 So obviously this week, Halsey tweeted out this thing that, oh yeah, we could just play it, can't we? I don't think it's that fun to think about the authenticity of this, but here's the word conjecture that I noticed a lot of time when I say it, people don't know what it means, so I'm putting it up here, I'm not trying to condescend y'all, I'll just experience his experience. But conjecture is a pinnier conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information. But I think this is real, and I think the more important discussion because here's like another one of the articles is like 10 artists who are talking about being forced to post on TikTok. There's a good amount to discuss in here, but like what I will say is this, is I would take this at face value because here's what my experience is, and this is actually probably a very good way to bring in why I believe her, and every time I'm at, I mean literally I was out on Sunday having this discussion seeing turnstile. I moshed, it was great, and like I'm talking to some music business friends, and here's the thing, in any era there is one marketing technique that does more to market an artist than anything else. There's always one dominant thing, and TikTok is like that, like they've ever seen. So let's get some important context going in this discussion, I'm going to fire up Yeol Spotify and put it on the screen. Right now Halsey is in this place that you never want to be in as an artist, and what I mean by this is if you look on the screen right now, this is her top 10 most listened to songs in recent times, as we all know that's what Spotify does here, and you know this is a rolling count of what's currently popular. So you're like wow yeah, well she has a song with two billion plays, Jesse, things seems like things are going right. Here's the thing you're probably overlooking. Halsey's latest record debuted at number two just like the last one did. Great, that's a very good look in the music business, but what makes teams panic, particularly your label and your manager, and I know because this is usually when they come calling me freaking the f*** out for a console call, is when your last record being this one, you see that album cover? You notice what's not in this top 10? Yeah, that's not a good place to be, particularly what you also don't want to have. This should have the distinction as well, even though the title's nothing, is these are actually other artist songs that she's just a featured artist on as is this. I think even maybe that one might be am I wrong? So that is not a thing that makes teams happy because the fact is, if you have two records that fail, your career is usually over. You can have a rare Green Day American idiot resurgence, but that is more rare than anything else. Anytime you're on an artist team and you're an artist, there's basically a war of that an artist is often this person who's in the trenches. They're talking to all their other artist friends and they're learning some stuff and they're coming back to their team and saying, yo, we should do a video. I said this for this career that we should do something like that. And then on the other side, the team is going, hey, we've been working with all these other artists because we work with all these other artists. The greatest advantage major labels have is they see what's working for one thing. Their head's in the game. They're going out drinking with other people in the thing. They're talking about what works. They see best practices and then they go, we should be doing best practices. So here's the thing. If you're on someone's team, you have a boss to answer to and that boss wants you to do right and doesn't want you to have another failure or else that's a mark of failure on your board and that is on you. I have bosses, for example, and if I don't grow things like say this podcast I'm promoting, I'm not going to be smiled upon by my bosses. I'm hired to make growth happen when I get calls to do marketing strategy. If they don't work, they will stop calling me. Thank God that never happens. Anyway, my point here being these people on her team are trying to get her to do what works overwhelmingly well and I was just talking about this. Literally, Lizzo is tearing up the charts and having unprecedented for her fast growth on a song because that song is a TikTok dance that is exploding. It is a huge trend. Getting these TikTok moments, it's unprecedented to what that does. So here's the thing. My assumption, and now we're getting into yet again, conjecture, my outcomes razor from being around this and it's a little less than most conjectures because I've just been in these meetings a lot, is an artist gets done with a song and here's what they do every time. Can we just drop it on Friday and then the label says, we'd really like to have some marketing running, especially when your last release went down because here's the thing. A label having an artist who is a formidable force in the music business, that's most of what generates the revenue for labels and keeping them going and snowballing and getting that snowball bigger and bigger as it gets pushed with all the ice. That's what drives labels revenue and management teams revenue. Not just 10 small artists, but like the big one getting even bigger and staying that way. When you've just had what some people call a down round, a record that really did not hit, yet again, did not hit, you're trying to save that artist from doing it and you're like, can we just do it? Now she's like, I have done eight records. I've sold 165 million records. I just want to release music. I'm tired. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately you're tired and what the label's saying is like, yo, a TikTok takes like 30 minutes. We could just brainstorm on this for a while and you could just do it. If you wait two weeks, maybe we'll have the marketing plan. And if I'm being honest, I've watched artists throw fits on social media over much less. In fact, I may have watched that in the last few weeks. And in all honesty, I bet you with Halsey's label, if it's going like I think it is, is they're trying to come up with another marketing idea, which does take time. I mean, I'm pretty fast on the marketing ideas. I've talked about literally last week with the way I come up with them, the way I get inspired with them. And still that doesn't mean they're always all good. If I go fast, it takes days, it takes talking to people, it takes brainstorming sessions, it takes getting dates on people's calendars to know how to do marketing well. And like this all seems to me like it's a lot of label people being like, this will really help us all succeed. I can say this. I don't think there's ever been a more determinative, a great idea or a great campaign can do more on TikTok for no money than ever. And that's kind of a cool thing. I think it's one of the things that musicians don't get emboldened about is that if you spent time right now learning TikTok and a good strategy, like Lil Nas X did with Old Town Road, he was an unsigned artist that was not some industry plant. If you say that, I won't even give it the time of day. He had a finger on the pulse still does. That was incredible. It was insane. And he engineered the most successful song of all time now by some metrics. I should say I don't want to get into debates of that. I think like there's this big, big thing here. A lot of people are making conspiracy theories because she says everything is marketing in the video. Here's some stacked evidence. So there's this great Buzzfeed article and it's 10 times that RS would say it's like, you know, there's this tweet here that like about all the RS saying it. So, you know, first we have that Halsey tweet that started all this conversation. We have Florence the machine saying they begged for low-fi TikToks. And like, I get it. I don't feel like Florence's brand is going to be very enforced by TikTok. You know, it's kind of like Adele also said that they asked her to do TikTok and she's, she famously quoted and said, I'm not doing that. I don't think really Adele needs to be doing it. Ed Sheeran probably could be being effective with it. And he actually did a pretty good TikTok that got a lot of shares off of it. This one was interesting. So recently on the podcast La Culturistas, I hope I'm not gringoizing that too hard, Betty Hu, who's an independent artist shared her gripes with the music industry. There's not a single record label in this town that will sign me. They all turned me down. And this is where it's shifting is labels go, we want to sign people with a viral hit on TikTok only. I'm not going to wake up and all of a sudden be really good at TikTok. So me being an older person on an app trying to force it will not make it any better. So Betty Hu is like a buzzy artist. I get recommended her songs a lot on my Spotify. She seems to be doing very well independently. And like, she does have some points there, but and this is like the same way that like I'm of an advanced stage, you know, that's the way what we call old now where the only way you stay young and young spirited is putting effort in. And it's the same thing. A lot of times artists, just like they're like tired, they don't want to learn, but that's how you get obsolete. And like, in all honesty, I've interviewed a lot of washed artists and they always talk about this moment where they refused to keep going with it because they decided it was against their brand. And that's usually a lot of time the end of their career. You know, I could see somebody in the cons saying, is this just another reason to stay independent? And it's like, I'm going to be honest with you. There is a place for you to express your authentic self on TikTok. I'm tired of hearing that it's just dances. Literally, I was just saying how Lizzo's new hit is like the first big dance in a minute. People's assumption of what TikTok are right now are totally dumb. It's just as dumb as when everybody was saying Instagram is just pictures of food and fitness, flat tea, tummy people. When really like nine months later, my dad was taking pictures of sunsets on there or a picture of our cat. It's no longer a place that's just youth. Being an old person on that, I think it's a really silly thing to say. I like this Maggie Rogers one. She's for someone who's a music I don't enjoy. I love her presence on line. Not be drunk at 2am in the East Village remembering someone is going to yell at me in the morning to post on TikTok. I actually will tell you this too. I go out with friends and they talk about how they have to remind artists that they should think of a TikTok each day. And there's another one down here. When my label tells me I got to make two TikToks a day from Omar Apollo, I think there's an interesting thing. There's this word in the headlock. Labels are allegedly gatekeeping their releases unless they go viral. The word force is being used a lot. I don't actually think force is the right word. They're telling them to do it. Can you put some effort in? But I know a lot of you bitch about how much work it is. It's a lot of work. But I'm yet again telling you as an old person. This is an era where you have to do less work than you've ever had to do. The 90s were hell for artists. Watch documentaries on all the shit they had to do. Watch radio head meeting people as easy. See all the things in aspiring band you still have to do back then. It'd be 24 hours of soul draining. TikToks really don't take that. And I would never begrudge a musician for complaining. I wish we could all just make art, but that's never been the case. It was much more the case when there was a lot more funding in the business. And yet again, one of the things I want to really get into on this live stream is how we get more funding. It's going to be the topic for either next week or the week afters live stream is some of my ideas and how we bring funding back into music because I think that will solve a lot of your problems. It used to be that a band with around what's called the equivalent of 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify would be able to have somebody doing a lot of the work for them. And that did differentiate some things. But that's another story for another time.