How NPR's Tiny Desk became the biggest stage in music

Fast Company

2 days ago

Until last October, Argentinian musical duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso were more or less a regional act. Known for their experimental blend of Latin trap, pop, and rap, the pair had a fanbase, but still weren't cracking more than 3,000 daily streams across services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. Within a week, they shot up 4,700%—hitting 222,000 daily streams—according to exclusive data firm Luminate, which powers the Billboard charts. Suddenly Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso were global pop stars.
What changed? On Oct. 4, the pair were featured in a Tiny Desk Concert, part of NPR's 17-year-old video series featuring musicians performing stripped-down sets behind an office desk in the cramped Washington, D.C. headquarters of the public broadcaster.
In the concert video, the artists play five songs from their debut album Baño Maria, which came out last April. Paco's raspy voice emerges from underneath a puffy blue trapper hat while Ca7riel sports an over-the-top pout and a vest made of stitched-together heart-shaped plush toys. The pair sing entirely in Spanish, backed by their Argentinian bandmates (sporting shirts screenprinted with their visas) and an American horn section. The duo's performance quickly took off across the internet. Within five days, it had racked up more than 1.5 million views on YouTube, and hit 11 million in little more than a month. It also reverberated across social media: the NPR Music Instagram post garnering nearly 900,000 likes, and TikToks clips garnered hundreds of thousands of views.
In a year that featured Tiny Desk performances from buzzy stars like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, as well as established acts like Chaka Khan and Nelly Furtado, Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso's concert was the most-watched of 2024. It currently sits at 36 million views.
That virality translated to an influx of bookings for the duo, including a performance at Coachella in April, and upcoming slots at Glastonbury in June, FujiRock Japan in July, and Lollapalooza and Outside Lands in August. Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso's global tour includes sold-out dates at Mexico's 20,000-capacity Palacio de los Deportes and Chile's 14,000-seat Movistar Areana—and was previewed by an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in April.
'Through Tiny Desk, we've noticed media approaching us, promoters being very interested in offering their spaces and festivals, and many media outlets opening doors to show us to the world,' says Jonathan Izquierdo, the band's Spain-based tour manager who began working with the duo shortly after the Tiny Desk Concert debuted. 'We've managed to sell out summer arena shows in record time and we're constantly adding new concerts. Promoters are knocking on our doors to get the Tiny Desk effect.'
Tiny Desk, Big Influence
The Tiny Desk effect is something Bobby Carter, NPR Tiny Desk host and series producer, has seen firsthand. Carter has been at NPR for 25 years, including the past 11 on the Tiny Desk team. He took the reins when Bob Boilen, the longtime All Songs Considered host who launched Tiny Desk in 2008, retired in 2023.
The series—which now has more than 1,200 videos—began as an internet-first way for Boilen to showcase performances from musicians that were more intimate than what happens in bigger concert venues. The first installment, featuring folk artist Laura Gibson, went up on YouTube. Today, the concerts are posted on the NPR site with a writeup and credits, as well as YouTube, where NPR Music has 11 million followers. NPR Music also clips installments on Instagram, where it has 3 million followers.
In the early days, NPR staff reached out to touring bands to secure bookings. Acts coming through DC could often be cajoled into filming an installment before heading out to their venues for that night's sound check. Now, musicians come to DC just for the chance to record in NPR's offices.
'We don't have to worry about tours anymore,' Carter says. 'Labels and artists are willing to come in solely for a Tiny Desk performance. They understand the impact that a really good Tiny Desk concert can have on an artist's career.'
Early on, the stripped-down nature of the Tiny Desk—artists can't use any audio processing or voice modulation—lent itself to rock, folk, and indie acts. But a 2014 concert with T-Pain, in which the famously autotune-heavy singer unveiled an impressive set of pipes, showed how artists from a broader array of genres could shine behind the Tiny Desk.
'Everyone knows at this point that they're going to have to do something different in our space,' Carter says. 'It's a bigger ask for hip-hop acts and electronic acts, but most artists now understand how important it can be if they nail it.'
Carter highlights rapper Doechii as an artist who overhauled her sound for her Tiny Desk concert in December. Doechii's all-female backing band used trumpet, saxophone, guitar, and bass to transform songs from her mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal for the live setting. 'If you listen to the recorded version of her music, it's nothing like what you saw in that Tiny Desk,' Carter says.
Clips of Doechii's Tiny Desk virtuosity lit up social media, introducing the 'swamp princess' to new fans. The concert even inspired a viral parody, with writer-director-comedian Gus Heagary pretending to be an NPR staffer watching the performance.
Reimagining Old Favorites
It isn't just emerging acts that totally revamp their sound for a Tiny Desk opportunity. Established artists like Usher, Justin Timberlake, and Cypress Hill have followed T-Pain's lead and used NPR's offices to showcase reimagined versions of some of their most popular songs. When Juvenile recorded his installment in June 2023, he was backed by horns and saxophones, a violin and cello, and John Batiste on melodica. The New Orleans rapper played an acoustic version of 'Back That Azz Up' twice at the audience's request—the first encore in the series' history.
'I love what has happened with hip hop [on Tiny Desk],' Carter says. He explains that artists now approach the concert with the mindset: 'I have to really rethink what I've been doing for however long I've been doing it, and present it in a whole new way.'
Tiny Desk has also helped musicians like Juvenile, gospel artist Marvin Sapp, and percussionist Sheila E to reach new audiences while reminding listeners they're still making music. 'We're helping artists to re-emerge,' Carter says, 'tapping into legacy acts and evergreen artists [to help] breathe new life into their careers.'
In many ways, Tiny Desk now occupies a niche once filled by MTV Unplugged —but for the generation that has replaced cable with YouTube and streaming.
'Maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago, all of our favorite artists had this watershed moment in terms of a live performance,' Carter says. 'Back in the day it was MTV Unplugged. SNL is still doing their thing. But when you think about the generation now that lives on YouTube, some of these Tiny Desk performances are going to be the milestone that people point to when it comes to live performances.'
Building a Diverse Audience
When Carter talks about Tiny Desk concerts reaching a new generation of listeners, it's not conjecture. He notes that the NPR Music YouTube channel's 11 million subscribers are 'as young and diverse as it gets. It's almost half people of color [and] much younger than the audience that listens to NPR on air, which is an audience NPR has been trying to tap for a long time,' he says.
That diversity informs some of the special series that Tiny Desk produces. The Juvenile video was part of Carter's second run of concerts recorded for Black Music Month, in June. Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso's video was tied to El Tiny, a Latin-focused series that debuts during Latin Heritage Month (from mid September to mid October) and is programmed by Tiny Desk producer and Alt.Latino host AnaMaria Sayer.
Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso's tour manager, Izquierdo, has worked with artists featured in the series before. He says Tiny Desk is crucial for Latin American artists trying to break through. 'I've realized that for U.S. radio, Latin music benefits from Tiny Desk,' he says.
The Tiny Desk audience's broad demographics are also increasingly reflected in its broader programming. Bad Bunny's April installment took his reggaeton-inspired songs from recent album Debi Tirar Mas Fotos to their acoustic roots, using an array of traditional Puerto Rican, Latin American, and Caribbean instruments, such as the cuatro puertorriqueño, tiple, güicharo, and bongos. '[Our] audience informs a whole lot of what we do,' Carter says. I get so many pointers from YouTube comments like 'Have you heard of this artist?' We're watching all that stuff because it helps us stay sharp.'
Tiny Desk heard round the world
With a strong global audience, Tiny Desk has been expanding into Asia. In 2023, NPR struck a licensing deal with South Korean Telecom LG U+ and production company Something Special to produce Tiny Desk Korea for television. Last year, NPR inked a deal with the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) to launch Tiny Desk Concerts Japan. 'We're really expanding in terms of global reach,' Carter says.
Here in the States, Carter and Sayer recently launched Tiny Desk Radio, a series that will revisit some of the series' notable installments, sharing behind-the-scenes stories from their productions and playing the audio from the concerts 'Our engineers put a lot of time and effort into making sure that we sound great,' Carter says. 'I hear it a lot—people tell me they prefer an artist's Tiny Desk over anything.'
That's something Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso clearly have on their mind as they navigate the Tiny Desk effect and a new level of recognition (their daily streams haven't dipped below 50,000 a day since the beginning of the year). The duo released an EP in February, Papota, which features four new songs, plus the recorded versions of their pared-down Tiny Desk performances. They also released a short film that recreates their Tiny Desk performance—this time in a Buenos Aires diner.
One of the themes of the EP is the pair wrestling with the implications of their viral success. On the song Impostor, Ca7riel asks '¿Y ahora que vamos hacer?/El tiny desk me jodio' (What do we do now? Tiny Desk fucked me up.)
It's an overstatement, but an acknowledgment that the path they're now on ran directly through the NPR offices.