It’s an entertainment platform.

All those hours you spend watching television? The younger generations spend that time on TikTok. Only in many cases, TikTok is better than television, because it’s more real, more human, you can relate to it better. Which is maybe why the cast of and comments about “Love on the Spectrum” are all over the service.

Don’t look at TikTok through the lens of Facebook. Facebook is a sharing platform, an informational platform, that’s where you go to tell your story and to find out about others.

And don’t look at TikTok through the lens of the original static image Instagram, which was a bragging platform, a place where you created FOMO.

No, TikTok is something completely different. And if you castigate TikTok you’re missing out.

Then again, most people I know bitching about TikTok have never been on the service.

And then there are those who do sign up and are flummoxed. Because the platform doesn’t immediately serve up what they’re interested in, and only what they’re interested in. TikTok is a cornucopia of stuff, and the amazing thing is that after a modicum of usage it serves up clips about topics that you didn’t even know you had interest in, but you do.

So there’s the element of surprise, of the new. It’s human nature to want to experience the different, the fringe, it’s titillating and stimulating. This is unlike your regular life, which is endless repetition, the same people and the same stories.

On streaming TV… Most of it is dreck. There are some great shows, but most of it is not shooting for greatness, or it misses the target. So you dedicate all this time and are pissed off that you did.

Or you can’t find a good show.

There’s endless fare on TikTok. And if you don’t like something, you can instantly scroll to something new. You are in control, that’s the essence of modern life, but nowhere is it as bite-sized as it is on TikTok. Yes, you can choose your streaming TV show, but you can’t change the plot in the middle. And if you really like something and want more…you can’t have it, the show has a limited number of episodes. But the topic you’re interested in on TikTok, there’s an endless slew of clips on the service.

So if you’re a user, TikTok is addictive because it’s so damn good.

And unlike the Marvel movies and the rest of the theatrical crap, its all based in humanity, made by humans, with plot, emotion, the entire kit and kaboodle. Where else can you get right down to the real nitty-gritty?

And actors… They’re playing a role, whereas on TikTok, the people ARE the role. Or they’re experts in a field with more knowledge than reporters. Reporters gather the story, TikTok creators ARE the story!

As for creators…

There is no middleman and there is no filter. If you want to make it in traditional show business, good luck. Unless you know someone, the odds of your project getting greenlit are infinitesimal. And traditional Hollywood outlets abhor risk. They put money first, they don’t want to take a chance, whereas TikTok is all about chances.

So you have this blank canvas.

Even better, the means of production are in your hand, and they’re absolutely FREE! Everybody has a smartphone, you create and edit the clips right on it! Sure, you can spend more time shooting and editing on your computer, but oftentimes it’s the rawness of TikTok clips that infects people.

So, if you see TikTok as a promotional tool, you’re missing the point, you’re not going to be successful.

No, you have to see TikTok as a CREATIVE tool.

If you just want to post tour dates and other information… There are much better sites to do this on. And this is not what the audience is looking for, the audience wants to be entertained!

So you’ve got to be creative. You’ve got to see your clips on the level of your music.

Then again, the essence of TikTok is missing from so much modern music, which is why TikTok stars in many cases are more popular and even richer. TikTok clips are not made by committee. And if something doesn’t work, the cost of production is only your time, there’s no opportunity cost, so you can try something different the very next day, the very next HOUR! It’s a creator’s dream!

As for creators using music in their clips… It’s not about the music, it’s about what the creators do with it! It’s like a movie with a soundtrack. The music is just the soundtrack to their clip.

So if you want to play the game you must dedicate time, be creative yourself. Do something that draws attention, you cannot rest on your laurels. No one is interested in what you’re famous for, they don’t want to know what you did yesterday, but what you did TODAY! If you don’t have a constant flow of material on TikTok, don’t even start. The audience expects it. They want to know you, they want to get closer to you. It’s a personal medium, if you’re not willing to reveal your warts, don’t start. Traditional entertainers always saw themselves as being above the riff-raff. Now if you don’t get down in the pit as an equal member of the audience, people make fun of you, they have contempt for you, they REJECT YOU! Humanity, honest, credibility, these are all the elements of a successful TikTok clip. These are not elements in most music, which is why music does not drive the culture. Not that there aren’t outliers, like Noah Kahan. Who does not have the best voice, but he’s singing about his inner life, his troubles, and that’s what people relate to!

As for all the anti-TikTok screeds in the adult press…

Well, first and foremost, the issue of China and data collection is now moot.

As for being anti-smartphone… I’ll make it very simple, I’m going to remove your television from your house. Or your computer. Most people would be twiddling their thumbs, not knowing what to do with their time. TikTok serves an identical purpose for its audience. To tell people to put down the phone, to not even have a phone, is a nonstarter.

Of course there is bullying on the phone, all kinds of negative b.s. that the media focuses on. But there’s so much good. The raw connection with so many people.

But I don’t want to stray from my main point. If you’re anti-TikTok, you’re like the parents who hated the Beatles. You’re dating yourself. You’re not better than the youngsters, you’re out of the loop, irrelevant.

Because TikTok is where it is happening.

I could tell you more, but you’ve just got to get ON!

If I get one more anti-TikTok e-mail, if I read one more anti-TikTok screed in the news…

Let me put it a different way. Video games come without instructions, there is no manual, players just figure the game out. That’s the culture today, has been for quite a while. It’s all instinctive…how to explore, find dead ends and then your ultimate direction. You’ve got to burn time to get to the destination. But when you get there, it’s so fulfilling!

At this point nothing can compete with TikTok, not movies, television or music. Because in almost all cases they’re missing the basic human/creative element, they’ve gone through a sieve, they’re not direct from the creator to the user.

TikTok is a breakthrough, it’s been going on for years, and the mainstream has completely missed it. When kids spend hours on TikTok it’s because it’s so damn GOOD! Think about that. It’s entertainment. Vivid, stimulating. Are you wasting time watching TV, even reading a book? In most cases, books are a backwater. A club of genre fiction or highfalutin’ literature that often falls on its face. But TikTok, EVERYBODY is on. That’s everybody under 35. You’re competing with the entire world, which forces you to be ever better.

And it’s not like traditional platforms, in that the spoils do not automatically go to the established players. On TikTok a nobody, making their first clip, can be pushed in front of people by the system. You can go viral just that easily.

I could go on, but it’s kind of like politics, either you’re on TikTok or you’re not, and those who are not cannot be convinced to partake.

But they should.

The only thing I knew about Toronto was the Maple Leafs. (And why is it the “Leafs” instead of the “Leaves,” I could never figure that out.)

You see they played the Rangers on Saturday night on channel 9. Not that I was a big hockey fan, but there wasn’t much else on TV at that time, and I lived for sports. We knew so many sports, especially from Jim McKay and the “Wide World of Sports” on ABC.

But my true endearment to the Maple Leafs came via my home hockey set.

You’ve got to know there were two competing styles… One involving a puck, the other involving a ball. The one with the puck allowed you to move the players back and forth, but the action was slow, whereas the one with the ball…the players were stationary and the game was even faster than the real one. You could wind up and send the ball all the way from one end of the ice into the other team’s goal. And the two teams were the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs. And the Canadiens were in red and the Maple Leafs wore blue jerseys and at the time blue was my favorite color so that’s probably why I liked them more.

Now with the expansion of the league, and the ascension of the Bruins and the Islanders…hockey’s visibility was raised. But at this point there were only six teams in the league and seemingly every player was Canadian. The Great White North. I couldn’t have picked out Toronto on a map, I was actually caught off guard when I learned that it was closer to Buffalo than Burlington. Not so far north as to have the frigid weather Americans think permeates the northern nation.

And I still can’t tell you why Toronto is the epicenter of the country, it’s probably got something to do with shipping and the Great Lakes, but Toronto is cosmopolitan and…

A city.

I called up an Uber and it was there in two minutes. In L.A. one never comes that fast, especially in the hills. There are people walking on the street and it was raining and COLD! Like in the forties. A temperature very rarely seen in Southern California, where it is definitely spring, I could feel the weather change definitively on my birthday.

So I’m here for Departure, the new incarnation of Canadian Music Week run by Randy Lennox. And I woke up at the crack of dawn, by my standards, never mind the time change, to interview Kevin “Chief” Baruk.

Funny about the music business, when you get to the core, where the action is, I’m utterly fascinated. It’s different from being a fan of the act, it’s about the nuts and bolts, the movement behind the scenes, and don’t forget music doesn’t require a degree, there’s no natural hierarchy, you rise and fall on your own deeds, the most successful people are entrepreneurs.

So Chief (a guy in the studio called everybody that name, like “chef” in “The Bear,” and it stuck to Kevin) went on the road with Nickelback for more than a year before the hit. Do I need to remind you?

And that was the entrée to Nashville. You see Chief’s longtime buddy Joey Moi had the idea of bringing the Nickelback sound to country. Needless to say, Nash Vegas wasn’t buying it, but then Moi employed the Nickelback formula with Jake Owen and Chief ran the management arm of Big Loud, and first came Florida Georgia Line and then Morgan Wallen and then Seth England decided he didn’t want to be in the management business anymore, after FGL looked at new managers and ultimately Chief spoke with Michael Rapino who told him he’d back him in a new venture and you can see the resulting enterprise here:

https://www.thecoreentertainment.com

Core built Bailey Zimmerman from scratch. A friend of Chief’s found him on TikTok, an old friend Chief hadn’t spoken with in fifteen years who was not in the business and…

Now Chief is the manager of Nickelback.

He says that everybody in Nashville loves Nickelback, and he put them on fifteen country festivals, they just played Stagecoach, where they killed. I know, you don’t believe it, you’re still a hater, but that doesn’t matter, because Nickelback doesn’t need you, they’ve got a mailing list of 750,000…that’s who pays the bills, and there are younger fans who aren’t being reminded, they’re finding out about the band two decades later, it’s new to them.

As for social media… Nickelback was not on it, not to any degree. Chief said it’s not about manipulation, trying to goose a project into virality, you just have to make music available and then the fans pick it up or they don’t. It always comes down to the fans.

And there were many more details and I wish it was a podcast because you would have dug it and learned stuff, but…

Then I sat in the audience and listened to Kevin Lyman, Warped is back! Backed by Insomniac. But the most fascinating gems from Kevin were the little things, minor, but ultimately major. Like the billing… Kevin did research, discovered that most people only read the top two lines of a festival bill, so he decided to list the acts alphabetically.

And once he got going, Kevin got wound up, he became passionate, he couldn’t stop talking, he was excited. And that’s the difference between the music business and the straight world. That passion, that excitement, without it you are not successful and if you manage to get a gig you don’t last. And music is one of the last fields where you still make it up as you go, there’s not much of a blueprint. You have an idea and then try to bring it to fruition.

Kevin also talked about the charitable component…this is important to younger fans, and also needing to police the acts themselves, from checking for underage groupies to keeping the performers from being strung out. He’s camp counselor, best friend and majordomo all at the same time, it’s a hands-on operation.

And then I went to the Four Seasons for lunch with this guy I met on a cruise to Japan and his buddy who’s kind of the Charlie Rose of Canada and… We were having a jolly old time shooting the sh*t and then his secondee invitee Rosie arrived. She said she was a fan of musicals. But really, she’d been a Canadian Supreme Court Justice! There’s mandatory retirement at 75, and now she teaches law at Harvard and NYU and by time I finished getting her story I felt inadequate, you can read about her here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalie_Abella

And everybody always talks about the money, but it’s the people you meet that is the main exponent of success. The conversations. They’re so stimulating, you learn so much…

And now I’m off to the Live Music Awards…

We could handle Jeff Bezos as a nerd…

It’s one thing to get a divorce, it’s quite another to get involved with the wife of your good friend. That’s a bad look, but even worse is HIS look and his now wife’s look!

If there’s anyone who likes Lauren Sánchez, they must be related to her. Her image is that of a social climber who has employed plastic surgery to achieve an image that is far from normal, one could even say far from human!

Prior to his involvement with Sánchez, Bezos was seen as an entrepreneurial mastermind, building a behemoth out of whole cloth, starting as a bookstore and then becoming the everything store. And Amazon became indispensable. Of course there was backlash against some of its business practices, but it’s just like Apple…no one can hurt the monolith, it’s just too desirable.

However, unlike Walmart, Amazon has done absolutely nothing to improve its image. Walmart has done a good job over the last twenty years of demonstrating warmth and fuzziness, almost becoming your friend (after already having eviscerated downtowns across America, but people have a short memory). Amazon has done no such thing. There’s no humanizing image campaign, and this has only contributed to negative public perception. You don’t want to work for Amazon unless you have to. The company believes that if you just get your products sooner that you’ll overlook what it took for you to get them, i.e. the working conditions in the warehouse, the independent contractors delivering the products…

But at this point, few know that Amazon’s reins have been handed to Andy Jassy, who got the gig by creating AWS (Amazon Web Services), which generates the lion’s share of the company’s profits with a lean staff…a truly digital business. No, Jeff Bezos is still the face of Amazon, and he’s still the largest individual shareholder.

Now when I was growing up, if you were rich you didn’t advertise it. And many who’ve inherited wealth still don’t. But those who made it on their own… They grew up middle class, they believe they EARNED IT! And most are completely out of touch. Whether it be Sergey Brin lobbying against wealth taxes or Elon Musk and his white power posts… You went to school with nerds…they were socially awkward. At this late date they may be rich, even run the world, but those building blocks of social experience and personality, they’re still lacking them. And they’re constantly pontificating, and at this point their pro-business, rightward shift is out of touch with their customers.

Believe me, there is an affordability crisis. And even if you don’t accept that, you will acknowledge that there’s huge income inequality. And it’s no longer the era of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” which aired from 1984-1995, and they even stopped making MTV’s “Cribs.” Furthermore, the public now knows the entertainers are not that rich. If they were, why would they keep trying to sell us stuff with their brand extensions? And almost none of them are rich enough to own a private jet. But the techies?

But it gets even worse for Jeff Bezos. Because he’s appeared to lose his mind. He seems nearly brainless, having exchanged his values for Sánchez’s. Suddenly he’s working out, sporting muscles and wearing a cowboy hat? A cowboy hat is a hard image to pull off if you’re not literally on the range, as for working out…who exactly are you?

And now you’re spending your dough frivolously, on a $50 million wedding and a yacht and now you don’t look that different from the rest of the oligarchs and don’t you know the entire world is looking down on these people?

Not Bezos…

Never have the rich and powerful been more out of touch with the hoi polloi. It’s not only the tech titans, but the politicians. They’re thirty years behind when it comes to tech, some probably still have AOL e-mail addresses. And the commentator class isn’t much better, denigrating all things tech on a regular basis…decrying social media and bitching that no one calls anymore, they only text. How come there was a generation gap when they were growing up, between them and their parents, and there can’t be one now? We live in such a changed world and it’s not only Republicans who want to go back to a fantasy past that wasn’t so good to begin with, but the Democratic commentariat too. Do you remember having to write down directions to everywhere you were going? Not having the world at your fingertips? You can’t give up the bad without the good…

So there’s a bifurcation in society, between the old and young, and also the rich and the poor. And in both cases, the “winners” have contempt for the losers. The old and rich think they’re better than the rest of us, and we’re sick of them lording it over us, in many cases ignorantly.

This ain’t left wing poppycock. Just look at Trump’s approval ratings. People don’t want all that money spent on overseas wars, they want to be able to work at a job that pays the bills, but most of what’s on offer are underpaying service jobs, oftentimes without benefits.

And don’t confuse yesteryear to today when it comes to fashion. Yes, there were VH1 Fashion Awards from 1995-2002, but…that was the heady nineties and the hangover thereafter. Those were good times, people could focus on frivolous.

But then even fashion changed. Now it’s cheap and affordable to all. The prices of Chinese clothing are drastically low, you can buy it, wear it once and then discard it. And we can talk about the ecological costs of this, but today fashion is what you build from cheap items and then demonstrate not only live, but online. Haute couture? Who exactly is that for?

But this is the way it always works. No one pulls back, they drive the enterprise to the precipice and…

Do you remember when MacKenzie Scott defended her husband? Probably not, but today she’s seen as America’s number one philanthropist. She sees no need for people to have billions of dollars, she’s giving it away. She’s the anti-Brin. And she wants no publicity for it. No awards, no gala… She’s just doing the right thing. How could she get it so right and her ex-husband get it so wrong?

MacKenzie Scott didn’t lose track of her middle class values, she wasn’t convinced her riches made her better than the rest of us, she believes we’re all in it together, that we live in a society and need to take care of each other.

Now we’ve been down this road of philanthropy before, with the Sacklers. Whoever it was at the Met who decided it would be good to get in bed with the Bezos couple should be fired. They’ve been hanging with the rich and famous so long, believing it’s all about money, that they’ve lost touch with the regular public. As for Anna Wintour… The only people who think she’s an icon are those who are in her orbit. She is perceived to be the devil. And when even the richest women change their hairstyle, she does not, because she doesn’t have to, she’s another one who believes they’re bigger than us, the little people.

So, would you want to be aligned with all this?

Well, chances are you couldn’t afford a ticket and weren’t invited because of your celebrity status. But this verges on tone-deaf. They’d have been better off just selling tickets and having no gala. But NO! These rich f*ckers want to parade, need to parade, like the Bezos twins.

You want to win in today’s society? Align with the public if you’re an artist or selling something to the public. You want to appear a member of the crowd, not above it. Nobody forgets any faux pas anymore, because it’s right there blinking at us on the web.

You’ve got to be moral, making appropriate choices.

How come entertainers can’t see this? That by becoming mini-corporations they’re becoming the enemy. Hanging with the billionaires for the crumbs of their largesse. Even being seen extravagantly spending their own wealth. That’s bad for your image, assuming you even have one.

The Kardashians may be rich, but their TV show first aired back in 2007, nearly twenty years ago. They established the paradigm of mindless image, but if you think that dominates forever… They were the progenitors, what makes you think that lane is still open?

Changes in society are subtle and then overwhelming. Trends end and purveyors are left holding the bag. You can sell out an arena and then you can barely sell a ticket and it’s rarely predictable, somehow the audience knows and you do not.

The audience knows so much.

Come on, Tesla sales went down after Musk and DOGE…

You think you can lord it over the public with impunity?

You can’t.

Now is the time to evidence values, to focus on your credibility, your ability to say no, to leave some money on the table, to lead with your work as opposed to hype.

Don’t expect media to tell you this…talk with your friends, then you’ll know what is going on.

The people run this country, and the people are pissed.

Beware.

This Dominic Fike song from 2018 is only 1:38 long.

All the focus is on how this eight year old number suddenly gained traction on social media, blasting “Babydoll” to the top of the Spotify chart both globally and in the U.S.

If you do research, you cannot figure out why. Everybody says they’re going to explain it, even Fike himself in an interview, but you listen and ultimately realize no one knows. In a digitized world where we keep hearing that AI is about to eclipse humanity, somehow this ancient number found its way to the top through people, one by one. AI can’t create this virality, only people can. And at this point, AI can’t tell you what caused the trend either, it’s organic.

And it’s the labels’ worst nightmare. Because they’re not in control. For all the hype about the manipulation of social media to break Geese… When you dig down deep, the posts that were made were so generic that sans substance, nothing would have happened.

Then again, one can say that artists are out of touch with the public. I’m less concerned with wannabes using TikTok success to get signed than the reverse, established acts making TikTok friendly songs!

If one listens to “Babydoll,” one can see why it would be good source material for a clip. It’s hypnotic and repetitive. And the title, and its use in the song, fits perfectly in this narcissistic world, where you advertise your wares online, trying to illustrate how great and desirable you are.

The script has been flipped. The person in the video is the star, not the artist that made the music! Today’s hits are fungible, fodder for the public to mix and match. 

Looked at through the lens of musicologists, all those denigrating modern music, “Babydoll” is nearly laughable, there’s not much there. Bridge? Where is that confounded bridge! But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at modern culture. We live in a topsy-turvy world, where the PUBLIC is the star, not those making the music itself.

If the acts were so damn great, the audience wouldn’t spend so much time shooting selfies at the show, they’d be riveted to what’s on stage. But they’re not. Sure, they want to be able to tell everybody they were there, TO BURNISH THEIR OWN IMAGE, to gain bragging rights!

And “Babydoll” is so damn short… It doesn’t need to be any longer, it’s all there in a minute and a half.

With CDs containing 80 minutes of music, everybody stretched out, added more tunes that went on infinitely. But we live in a bite-sized world. I’m not saying people have a short attention span, because they don’t, biology hasn’t changed, but if you want them to binge, to dedicate a ton of time, you have to be consistently great, and almost none of these albums are, never mind many being so long, even a hundred minutes!

How long does it really take you to get your message across?

Do you need a thirty second intro? A stretched-out solo? Are you just doing it that way because that’s how everybody else has been doing it?

My favorite song under two minutes is the Box Tops’ “The Letter,” which clocks in at a blistering 1:52, with all the changes and magical moments absent from “Babydoll.” Then again, “The Letter” is forever, “Babydoll” is momentary trash, like so much of the Spotify Top 50.

Listening to “The Letter” you’ll be stunned it’s under two minutes. Because it’s got a magical intro, lasting a large three seconds. And then there’s Alex Chilton’s vocal, rough and meaningful, intense in a way his work with Big Star was not. And there’s a bridge…which does not lead into a chorus. And there’s a message. Do you find all this in modern music? OF COURSE NOT! Certainly not from people making sub two minute records.

And we don’t live in the old world, which too many young acts can’t accept. An under two minute song pays the same amount per stream as something far longer.

Listeners want to be grabbed right away. They don’t want to hear you masturbate, building an opus that is substandard.

Writing camps. Artists. They need to change their goals. They need to make their music shorter! Excise all the extensions that came along with FM/album rock over FIFTY YEARS AGO! (Well, maybe if you could write “Free Bird”…but even Skynyrd couldn’t replicate that.)

This is not so hard, it’s just that when you leave out the superfluous extras, you must focus on the core elements.

Why should a record not demand attention, hook the listener instantly?

And if there’s a story, however compact the record, it lends itself to social media videos.

Ultimately this is a win-win. It’s a paradigm change, that has already happened, but the industry, and the prognosticators and the press, have not acknowledged it. We want it shorter, we want it instant, we want it comprehensible so the public can chop it up, use it… You don’t want someone trying to find the hook in an eight minute song, you want to deliver the OBVIOUS hook(s) right away.

“The Letter” is infectious, one listen is enough to want, to NEED, to play it ad infinitum. And in today’s money-focused world, a short hit song rains down money…KACHING!

Don’t think you’re still living in the old world. It’s a totally new marketplace. There’s no wall between public and performer. You’re equals, in it together. Think about serving the audience, giving them something that they can use to express THEMSELVES!

That’s what I’d do.