Artemas runs one of the most valuable catalogs of the TikTok era, more than 3.6 billion streams, on a decision-making system he describes with a recurring metaphor: an Ouija board. “I want my music, my art, my career, my life really, to be kind of like an Ouija board... Just let it happen rather than trying too hard,” he told BASIC Magazine. It sounds like mysticism. Look closer and it is the most disciplined A&R department in dark pop: one instinct, zero committees.
What does the Ouija board actually mean?
He has used the image in at least two major interviews, which makes it doctrine rather than a throwaway line. To Billboard: “It feels like a ouija board; I prefer to let the world send me messages rather than strictly planning for the future.” The operating principle underneath is simple: do not overrule the signal. When something feels alive, release it; when the industry’s advice conflicts with the feeling, ignore the advice.
He arrived at this the hard way. After three to four years of releasing music “with little to no listeners,” following distribution deals and conventional rollouts, his conclusion was blunt: “Forget it; no one in this industry knows what they’re talking about.” The 2023 pivot that followed, scrapping his catalog with about 100 fans and rebuilding on dark R&B demos he genuinely loved, was the first full Ouija-board decision. Six months later he had the most streamed song in the world.
The method, caught in the act
Almost every famous detail in the Artemas story is an instinct that a normal process would have sanded off:
- The mumble stayed in. The spoken intro of “i like the way you kiss me” was recorded while waiting for an Uber; producer Toby Daintree called it “the least thought out thing,” and it became the song’s most imitated moment.
- The three-hour song shipped next day. “We produced the song in approximately three hours, and I posted it the following day,” he told The Guardian. No focus group, no six-week setup.
- The ruined photo became the cover. A camera glitch blurred his face during a shoot; instead of reshooting, he made it the LOVERCORE artwork: “it’s dark, and it felt so cool to me.”
- The car became a studio. The yustyna cut “caroline” was recorded on the motorway: “If you isolate the vocals you can hear it in the background.”
A committee would have fixed all four. The audience loved all four.
Instinct still needs a spine
The Ouija board is not passivity. It sits on top of ferocious craft discipline: Artemas is entirely self-taught as a producer, engineer and mixer, an “eight-year process” of bedroom trial and error, and during the pivot he held a song-a-month, TikTok-a-day cadence for six straight months. “You have to be a bit fearless and accept judgment,” he told Billboard. The honesty is deliberate too: “I unintentionally keep saying some very honest things in songs and leave them in. I think there’s a magic in saying things others might be scared to say,” he told Numéro Netherlands. Leaving them in is the method.
Why this matters beyond one artist
The Ouija board method is a data point in an argument The Ring keeps encountering: in the playlist era, the artist’s unfiltered instinct is often a better predictor than professional judgment, because the audience is voting on feeling, not polish. It rhymes with the volume-and-instinct routines documented in Christian Gates’ song-a-day grind and Dutch Melrose’s self-managed operation: different systems, same underlying bet that nobody knows your signal better than you do.
Artemas keeps making the bet. The club-leaning getting up to no good arrived in March 2026 because Berlin-warehouse tempos were where the planchette pointed, and a 38-date world tour follows this fall. The board keeps answering. He keeps his hands on it lightly.