The music industry spent decades perfecting the art of the spike. Entrepreneur Ievgen Poltavskyi states that the model is structurally broken. And he’s building an alternative.
There’s a line Ievgen Poltavskyi keeps coming back to in conversation. More like an operating principle he’s tested against real numbers and found to hold:
Poltavskyi is the founder and architect of HitsLab – a music project that, in its first 15 months, crossed 3.8 million downloads and 35 million public views without spending a dollar on paid promotion. No label infrastructure, influencer deals or ad budget. Just a catalog of music designed, from its first track, to function as a layer inside someone else’s content.
That distinction – music for content, not music as content – is the foundation of everything he’s building. And it puts him at a very specific intersection: music, platform economics, and the creator economy, where the rules of what makes music valuable are being rewritten in real time.
We spoke with Poltavskyi about what’s actually shifting in the industry, why the hit model is losing its structural advantage, and what it looks like to engineer music for scale rather than for attention.
There’s a tendency to describe any new music platform as “disrupting the industry.” You seem to avoid that framing. So let’s start differently: what is HitsLab, actually?
HitsLab creates and distributes music that is purpose-built for mass use by content creators – it’s quite simple and completely legal. But I wouldn’t call it just a catalog. It’s an entire system where music is designed as a functional layer of content.
We’re entering a period where music stops being a commodity and becomes infrastructure for digital content. The creator economy doesn’t need hits. It needs fast, safe, and scalable solutions. That’s the systemic gap we close.
When you say “functional layer” – what does that mean for someone who’s never thought about music in those terms?
It means that in the creator economy, music is no longer the final creative choice. It’s an operational decision. Creators don’t pick the “best” track. They pick the one they can find fast, use safely, embed easily into their edit, and confidently repeat.
Brands are looking for consistency. Production teams need speed. Independent creators want predictability. In every case, utility wins. The track that reduces friction in a creator’s workflow is the track that gets used – and reused. That’s the functional layer.
And HitsLab is built for that third stage.
Entirely. Free access wasn’t ever a pricing decision for us, it’s actually a distribution strategy. It expands the top of the funnel and generates network effects. When your music is embedded in tens of thousands of pieces of content, that’s not lost revenue. Free distribution expands access, mass usage creates data, and repeat use builds long-term value.
Let’s talk about the numbers. 3.8 million downloads and 35 million views in 15 months is a significant scale for any content platform, let alone one with zero paid promotion. What drove that?
Practical utility. That’s it.
When music reduces friction, it starts spreading through use. At that point, the catalog stops behaving like a library and starts behaving like infrastructure. We’re observing a behavioral shift in how creators relate to music. The speed of that growth is what matters most, and the fact that it happened without traditional marketing pressure tells you everything about where the demand actually lives.
Hundreds of tracks embedded in daily video production. Tens of thousands of applications across user-generated content. And the primary driver behind all of it was that the music was easy to find, safe to use, and functional enough to repeat.
You’ve made the argument that the viral hit model is losing its structural sustainability. That’s a big claim in an industry that still largely revolves around hits. What’s your reasoning?
A hit gives you a spike of attention. An infrastructure track creates thousands of application points. The economics are fundamentally different.
The traditional music model is built around releases and peak attention. But the creator economy operates on a logic of continuous output, where repeatability matters more than uniqueness. Music becomes part of the production process. In that reality, repeat usage becomes the new form of demand.
Music is increasingly moving from the economy of attention to the economy of use. And in the economy of use, the winner is the one whose music becomes embedded in everyday content creation.
You mentioned repeat usage as a key metric. What other indicators define success for HitsLab, and why those specifically?
Repeat usage is the north star. Then retention – how many creators come back after their first download. Then breadth of application – how many different contexts a single track ends up in across different creators, formats, and geographies.
Traditional music metrics – streams, chart positions – are almost irrelevant to what we do. We care about whether a track becomes part of someone’s production routine. That’s the signal that tells us we’re building infrastructure, not just distributing audio.
How does a track designed for infrastructure actually differ from a conventional song or release?
A conventional release is optimized for listening. It wants to hold your attention from start to finish as a standalone experience. An infrastructure track is optimized for embedding – it needs to work inside someone else’s creative output.
That means clean entry and exit points for editing. Emotional clarity that supports visual content without competing with it. Structural predictability so a creator can cut it, loop it, layer it without second-guessing. The design principles are closer to product design than to traditional songwriting. We don’t make music for playlists.
How has creator behavior around music shifted in recent years? What do they expect now that they didn’t before?
The shift is fundamental. A few years ago, creators still treated music as a creative choice – something you browse, audition, deliberate over. Today, for high-volume creators, it’s operational. They want speed, safety, consistency. They want to know the track they used last week is still available, still safe, still works the same way.
Brands have moved in the same direction – they want sonic consistency across campaigns, not one-off selections. The whole market is migrating from curation to utility.
If you were building HitsLab from scratch today, what principles would you hardcode into the foundation?
Five things. First – scale over scarcity. Value is created not by restricting access but by the breadth of use. Second – repeat usage as the core metric of popularity. Repeated application matters more than one-time attention. Third – free access as a strategic accelerator. It expands the top of the funnel and creates network effects. Fourth – music as product. Tracks are designed for use, not just for listening. Fifth – cumulative catalog value. Every new track strengthens the infrastructure, and the infrastructure strengthens every track in the catalog.
Where does this go? What role do infrastructure music platforms play in 5–10 years?
Music is going through the same transformation that software and media already went through – from a model of ownership to a model of access. Free access stops being a marketing instrument and becomes the baseline infrastructure layer of the creator economy.
AI will only accelerate this transition. User flows will be directed toward wherever there’s less friction and more practical value. In that reality, the value of music will increasingly be measured not by listens, but by repeated use.
The platforms that win will be the ones that deliver speed, safety, scale, and minimal friction. The creator economy is only accelerating. And that means demand will grow specifically for infrastructure solutions.
Ievgen Poltavskyi is a creative music entrepreneur, founder and architect of HitsLab – a scalable music ecosystem used by hundreds of thousands of content creators globally. A former lead casting director for X-Factor Ukraine, his current work sits at the intersection of music, platform economics, and the creator economy. HitsLab’s catalog is available on Pixabay.
