His tracks have been downloaded almost 4 million times. His catalog powers content across YouTube, Instagram Reels, and Shorts in dozens of countries. And most people who use his music have never heard his name. Ievgen Poltavskyi prefers it that way.
Here's something worth sitting with for a moment.
There's a specific kind of music you've almost certainly heard this week. Not on a playlist and not on the radio. Inside a YouTube video you watched at lunch. Behind an Instagram Reel that auto-played while you were scrolling. Under a tutorial, a product review, a travel montage—somewhere in the background of content you consumed without thinking twice about its soundtrack.
That music didn't end up there by accident. It didn't get licensed through a traditional sync deal. Nobody's manager negotiated a placement. There was no A&R, no publicist, no campaign.
But there was a system.
And increasingly, that system is HitsLab.
Ievgen Poltavskyi doesn't talk like most people in music. There's no reverence for the album format. No nostalgia for the way the industry used to work. No pitch about "the next big sound." When he introduces himself, the language is precise and deliberately unglamorous: creative music entrepreneur, founder and architect of music ecosystems.
Before HitsLab, Poltavskyi served as lead casting director for X-Factor Ukraine—a role that put him at the intersection of talent, audience, and system long before he applied that thinking to music distribution. But when he talks about what he does now, the entertainment industry framing falls away entirely. He sounds more like someone building infrastructure than someone making records.
"HitsLab exists to solve a very specific problem—creators need music they can use freely and we produce exactly that," he notes. "We think of music as a utility layer, something that powers content rather than competes with it."
The numbers behind HitsLab are hard to ignore, mostly because of how they happened. In its first 15 months, over 3.8 million downloads. More than 35 million public views. Tens of thousands of applications across user-generated content. Hundreds of tracks are embedded in daily video production routines around the world—across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
None of this was paid for—zero ad spend, influencer partnerships, or label machines pushing tracks into playlists.
"Everything I'm describing, I observed firsthand," Poltavskyi says. "Growth happened organically—creators embedded the tracks into their routines because it saved them time. When enough people do that, the whole catalog takes on a different character. It becomes a background layer—something that just runs beneath the content without anyone stopping to think about it."
That idea—music as a background layer—is doing a lot of work. And it's the core of
what makes HitsLab difficult to categorize using the music industry's existing vocabulary.
It's not a label because it doesn't do artist development. It's not a sync agency because nobody at HitsLab is pitching tracks to music supervisors. It's not a streaming play because there are no playlists to game, no algorithm to chase.
What Poltavskyi has built sits in a category that barely existed five years ago and now, quietly, powers a measurable chunk of the internet's daily audio layer.
Who Actually Uses This — and How
The creator economy turned content production into a continuous, industrial-scale process. A mid-level YouTube creator publishes three to five videos a week. A Reels-native creator might push content daily. Each piece needs music. Not remarkable music—reliable music.
"Nobody's spending twenty minutes auditioning tracks for a TikTok," Poltavskyi explains. "Creators reach for whatever loads fast, clears instantly, and drops into their timeline without fuss. Brands want the same feel across fifty pieces of content. Editors want to stop thinking about music. Solo creators want to know it'll work before they hit export. The pattern is always the same—convenience drives the pick."
The user profiles map cleanly onto the creator economy's major segments: YouTube creators who need consistent background music. Short-form video creators cycling through audio at high velocity. Digital marketers and content studios that require a predictable quality audio layer across campaigns. Educational platforms where a track needs to function without distracting from the content it supports.
In all of these scenarios, the selection logic is the same. The track that reduces the most friction in the workflow is the track that gets embedded. And the one that gets embedded most reliably is the one that gets reused.
This is where Poltavskyi's thinking diverges most sharply from conventional music industry logic.
The Argument Against the Hit
The music business, at its structural core, is still organized around the hit: one song, one moment, one concentrated burst of attention. The entire machinery—from A&R to marketing to radio—is designed to produce and exploit those spikes.
Poltavskyi's counterargument is not that hits are irrelevant. It's that they're structurally unsuited to the way most music is now used.
"A hit lives and dies by attention—one cycle, one peak," he says. "But a track that fits seamlessly into workflows gets used thousands of times across contexts nobody planned for. That kind of demand compounds. And it signals something bigger—that music is starting to be valued for how often it's applied, not how many people pressed play."
The traditional 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. In that environment, music becomes part of the production process.
"In the new economy, the winner is not the one who sells music," Poltavskyi says. "It's the one whose music becomes embedded in everyday content creation."
There's a material difference between a song and what Poltavskyi calls an infrastructure track—and the difference is in the design philosophy.
A conventional release is optimized for listening: it's meant 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 without competing with it.
What does that mean in practice? Clean entry and exit points for video editing. Emotional clarity that supports visual content without overwhelming it. Structural predictability that allows creators to cut it, loop it, and layer it without hesitation.
"The way we approach a track has more in common with building a tool than writing a song," Poltavskyi says. "Every decision—tempo, structure, energy curve—is filtered through how a creator will actually use it. Will it loop cleanly? Does it cut without leaving an awkward gap? Can someone drop it into an edit and forget about it? That's the design brief."
Every track in the HitsLab catalog is engineered with this logic. And critically, the catalog itself is designed as a compounding asset: every new track strengthens the infrastructure, and the infrastructure strengthens every track. It's the difference between a library that grows linearly—more tracks, more shelves—and a system that grows exponentially.
There's something Poltavskyi says toward the end of our conversation that explains, more than any metric, why HitsLab looks the way it does:
"If you judge what I do by individual tracks, you'll miss the point," Poltavskyi says. "The real work is in the underlying system—something designed to grow through usage patterns. It doesn't need a face. It just needs to keep being useful."
That's an unusual statement from a founder. Most people in his position want to be the face of the thing. Poltavskyi seems more interested in building a system that doesn't need a face—one where the product is invisible by design, embedded so deeply into other people's workflows that it becomes indistinguishable from the infrastructure itself.
Most of the people using his music right now: the creators building their audiences, the brands publishing their campaigns, the students editing their projects—have no idea there's an architect behind the layer they depend on every day.
Apparently, there is. His name is Ievgen Poltavskyi. And he built the system.
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