - it has a character, a texture, limitations and strengths that are different from music made by human hands. I don't pretend otherwise.

What it is is a stress reliever. A creative outlet that doesn't require me to be anything other than someone who has opinions about marketing and knows how to write a lyric. It's the thing I turn to when the third URGENT email of the day arrives about something that will stop mattering by Thursday. It's how I process the shared absurdity of this industry in a way that makes other people in the industry feel less alone.

It's also, unexpectedly, an asset. When I play a track for someone in marketing, they either instantly get it or they don't - and the ones who get it usually want to know more. That's a better first impression than handing someone a business card. You can forget a business card. It's harder to forget the person who made a song about a freelancer going AWOL on social media edits.

The songs range across genres because marketing pain doesn't have a genre. Some tracks are melancholy, because the exhaustion is real. Some are pure comedy, because sometimes the only response to professional absurdity is a beat. The idea is that wherever you are emotionally on any given work day, there's probably a Clicks & Swagger track that meets you there.

The Marketing Pain Hook: Why Shared Frustration Travels

Every track on this project starts the same way: with a pain that is too specific to explain to anyone outside the industry, and too universal inside it to need explaining at all.

That is the hook. Not the melody - the recognition. The moment a marketer hears the first line and thinks someone else has lived this. Shared frustration is the most reliably forwardable thing in any profession, because forwarding it is how people say "you too?" without having to write the message themselves.

It also explains why generic content about marketing does nothing. "Attribution is hard" is a statement. "The channel that closed the deal will not be the channel that gets the credit" is a wound. The first gets a nod, the second gets sent to three people. Specificity is what turns a complaint into a hook, and it is the same mechanic behind why marketing humor works at all.

Sound just happens to be the best carrier for it. You can skim a post about burnout; you cannot skim a chorus about it. That is the argument in full in AI music as a marketing tool.

The Invitation

If you work in marketing - any corner of it, any level, any kind of organization - and you've ever felt like your industry's specific frustrations go undocumented, this project is partially for you.

Not because I have all the answers. Not because AI music is the future of branded content or thought leadership or whatever taxonomy people will eventually use to describe this. But because the stories we share in conference rooms and Slack channels and agency kitchens deserve to exist somewhere outside our heads.

The freelancer who went AWOL is real. The URGENT email that stops being urgent the moment it's delivered is real. The late night before a campaign launch when three platforms simultaneously change something fundamental and you have to pretend everything is fine is real.

The laughter that follows is also real. That's where Clicks & Swagger lives.

Cry a little. Laugh a lot. Share the emotional trauma with your marketing friends.

That's what this is for.

Lachezar Simeonov is a Fractional CMO and growth marketer, in marketing since 2014, and the creator of Clicks & Swagger, an AI-generated music brand that turns digital marketing pain points into genre-diverse songs. He runs 4 Pillars Digital and is based in Bulgaria.

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