Planet Money - TikTok to the top

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Thanks to TikTok, Tai Verdes went from struggling musician to Top 40 hitmaker. But first, he had to crack the algorithm of how to go viral. | Come see Planet Money Live in NYC on May 10th! One night only. Tickets on sale here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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This is Planet Money from NPR. A few years ago, Ty Verdes was in his early 20s, working a day job at a Verizon store in Los Angeles and dreaming of becoming a pop star. But he wasn't having much luck through the traditional routes to musical fame. I would like write a song and then go to these auditions. I would like write a song and then go to these auditions. I'd wait, whatever it is, like nine hours just to sing for two minutes. And then no one would say anything. They would just be like, all right. And then you'd go home. But then, of course, the world shut down.

Like a lot of us, Ty had to shelter in place at home. And also like a lot of us, he started spending more and more time on TikTok, this social media app that has exploded since the pandemic started. If you aren't totally addicted yet, TikTok is made up of these short, punchy videos of people doing little dance moves or cooking videos or hair and beauty routines, little trends often set to very particular songs. So Tai was stuck in his apartment working on his music when he started thinking about how he might be able to tap into these enormous audiences. And over the next year of tinkering and testing out different

strategies, Ty managed to kind of crack the TikTok formula. He used the app to get his songs into the ears of millions of people around the world. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. And I'm Charlie Harding. Charlie, you are one of the hosts of the Switched on Pop podcast, which is all about the making and the meaning of popular music. And you've come here today to give us a little glimpse into how TikTok is transforming the way the music industry works, which songs become popular, and even the structure and style of

songs themselves. That's right. Today on the show, the story of Ty Verdes, who figured out how to ride the TikTok algorithm going from a sales clerk at Verizon to an internet phenom to a top 40 pop star in just about a year. When Ty Verdes started using TikTok, he thought of it like a little musical sandbox where he could try out different strategies for building an audience with almost instant feedback and very low stakes for failure. If you're nobody, you have to do something wild to get things started. for building an audience with almost instant feedback and very low stakes for failure. If you're nobody, you have to do something wild to get things started. In these ripe spaces where no one's going to remember, like in these new spaces of social media where no one's going to remember anything,

like, do they remember Justin Bieber from YouTube? No. I got a problem and I don't know what to do about it. Even if I did, I don't know. Do they remember Shawn Mendes going on and playing Six seconds of a song Just trying to show that he's riffing You know what I'm saying?

Who's that hold on tight And lives on Africa That's when you can be experimental And kind of do that sellout stuff Where you're like, hey, let's amp this up a little bit So that we can get this platform going One of the first things he tried to get The viral snowball rolling where you're like, hey, let's amp this up a little bit so that we can get this platform going. One of the first things he tried to get the viral snowball rolling was actually paying people to use his songs in their videos.

For example, his song Skin Routine. Could you tell me about that song and how you go about it? When I made Skin Routine, I had TikTok. And I was like, okay, I can I had TikTok, and I was like, okay, I can do this whole campaign where I'm like, people can show me their skin routine, and that'll be the trend.

But yeah, I started paying people. Now you're probably thinking, what about the money? The money's important. I like money. The first 100 people to make a TikTok of themselves doing their skin routine to my song,

dancing to my song, doing anything to my song, they're going to get paid out based on these brackets. Like 10 bucks, 20 bucks to use my song in their videos. What happens? Nothing. Nothing happens. I think that maybe it gets a couple thousand streams, but like in reality, I pay these people, they use the song, but no one really gravitates to it.

So I was like, you know what? Next song. Let's try again. but no one really gravitates to it. So I was like, you know what? Next song. Let's try again. Ty tries his hand in recording some songs and plays them back for his brother. I don't think he likes any of my music. And then my brother told me,

you have to hook people in the first two lines. And that's what I live by now. It's like, your premise has to be so good that you need to know what's next. So then I was going through a toxic relationship right and i was just like listening to youtube beats because that's how i find my music right a lot of the album is youtube beats yeah explain what that means so that means a producer is trying to sell his beats he'll sell them for like 10 bucks to use like a MP3. The whole vibe of the internet is a lot of rap beats, a lot of trap beats.

A lot of lo-fi beats. But there's not a lot of like instrumental indie stuff that's just floating around. I'm on the seventh level of hell of YouTube every single night. I'm going on YouTube searching like Harry Styles type beat or something like that. And then after going around, I found this beat that had like a thousand views, which is so small. Usually a lot of these beats have like 50,000 to 100,000, maybe a million views on them because they're so good.

And people like rap over them, try to do their songs over them. I knew that I had to have something that wasn't viewed a lot because I needed it to be mine. I had to buy it eventually. So I found this beat, this guy named Red Mosque in France. And I loved it. Just that bass in the beginning, that... You're a musician. You play piano, you play guitar musician you play piano you play guitar you sing yeah but you kind of find this cheat code

of like i'm gonna find fully produced songs and use my best talent which is the storytelling lyric melody how do you come upon that way of working because i see how everybody else was doing it i can make leaps and bounds if i have a guitar player who's been playing guitar for years and get the feel and be like that's what you should play compared to me learning hours and hours of guitar and piano and learning how to play into a studio. Because I can play it, but I've never played, I've never tried to track something to a loop before. I could probably learn how to do it, but I'm not, that's not my goal. My goal was to be a singer. And I knew that with my skills right now, that on guitar and piano, ukulele, it wasn't going to sound authentic.

Does it change your relationship to the music, knowing that, hey, this is coming off of YouTube, as opposed to it's the thing that you did in the studio? No, because it's about the feel of the song. It doesn't matter where it comes from. I have the whole song written out, and then I have the YouTube beat. And then now I need to structure it to make it have a pre-chorus, chorus, and whatever. I structured it to match the lyrics and whatever.

I go and track it. It takes a day. There were some issues with it. Then I go back in like a week and a half, and then I fix it, and then on my drive back. That was the first time I had listened to my own music back on the highway and enjoyed it to the point where I was like smiling

windows down. And it was amazing. So you're vibing to it in the car. It's working for you. What happens? I was vibing and I was having a good time but it wasn't the best. It's not like I got out of that car thinking this is the best song.

This song is going to go gold. You know what I'm saying? Like, I did not think that. I thought, all right, this is good enough. That was my entire mindset. This is good enough. Put it on TikTok. And just like his brother had told him, Ty started the song with a catchy opening line,

something that might have sounded a bit racy on the radio, but turned out to be pretty well suited to the irreverent tone of TikTok. And then that's when the story starts. That's where you can see it all on TikTok. I go in my car, open the door, gets a thousand likes, I'm going to put it on Spotify. I was going to put it on Spotify. Like I was going to put on all of it. I was going to put everything everywhere. Right when I put it up, 10,000 plays. And that never

happened to me before what's happening in your mind as you're watching this happen to be honest it was so gradual it was so gradual i was like 10 000 this is cool because i i knew 100 000 views it wasn't a lot i've seen people get 5 million views i've seen people get 10 million views on tiktok i was like okay this is a start i can start with this and then i post another video the next day of like the pre-chorus, and then it gets another 100,000 views. And I'm like, oh, okay. All right, people.

This is another part of my new song called Stuck in the Middle. All right. This is the chorus. Because we're stuck in the middle of lovers. My song was never a song that went crazy out of the gate. It didn't have a trend. There was nothing attached to it, which I think was a blessing because trends die.

Why is it connecting? I think because they're going through the same thing. And some people probably swiped past my video as well, but then some people saw me in their car and they were like, you're a player, aren't you? And I bet you got hope. Dang. Someone said that to me. Oh, I actually said that to someone. And then now they're like, now I need to go find this song. And in the video, I have a comment saying like, this song is live. You can go search it. My name

is Ty Verdes. You can go search it right now. I just have so much passion for this. But I just released this song, Stuck in the Middle, on Apple Music, and it would mean the world to me if you guys would listen to it. One of my goals is to have one of my singles hit the Billboard charts this summer. And then it just leads, bleeds into the music. It's crazy because right when I put it on Spotify, you could see people going from TikTok to Spotify. People seem to also really connect with the fact that you've got like a day job at the same time. Exactly. And working at the Verizon store. How could I forget the Verizon store? What if I told you that this random

college dropout that you're seeing on your screen right now started a Spotify page two months ago. And in that two months, he's gotten 2.5 million streams. Been featured on Rolling Stone. Been number one on the U.S. viral charts. Had a piece written on him on Lyrical Lemonade. And has multiple record deals. And he still works at motherfucking Verizon. That'd be pretty f****** crazy, right?

I had, like, all the heads of all these companies calling me at Verizon during my work break. You know, I was like on, with like the CEO of Capitol Records, you know, for 15 minutes. And I tell him, sorry, we got to reschedule

because I have to sell these phones. You know what I'm saying? Like, I told people that I worked. Everybody works. And that's something that people relate to. You know, when you see like a Justin Bieber, a Camila Cabello, Shawn Mendes, it's hard to imagine them at Subway.

You know what I'm saying? But it was easy to imagine me at Subway because I showed you me at Verizon, you know, working. So now that people have this baseline of like, oh, this is a regular guy that had a job. In reality, I kind of wasn't a regular guy. I had a lot of social media experience. I had a, I had musical background. I had like parents that allowed me to go have music. I had a lot of advantages that I'm super thankful for. But yeah, I think a lot of people love that type of like underdog story. This song has yet more of a life. Like you're telling your story.

People are connecting with it. They're following you more on TikTok. Yeah. So then I keep going. I keep saying, I keep like doing like maybe little parody, little dances. I keep talking about the song, reaching different accolades. I meet my managers, Ryan and Brandon, and I showed them the rest of my demos. At this time, while the song was blowing up, it had been like two or three months. I had made more songs. And one of the first producers that they introduced me to was Adam Friedman. And then that's how I started making more of the album was after I met Adam Friedman. What's different in the approach that you all bring to writing? Yeah. Adam Friedman is this producer who has worked with Mike Posner, the Black Eyed Peas. And I had so many questions because I had been just thrust into label conversation.

So I was asking Adam because Adam had also been an artist who had some success. First session, all we did was talk. We talked for like six hours about like every question I had. He tells me about all the label stuff, all the music stuff, how songs should be made, what feels good, feel in general. And then the next time we meet up, we make a song and it's trash. It's so bad. But because of the back and forth we built up, the next song that we made was Drugs. He comes into the studio. We start talking again for the third time.

I'm kind of disheveled because I'm like, God, this guy, we made a terrible song. I don't even want to go back, to be honest. But you never know. You always got to give people a second try. And then we start talking. He says, you know what? I had to actually go take a walk to go to Target when I was at my parents' house recently. And then I smoked some weed on the way because, you know, I had to relax.

And he smokes weed, you know? And I was like, why don't you just write a song about that? And I was like, yeah, sometimes you do drugs. Why don't you tell your mom sometimes you do drugs? And I was like, oh, yeah. Sometimes I do drugs. Not hard was like, oh, yeah. Sometimes I do drugs, not hard ones, just ones that change my mind up. That for me was so easy and so real that it was like the first time I was with somebody else that I was and we were like jumping

up and down in a studio freaking out because we had made something that we thought was just just super original sounded good and felt good okay so what happens after these sessions so after the sessions I'm super relaxed but I'm also not when stuck in the middle kind of is like tapering off. It's grown to 100,000, 200,000, 300,000, then kind of stays. It became like a trending song on TikTok, but then it's been six months. Like I want to be an artist. Not a trend. Yeah, not a trend. The hardest thing about building a career on social media isn't creating a viral song. It's creating the second one and the third one. Yet Ty Vardis' persistence pays off for him, and his next song, Drugs, is a hit. I decide in October to put Drugs out, and immediately we go viral again.

I don't want to tell my mom I smoked this weed. I don't want to tell my dad he'll call me weed. And we sing drugs, and we get a million views on that video. And then we sing it again, and we get like five million views on a video. And because of the subject matter, you know, we had conversations of putting it on radio, but no one would take it. At this point, Ty's viral success had earned him enough to get his own place. He quit his job at Verizon live on TikTok. His boss even congratulated him. It's very sweet. But obviously, Ty had much bigger ambitions. His songs had been playlisted on Spotify, but he still wanted to make a song

that would break into top 40 radio. So one day, Ty is working with his producer. Adam shows me this guitar loop, the A-OK guitar loop, and I'm like, I'm using that. Like, the guitar, like, it just

feels good. Doesn't this guitar sound so good? Like, I don't know somebody who can listen to that song and be like, nah, that doesn't feel good to me. Unless they don't want to be happy. If you don't want to be happy, the song's not for you. It's probably kind of annoying if you don't want to be happy. But if you do want to just, like, be a listener and you hear that guitar it's gonna feel good so you feel this thing you're feeling good yeah i'm feeling good so i hear the guitar

loop this is one of the songs that was like kind of like puzzle piece together he had worked on the song for like four years and then adam went, redid the drums. And redid the feel of the chorus. And tuned up the vocals. And now it sounds like a different type of record. But the thing is, the vocal wasn't there yet. I go in and then I hear the song. I'm like, this is okay.

But it didn't hit with me right away, but I did love the guitar lick in the beginning. I didn't know what it was yet, but I'm using it. And I would listen to it and I was like,

this song sounds weird. I don't know why I don't like it. Why don't you move the chorus in the front? Because it didn't used to have living in this big blue world. It didn't used to start

at the front. It used to be some verse have living in this big blue world. It didn't used to start at the front. It used to be some verse. So that's what I'm saying about feel is that I like would structure the beat to make it feel the best that I thought possible. Now, I go in and I'm like, what can make this song just better? And the hook was so good. I was like, let's just put the hook in the beginning. I didn't like any of the verses.

I didn't really like the bridge. Let's just go in, put the hook in the beginning, and then start there. We go in and cut it. Now, I go in, write a quick verse, first verse. I wrote that in like, I don't know, 30 minutes. And then I go in and write the bridge. Just the entire vibe of the song changed after all those elements, all those tiny little elements were changed. It became my song. Now when the chorus hit in the front and I put that on TikTok, that was kind of like the closing moment of this, like why I'm here right now is because that video has like 20 million views.

I just want to make you feel 2% better when you listen to this song. That's it. Just two. Ready? That was the first time that something that I put on the internet went viral on meme pages, on TikTok, that transcended social media, where I got on the radio, I got on TV, I did late night because of A-OK, me going in the car and singing, living in this big blue world. You had said earlier that you knew it was safe to experiment early on things people are going to forget or aren't that important to who you're going to be. How do you feel about relating so closely to the

platform of TikTok? And what do you hope to do with that? Nothing, man, it's going to be gone. I don't really know what's going to happen next. But I do know this, that you can go on TikTok right now and put a song on TikTok. And the algorithm will put you in front of an audience that you haven't been before, who have never seen you, who will give you their attention. Ty says you can't count on any one particular social media platform. Things are moving way too quickly to know what the music industry will look like in the next few years. What you can do is meet people where they are. One 20-second video at a time. Have you hacked an algorithm unleashing millions of new followers?

Tell us about it. We're at planetmoneyatnpr.org. Have you hacked an algorithm unleashing millions of new followers? Tell us about it. We're at planetmoneyatnpr.org. We're also on all the socials media, including TikTok, at planetmoney. The original Switched on Pop episode was produced by Nate Sloan and me, Charlie Harding, edited by Julia Myers and engineered by Brandon McFarlane, executive produced by Hannah Rosen and Nishant Karwa. This adaptation was produced by Audrey Dilling and edited by Jess Jang.

Mastering by Isaac Rodriguez. Planet Money's executive producer is Alex Goldmark. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. I'm Charlie Harding. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.