(2023-11-02) Watch This Guy Work And Youll Finally Understand The Tiktok Era

Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era. Ursus Magana put off eating his last brisket taco to whip up a blueprint for how he would guide me to stardom. It started with me ditching journalism to focus on churning out daily TikToks in which I’d offer tips about storytelling.

parlay that success into a “big swing”: a how-to book or Netflix series that would land me a spot on The Tonight Show and a lucrative endorsement deal with, say, a manufacturer of ballpoint pens.

when I caught myself flirting with that fantasy, I grasped how a genuinely talented young artist must feel when Magana lays out his plan for making them the richest person in their family by the age of 19.

Magana and his colleagues at 25/7 have made good on that grandiose promise enough times to prove that, despite any semi-delusional schemes for my future, they know what they’re talking about.

If individual creators want to stay afloat for longer than a brief moment, they still need managers to help them navigate the algorithmic churn.

25/7 Media has fashioned a niche for itself prospecting for viral talent in areas that its larger rivals often ignore—the misfit subcultures of the young, which can often cross-pollinate with other online communities to yield colossal audiences.

part of his pitch, and his gift, is that he’s an authentic product of the subcultures in which he operates

“We understand how they feel at home when they’re doing something kind of weird, something that isn’t easily explainable,” he says.

late-morning Google Meet with an executive from the digital music distributor Vydia. The executive was keen to strike a deal involving a 25/7 client named YoungX777, a

discovered by 25/7 in late October 2022

the song hadn’t racked up many streams. But its five-second intro, a post-toke cough followed by a throaty scream, had popped up in a few TikToks of MMA fighters pummeling each other and weightlifters grunting beneath squat bars. Experience had taught 25/7 Media that when brief “recreates” of these kinds of songs burble up in those particular TikTok communities, virality can soon follow.

When the number of recreates climbs into the tens or hundreds of thousands, Magana told me, two of 25/7’s core tenets become germane

The first: Once a social media user hears an audio snippet nine times, it gets stuck in their head to some degree. The second, which Magana has dubbed the Ten Percent Rule, is that 10 percent of those earwormed users will end up tracking down the snippet’s original source

an essential part of the strategy: The firm has to snag clients before they appear on the radars of well-heeled competitors

ran its standard campaign to juice a new client’s recreates. Rather than pay one or two famous influencers to use the “Toxic” intro in the hopes of producing a trickle-down effect, the firm appealed to scores of MMA and weightlifting TikTokkers whose followings rarely top more than a few hundred. (Some were given small payments to push the song, but others were happy to do it for free.)

The “Toxic” intro became a TikTok and Instagram Reels sensation in mid-January, at which point the Ten Percent Rule kicked in

By month’s end, the full song was zooming toward more than a million plays on Spotify.

I gleaned more about 25/7’s way of doing business during an afternoon call with Ovrthro, a 22-year-old Canadian musician and TikTokker

stressed that the ride can be short unless a client is committed to constantly pumping out fresh content. The algorithms are designed to highlight new material, even if its quality is subpar. “When you drop one song,” he told Ovrthro, “there needs to be four other versions of the song right away.”

an Oregon-based musician who goes by 93feetofsmoke, said that he was aiming to release around 50 solo songs this year and produce as many as 70 for other artists. “You can’t take weekends off,” he told me. “Like, I don’t take the weekends off, ever.”

An introductory film class there altered his wayward trajectory. Instantly fascinated by the craft of stitching images together to tell a story, Magana talked his way into an unpaid internship with a photography studio that had been branching out into video production.

1993, his pregnant mother attended a Guns N’ Roses show at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes.

inquiry from Fullscreen, one of the first companies to specialize in connecting digital creators with major brands

assignment: doing search engine optimization for Telemundo’s YouTube videos. Through trial and error, he mastered the tricks necessary to inflate a video’s views and thus maneuver YouTube’s algorithm into pushing Fullscreen’s clients

His portfolio expanded as he honed his SEO chops—he was assigned to the Ubisoft account to help launch an Assassin’s Creed title, for example, and he produced YouTube content for Telemundo during the 2018 World Cup.

Sinna Nasseri magana and alvarado’s first stab at managing digital talent was a failure, albeit an instructive one. In the fall of 2019, they signed a popular TikTokker named Reagan Yorke

created this song, coached her how to sing rap, all that stuff,” Alvarado says. But the resulting video, starring Yorke’s influential friends, was a dud on YouTube.

Their conversations led them to conclude that even their clients’ finest content would flop unless 25/7 figured out how to game the platform’s algorithms and heed the data’s cues.

25/7 Media put its revamped vision into action to support Curly J, a New York–based rapper

When they dug into the data on Curly J’s YouTube videos, they saw that more than a quarter of the comments mentioned video games—specifically the battle royale phenomenon Fortnite. So Magana and his colleagues set about finding ways to have Curly J’s music inserted into the Fortnite montage videos that were doing huge numbers

The ones who agreed to promote Curly J’s work weren’t always reliable; many vanished with the $100 or so that 25/7 Media paid them. But hundreds of honorable creators inserted songs like “No Hoodie” into their montages

Curly J’s connection to the hottest game of the pandemic did not go unnoticed in the corporate realm. In June 2020, Warner Records signed him to a $4.8 million deal

As 25/7 Media expanded throughout late 2020 and early 2021, brand sponsorships became another handsome source of revenue.

It was harder, though, for Magana to arrange sponsorship deals for the many 25/7 Media clients whose primary platform is OnlyFans, since brands are wary of sexually explicit content

By the time I first spoke to Magana in late 2022, 25/7 Media’s success had given him some measure of financial security

Magana also acknowledged that, like so many startups without outside investors, 25/7 Media remains just a few blunders away from the abyss: “If 50 percent of my talent or 50 percent of my staff doesn’t work out, my daughter doesn’t eat,” he said.

In the weeks following that initial conversation, Magana came to view Lumi Athena as the client most likely to get 25/7 Media out of its classic startup bind.

But Magana told me that Lumi’s future lay not in creating his own music, but in producing other artists.

He and his partners had just gotten out of a meeting with Mike Caren, a former producer for Beyoncé and Kanye West who is now CEO of his own record label, Artist Partner Group.

Caren brought up the idea of creating a joint venture with the startup

he also feared that if he passed up the opportunity, he’d never learn the skills necessary to take his clients to the next level. “You know, I won’t know how to get an artist to the Grammys,” he told me. “I won’t know how to get an artist in, like, you know, Nickelodeon Splash events—like, all the mainstream levers.”

Sinna Nasseri Magana thinks he needs that expertise because so many of his clients—even some with roots in the most subversive subcultures—aspire to conventional forms of validation and fame.

Many of 25/7 Media’s clients are ill at ease in the world for poignant reasons. As reflected in the inward-looking content they produce, these young artists see themselves as largely defined by their battles with anxiety and depression.

Relating to clients can become more difficult after they discover that the fame they crave can’t fix their deeper problems

That realization is too often followed by self-destructive behavior.

Lumi returned to LA to pursue a fresh musical direction. “TikTok kinda, like, stole my sound,” he told me shortly after he woke up one afternoon in late August. “Like, after ‘Smoke It Off!’ popped off, they just run off with my shit.”

after weeks of internal debate, 25/7 Media’s founders decided to pass on the joint venture opportunity with APG. Alvarado had lobbied for the deal, contending that it would address all of the startup’s financial anxieties. Magana countered that the rapid success of Lumi Athena, whose flagship song “Smoke It Off!” has now been played more than 235 million times on TikTok, proved that 25/7 Media wasn’t yet at the point where it needed to surrender any independence

To keep 25/7 growing as a fully independent enterprise, Magana is seeking new ways to drum up revenue

was only in hindsight that I had questions about all the specifics Magana conveniently elided. While he was stringing together one enthusiastic sentence after another, I was sold on his vision.

Bob Lefsetz: The Wired Article. “Watch This Guy Work, and You’ll Finally Understand the TikTok Era – The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. Talent manager Ursus Magana can (almost) make sense of it, with a frenetic formula for gaming the algorithms.”

this article is the best thing I’ve seen written about the music industry all year.

What you’ve got here is a hungry immigrant who is gaming the system. Who can make someone with no attention a star.

You don’t need a degree to enter the music business. As a matter of fact, it might be a hindrance.

The music business was built by mavericks, doing it on their own dime. Well, maybe on dimes they extracted from others

Music was the domain of rule-breakers. Now everybody works for the man.

why in the hell would you start a label? Why would an artist give up so much of their action, when you can do it yourself and take all the money. That’s not the mantra you hear, but that’s the ethos of TikTok, of YouTube, but the main reporting outlets refrain from emphasizing this, because this would mean they’re up for grabs too, and they are.

are the majors signing acts and then trying to blow them up on TikTok? No, just the reverse. They’re trying to skim the cream from TikTok. Which is a fool’s errand, for many reasons, primarily that most of these acts have little runway left.

And what is mainstream anymore? Can we please admit it’s all just niche?

what Ursus specializes in is figuring out and gaming the TikTok algorithm. And the algorithm is everything. It decides what is seen and what is not. Magana leverages one act to break another, just like rap artists feature a newbie on one of their tracks

the dirty little secret is they make much more money than the complaining musicians

if people want to listen to your music you can make a fortune in music, more than ever before. But most people don’t want to listen to most music. And it’s harder to gain attention, even get sampled, than ever before.

So Ursus is building the acts online, where the audience is. It’s totally direct. Radio and print are irrelevant.

The number one criterion for success seems to be saying you’re depressed. Because so many people on social media are.

The media has it wrong, it’s not that social media is making people depressed, rather they’re going on social media to feel understood

money is always an issue, but changing the world is too. Think about it, a techie, who happened to love music, i.e. Steve Jobs, put a dent in the universe bigger than any musician in the past two decades

Read/listen to this article and you’ll see that the majors have no hope, because they’ve got no one on their team as savvy or as innovative as Magana.

The majors have money to invest, to nurture and develop talent. Most of what succeeds on TikTok is not quality musical talent, but the majors see the dollars and that’s where they go, in ignorance

If you think piracy and non-musical material are the big problem with streaming payouts, you can’t see the forest for the trees. It’s positively de minimis, but it makes a good story.

Terrestrial radio’s business is selling advertising, Spotify’s business is selling subscriptions, and they’re generated almost totally by music. Yes, Spotify is in bed with you, it’s not the enemy. As for Spotify versus the other outlets…the truth is not only does Spotify have more subscribers, but they listen more!

So, I brought this “Wired” article up at a publisher meeting. No one had heard of it, no one read it.

As for those in music business college… You’ll learn something, but not the skills Ursus Magana has.