Why I'm Not Looking For The Next TikTok
Max: Hello? This is Max.
David: Hey Max, my name is David, you emailed my daughter?
Max: Hey David, how can I help you?
David: Well…she’s 12.
Max: Ugh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…
David: No no, you’re good. I just have a question.
Max: [Phew] Ok, hit me.
David: Why did she come home from school and say she needs a manager?
Max: Probably because she has 900k followers on Musical.ly.
David: What’s Musical.ly?
This was an actual phone conversation I had with the father of a top Musical.ly creator in May 2016. It was the moment I knew that my idea to start an influencer agency for music was going to work.
I had just finished Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One” and was drawn to his point that good business ideas start with an answer to the question, “what important truth do very few people agree with you on?” I believed I had found mine.
Sure, Musical.ly’s song catalog and re-create functionality posed a promising viral marketing opportunity for music (see The Harlem Shake On Crack), but so what? I couldn’t find anyone to disagree with me on that. Then, I went deeper down the rabbit hole and began to suspect something that questioned even my own beliefs at the time: When a top creator filmed in public – be it for Musical.ly, Snapchat, Instagram, or YouTube – the video typically ended with them being swarmed by excited fans. That is exactly what I imagined life was like for A-List television stars from my childhood (Will Smith, Mario Lopez, the Olsen Twins, etc). Making this connection shifted my perception of social media from a fringe community of eccentric wannabes to a breeding ground for modern day celebrity. I adopted this as my “important truth” and took it for a test run.
I sent hundreds of emails per day, determined to measure this belief against public perception. If you had over 100,000 Musical.ly followers in the Spring of 2016 and an email address in your bio, chances are you heard from me. Were these creators looking for new business opportunities? Or was their star power already widely understood, thus insulating them from outside interest? That's when David called.
The music industry spent the next several years collaborating with this powerful community in a frictionless environment that allowed each side to capture far more value than it was giving up. This symbiosis lasted through TikTok’s rebranding in 2018, the “Old Town Road” phenomenon of 2019, and the app's coming-of-age phase during the pandemic.
Then, Addison Rae appeared on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” in Summer 2021 and the clock started ticking. The outside world finally began to accept her kind as more than just “internet famous” and TikTok as a safe place to create. Newcomers flooded the app in search of fame and their content was met with insatiable demand from a fresh batch of marketers eager to get in on the action. “Influencer” became a bona fide career path.
Looking back, it wasn’t TikTok’s explosive growth or inherent trend-launching apparatus that afforded our industry such an extraordinary business opportunity. It was that we embraced the cultural authority of social media creators when it still took courage to do so. And that moment in time – not the nuts and bolts of the app itself – is something we will never be able to capture again.
Nowadays, no one is wondering why someone from the internet is on the red carpet or lacing up against Floyd Mayweather on Pay-Per-View. Everyone knows that social media is The New Hollywood, a consensus that makes our role as viral marketers increasingly difficult and, if I'm being honest, a lot less fun. This is what I meant last month when I told Billboard that “TikTok is eating itself.”
David’s daughter is now 18-years-old with over 8 million TikTok followers and powerful gatekeepers representing various corners of her career. I still bring them opportunities hoping to attach my agenda to her rising star once more, and perhaps someday I will. If only David would call me back.
All of this is why I'm not looking for the next TikTok. Not because there will never be another unicorn social media app with a billion users – of course there will – but because it won’t matter. The “important truth” upon which the business of “influencer marketing for music” relies is already in the mainstream zeitgeist and that can’t be undone. Instead, I’m focused on maximizing the opportunity that remains and have accepted that the next one will look entirely different.
- Max