In 2012, Casey Cooper was sitting in the back of a college lecture hall when he figured out he had something. The night before, he’d posted a cover of a Skrillex track to YouTube, and by morning it had hit the front page of Reddit. Then the front page of YouTube itself. He looked up and saw four laptops open in front of him in the stadium seating. All four were playing his video.
None of those students knew he was in the room.
“That was kind of the moment where I was like, hey, I think I could do this thing,” Cooper said.
Now, Cooper is the Director of Content Strategy at Sweetwater, the Fort Wayne-based music retailer that’s become one of the most recognized names in the gear world. He got there by spending more than 15 years building channels with millions of combined followers, working independently with brands before eventually joining the team full-time two years ago. The pull of building something bigger drew him in.
Holding attention is the whole game
Over the years, Cooper has learned that every platform, from YouTube to TikTok to Instagram, measures one thing, and that’s viewer retention.
“Every single platform just wants you to hold viewers’ attention,” he said. “If you can realize that one thing, that’s going to solve so many of your problems.”
On long-form YouTube, that means average view duration. On short-form, it’s how many people stopped scrolling and how long they stayed after that. Click-through rate matters too, but it’s secondary. For maximum success you need a high CTR, but you can have a great thumbnail and a terrible video. The platform will figure that out fast.
Originality is what drives retention. Cooper’s Skrillex cover spread because nobody had seen dubstep played on a marimba and cajon. A later video went viral because he set a kick drum vertically and played it with a basketball. The crossover is the hook. The uniqueness is what keeps people coming back.
“If you can’t do it first, then you have to do it better or more creatively or in a more unique way than the other people that have done it,” he said. “What’s really tough is doing the same thing that everyone else is doing and expecting different results. When you aren’t the first, you aren’t being unique, you aren’t being creative and you aren’t putting your own spin on it, you’re kind of stuck.”
Great gear helps, great content wins
At Sweetwater, Cooper is surrounded by some of the best equipment available. His long-form setup runs a Canon R5 with an R6 as a B-cam. But the camera he actually carries everywhere is a DJI Osmo Pocket 3.
During a session with Todd Sucherman, drummer for Styx, Cooper pulled out the Pocket 3 while a full Blackmagic Design rig with multiple cameras was already set up in the room. He captured a quick take, synced it with the studio audio already rolling and uploaded it. The short amassed 350,000 views, while the long-form, full-production shoot received 20,000.
The John Mayer shoot told the same story on a bigger scale. Sweetwater brought full production for a signature guitar release: sliders, multiple cameras and serious lighting. The polished multicam cuts performed well. The footage that outperformed everything came from a single iPhone Cooper had propped up near the main camera, capturing Mayer sitting with his pedals and amp. One angle, no crew. “It’s not necessarily about the gear to the extent as it is allowing people into the moment,” Cooper said.
It’s a point he makes deliberately, even working for a retailer. “I also care, and Sweetwater also cares, that you don’t buy gear thinking that’s going to be the key to success,” he said. “The content has to be the key.”
Where he does push creators to invest is audio. “What you really need is you need to make sure that you’ve got a nice mic so when you’re talking you can hear it well.” Bad sound kills good footage. Clean audio can carry footage shot on a phone. It’s something Sweetwater’s depth in audio gear is built around, helping creators get that part right before worrying about anything else.
What running Sweetwater’s content actually looks like
As Cooper transitioned from being a solo creator to running Sweetwater’s content strategy, he faced a challenge most solo creators never face. At a retailer of Sweetwater’s size, the audience isn’t a single group of people. It’s dozens of overlapping niches with almost nothing in common as viewers.
“It’s not just like we’re trying to create something for a guitarist,” Cooper said. “It’s ‘This product is for a very specific type of guitarist who uses this specific type of gear at this time or this stage or plays this style.’”
His solution was to split Sweetwater’s YouTube presence into two channels. The flagship, approaching a million subscribers, needs broadly appealing content. Put a keyboard video in front of an audience of guitarists and the engagement craters, sending bad data to the algorithm regardless of how good the video is. “It goes out to such a wide audience of people and if the wrong people see it at the wrong time, and those viewers result in negative data points, then it tanks,” Cooper said.
The second channel runs on SEO, built to get in front of the exact viewer already searching for a specific product or concept. On that channel, subscriber count isn’t the goal. It can actively hurt you.
“Subscribers no longer are a goal, which is a weird thing to say to anybody who wants content,” Cooper said. For niche, product-specific content, reaching the right 10,000 people beats reaching the wrong million every time.
Know who you’re talking to
Asked what he’d tell a creator starting from zero, Cooper stresses the importance of building something people actually want to watch.
“Figure out who your audience is and figure out what they want,” he said. “If you create what it is that you want to create and nobody wants it, then there’s no career, there’s no views, there’s no subscribers, there’s no brand deals.”
“Your audience is actually so important to the success of what it is that you’re creating because they’re the ones that make it viral or not. They’re the ones that watch it. They’re the ones that share it.”
That’s the framework Cooper has refined over 15 years, and it’s the same thinking he brings to Sweetwater every day, helping creators find the right gear, the right audio setup and the right strategy to make content that actually sticks.
So, if you’re just starting out or trying to scale, Sweetwater’s team of experts is there to help you get there. You can visit Sweetwater.com to get started.
