Investigating the "influencer to pop star" pipeline

[Music] hello everybody welcome to mike's mic my name is factually contractually and logistically mine for this video i am going to be serving video essay realness it's a little different to the content i usually do so if you enjoy it please let me know by liking the video and maybe leaving me a comment for this video i wanted to talk about the influencer to pop star pipeline and when i say pipeline i'm just talking about the trend of social media stars making their way into the mainstream through music whether successfully or unsuccessfully we're going to look at some examples across a bunch of different platforms and maybe even review a song or two pause put your paws up i'm a little monster disclaimer i am not an expert i listen to a lot of music yes but does that make me an expert no well maybe no so if i have an opinion on a song not being good that's just my opinion and that might not be how you feel about the song and that is okay at the same time i'm not going to be s word it hasn't been a minute in the video so i can't swear yet i'm not going to be s wording over all the songs from social media stars so if that's what you're looking for in this video then maybe you won't find that or maybe you will also what defines good and bad music is subjective i guess in this video good music refers to artists or songs that find commercial success or in the case of small creators it's more that they've built a community that really loves everything that they put out and bad music will be referring to just blatant cash grabs you can see that there's no real intention to put effort into it make a career out of it they just want a quick dollar maybe a bit more than one dollar that being said in general there are songs that fit that description and they're still fun to listen to i can't make the music not but if it hits it hits besties let's go back to the start what is an influencer i really hate the term influencer it aggravates me it aggravates my soul i feel an itch that i need to scratch when i hear the term influence when someone calls me an influencer maybe i want to run into a wall giving very much start of beautiful by kristen aguilera she's like don't look at me it's embarrassing i think it's because of the company that gets looped into the umbrella when you make the term influencer fit anyone that uploads content to the internet and i guess by that definition if you yourself yes you audience member if you have ever uploaded something to the internet and someone has viewed it you're an influencer wait a minute hold on also what am i influencing you shouldn't be looking at people who upload mp4 files to youtube.com for all your big brain discourse no no according to the original girl boss merriam webster the first known use of influencer was in 1662 so the girls have been influencing for a while mary beth was walking around promoting skinny tea to anyone that would listen use code plague for ten percent off their definition is one who exerts influence a person who inspires or guides the actions of others ill often specifically a person who is able to generate interest in something such as a consumer product by posting about it on social media so yes i don't like the term influencer and i feel like a more appropriate title for this video would be investigating the social media star to pop star pipeline that is just too many letters for the algorithm and i feel like i'm already on denies with her and i don't want to push it also let's be clear people hate influences the general public they do not like influences but there are definitely some people who i'm going to be talking about that give me paws and i definitely don't think they'd be coming on at the club the one thing that will unite the people on this giant rock spinning around a fireball in infinite space is the hatred for influences maybe dixie is a peacekeeper after all the real peacekeeper was the friends we made along the way what i think a good example of the public disdain for influences is from this article in l.a times called paris hilton hollywood's original influencer you could easily label this the decade of the influencer those youtube and instagram stars who make money by selling face tuned versions of themselves while hawking face creams fashion collaborations protein powder and how to improve your life seminar through their social media posts they convince thousands and millions of fans of admirers to like what they like and want what they want i don't know what accent that was but it just felt right i love this quote because it just makes it sound like all influences are part of some grand scheme that this giant evil corporation paying all the minions to influence the masses like come on i just want to upload my little video files to the internet have a little laugh and then that's it shut the computer go to sleep but since technically everyone who uploads content is under that term influencer there are people that definitely fit that description and just by reading i can already think of like three or four that i'm just like and i guess that's why youtube tries to call youtubers content creators our content creators how long until influencer is like a curse word you're an influencer brackets derogatory so this article talks about how paris is one of the first if not the first influencer and i agree with that but i also think it would be wrong to just say that tv and movie celebrities from before that weren't doing what influencers are kind of doing now but i would say paris hilton is definitely one of the first people that the general public liked to frame as being famous for doing nothing or only famous because she was in a uh huh and she's a great starting point for this influence of the pop star pipeline discussion also i'm not going to sit here and defend everything that paris hilton's done in however many years but i will say there's definitely a lot more behind the scenes than what she was being shown as in the tabloids in terms of music paris hilton has made one studio album nine singles and 12 music videos she released her debut album called paris on august 22nd 2006 and the album peaked at number six on the billboard 200 which is insane that's a big deal that's commercial success um i'm going to talk about this a bit more later but i think we're kind of skewed now by always reading the statistics about how this ariana grande album or taylor swift album debuted at number one so we're kind of used to that but that is crazy also side note the week that paris album hit number six on the billboard 200 at number five we had the cheetah girls 2 soundtrack we as a society did not do enough for the cheetah girls maybe i need to do a video about the cgcu the cheetah girl cinematic universe also the album paris is good i will stand by that it's like 2 000 personified in an album and it's fun so by far paris's most well-known musical venture is the single that came off this album called stars are blind this song did what it needed to do [Music] and this is the first influencer song we're going to talk about let's have a look at some of the lyrics even though the guns are crazy even though they're rain wait if you show me real love baby i'll show you mine so obviously there's some innuendos in here but literally every song from the 2000s is just one big innuendo i'm like a 12 year old that learned the word innuendo and i just keep using it innuendo innuendo hmm innuendo so the song was generally positively received by critics and it peaked at 18 on the billboard hot 100. and the overall response seemed to be that people were surprised that this person who seemingly isn't good at anything other than being famous managed to come out with a fun catchy song so the track was worked on by fernando garabe sorry if i pronounced that wrong who also has credits on most tracks from born this way which has its 10th anniversary this week so paws up you better be streaming and they also worked on tracks from pink friday row and reloaded and this just all makes sense maybe correlation does imply causation i guess what i'm trying to say by talking about who worked on the song is that there was some serious money behind this and the money discussion is definitely a huge chunk of the pipeline because at the end of the day if you have enough money you can essentially make anyone a start or you can make a solid attempt at making someone a star so paris comes out with a banger and her album peaks at number six on the billboard 200 what a precedent what next let's pivot five years later bestie minion of paris kim kardashian comes out with jam brackets turn it up and they play in my channel i think it's fair to say the kardashians are no strangers to a slightly off business venture that la times paragraph i think when the author wrote it they must have been thinking about the kardashians because i'm reading that and i'm thinking about them and i'm like it links up and yes while i liked laughing at memes from keeping up the kardashians and i like to laugh at whatever comes up on tick tock about kendall and kylie i think it's fair to say the kardashians are first and foremost money makers and probably a good representation of late stage capitalism is that a hot take the hot take would be that people should not be looking at those who upload jpegs and pngs to the internet as role models but that's a discussion for another time so kim kardashian dropped jam brackets turn it up and i keep including the brackets turned up because it's important i think dropped is good terminology because um when she released it it fell and it fell hard flop turn it down the song tanked in comparison to stars are blind and was absolutely demolished by critics here's a fun quote from one of the reviews dead brained piece of generic dance music without a single distinguishing feature but also they called it generic dance music it's like that regina george but she's like so you agree you think you're pretty so you agree you think it's dance music turn me up turn me up turn me turn me turn me up yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah turn me up turn me up turn me turn me turn me up yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah everybody moved i do want to talk about the single cover i just feel nothingness it's like looking at a wall that's just been painted but just painted one color like you recognize that the wall has been freshly painted but you're like it's just a wall and it's just one color and i have fumes in my nose now that was the end of kim's journey into music and while kylie hasn't released music as of yet i think the threat is always there that reminds me of that tweet from idolater in 2017 jessie j is threatening to release a new album i've mentioned that tweet in a video before but i always think about it because it's just so casually vicious like what did jesse do so those are some examples of early influences releasing music to mix reviews porting over an existing audience to a new medium that should be the title of my autobiography once i work out how to do it and i debut number one the billboard hot 100 imagine the absolute societal collapse let's talk about youtubers doing just that i mean not the debuting at number one part and that sounds shady but i'm not being shaped i think now's a good time to talk about the charts debuting at number one is quite literally almost impossible as i was saying before i think people really underestimate just how difficult it is to get on the chart at all let alone get into the top 10 let alone debut in the top 10 on both the billboard hot 100 and the billboard 200. for example let's take dual leaper she's an absolute mega successful powerhouse icon legend boots the house charlie xcx snatch my wig bringing to the runway but she doesn't have a number one on the billboard hot 100 or the billboard 200 second twist second twist sickery twistery i've done a podcast episode about how the charts work but maybe i should do something on the main channel as well my general thoughts on using these two charts to measure success is that it's a bit crusty especially since it's just streams inside the us so pitting international artists on this scale that is so skewed to us audiences isn't necessarily fair plus as i said at the start success can be measured in so many different ways like i would say charlie xcx is a trailblazing icon but maybe she doesn't chart as high on the billboard hot 100 as jim from the states who's singing about a truck and as much as i hate to admit it maybe that's okay all right back to youtube we're gonna talk about magcon and tiktok and all that later but i think youtube is a good starting point for talking about real influencer influencers moving into music because youtube was the first platform that really prioritized video there were obviously social media platforms before youtube but if people were already going to youtube to consume music content in the form of like music videos then if you're uploading content to youtube as covers and that kind of thing it was realistic to assume that people might see your content actually i lied let's talk about myspace quickly i just wanted to give an example on how wild the internet is did you know that nicki minaj has a song with jeffree star it's called lollipop luxury and i just want you to let that sink in i don't like jeffree star he's like youtube voldemort anyway i think that track happened because of myspace because that's where he was uploading and that's how he was getting big and everything blah blah blah blah blah blah blah life moves on i don't want to talk about tom free riddle star anymore but the point i wanted to make was that people have been using social media to get their music found since the beginning of time the cavemen were doing it that first mammal that walked out of the ocean she was uploading her mp3 files to soundcloud and i feel like the introduction of youtube sorry i'm stretching because this is like the longest i've sat down to record a video for ever i feel like the introduction of youtube was kind of like giving caffeine to a toddler where the toddler is someone that can sing and the caffeine is a platform for people to consume that talent now i obviously have a personal bias towards youtube because that's kind of what i do but don't get it twisted i also hate this website i do think youtube is a good way to kick start a career heading into that kind of area all you need is a bit of talent and personality in fact you don't even need both of those if this is the scale and you're 100 on the talent end as long as there's enough money behind you you can still sell records and if you're 100 personality and no talent and again there's enough money behind you you can port that audience over and just claim it's a meme song until it's not a meme song and it's a real song more on that at 8. i haven't said this in a while on the channel and you seem to have forgotten it but i have a master's degree in mechanical engineering why is that relevant it's not but i wanted to give you all a diagram to work with this is a venn diagram of talent and personality and let's start at the center intersection of talent and personality that's actually such a huge compliment and i don't give compliments easy so if you're in this you better appreciate it all right everyone i want you to participate in the following activity i want to think about a person who started by uploading cute little youtube videos pause that's me and now they're a mega successful pop star the first person who comes to mind is probably troye sivan right i think troye sivan is probably one of the most successful real youtuber to mainstream converts i know there are other people that made covers and got picked up by record labels but troy was a youtuber in every sense of the word i'm talking collabs i'm talking challenges i'm talking vidcon i'm talking dating rumors the whole lot he's kind of like the blueprint for this sort of thing the pink print the troy prince where the bob's at life has just been so good since nikki dropped beaming up scotty on streaming it's not related to this content at all but it just oh am i right it's pretty clear that at this point troye sivan is more famous for the stuff that he's done after youtube than what he did on youtube if you look at his socials he's got like 11 million followers on instagram and i think at his peak he has something like 4 million subscribers on youtube so obviously the majority of his followers came from after he went into music so how did he do it it all comes down to the diagram he had four million subscribers on youtube from essentially just being himself so tick personality and while making those typical like youtuber videos from the early 2010s he was also uploading covers and original songs so tick talent he released his first major label ep called trxy in 2014 which peaked at number five on the billboard 200. i remember when he dropped i was like oh cool ep new trixie ep just dropped i feel like replacing letters in titles is just so very 2014. not an attack just a fact i mean miss pink has been yelling in the ice slot since the beginning of time he also dropped a wild ep in 2015 and blue neighborhood in the same year side note the word neighborhood is just it's aggravating i don't like it i just can't handle the word neighborhood it's so many legends and the start of it is so horsy you know like neighborhood and for what overall his most successful album chart outing so far has been bloom which peaked at number four in 2018 and i would say that really cemented him as a queer icon in pop music also dance to this everybody moved name someone who didn't move you can't there's no one because everyone moved let's not undersell oh let's not undersell how iconic it was that he worked with ariana grande on that song and she's one of the biggest pop girls on this rock but as you all know it has long been prophesied since the beginning of time since the big bang that there could only be one brown head australian youtuber that used to live in perth now lives in melbourne so i think troy could sense that i was arriving and got out of the game so thank you troy who else have we got other successful examples that come to mind are conan grey and dodie who also just released an album stream build a problem i would say conan gray kind of followed the troy print because his debut album peaked at number five on the bible 200 which again wild conan's also had a billboard hot 100 top 50 single with heather which went viral on tick tock but i'll talk more about how songs go by along tick tock more at night but yes a clear distinction that i wanted to make with these artists compared to the ones i'm about to talk about is that singing has always been part of their content or like they made it clear they were passionate about that so when they pivoted into music it felt authentic and now back to this jake paul that had a lot of boxed about the other day in the press i'm going to try and restrain myself here i'm not the biggest fan to say the least in my opinion it's one thing to act the way he does online and offline but it's a totally different thing to cultivate a young audience and do all of that stuff with them watching but that's not for this video remember that era of like ricegum vs jake paul if we made it through that we can make it through anything and the songs that came out of that we had its everyday bro it's every night sis the fall of jake paul by logan paul exhausting absolutely exhausting if we're looking at views alone these songs were absolutely huge all of these videos have over 200 million views which is a lot for one of the main pop stars let alone a youtuber song but as i said before there's a distinction between these songs and the ones i mentioned before these are meme songs there doesn't seem to be an intention from these people to make it bigger the music industry because they're really passionate about making music they all capitalized off a situation they found themselves in turned into a music video they got views and streams and hundreds of millions which equates to what audience money and there are also other people who kind of fit somewhere around there but i don't know what their goal is like tana mojo like what is her goal is her goal to make music or to make money and i think you can do both of those things but then it's clearly some people would just want to do the second part which is fine if you like these meme songs you like these meme songs but in my opinion they can't compete when they don't compare my my by troye sivan real song lasagna by pewdiepie meme song walkman by a tiny meat gang is it a real song or is it a meme song or is it hannah montana limo out front but the both world but it's a meme song but it's good i think tmg is the way to go if you're a youtuber that wants to make music but you come from this background of creating content that's funny it's just jokey enough that if the song doesn't find commercial success the audience that it was intended for which is the audience from youtube and other platforms will still enjoy it and it's still just a fun little outing but at the same time the production value on these types of songs is getting really good both in terms of the production on the song and also the money behind the music video and also like featuring artists like black bear at what point is it not a joke anymore let's quickly talk about the mad con situation while youtube is very much in my wheelhouse i don't know that much about magcon but there are definitely some names from it that i recognize according to dictionary.com magcon was an event featuring young online stars from platforms like instagram and vine who toured the us to meet their fans apparently the name magcon comes from meat and great convention which i'm sure at some stage i knew that but it just feels like new information and i guess some of the notable examples that come from the maracon era are cameron dallas sean mendes and then mahogany locks i feel like shawn mendes really wants to park that part of his history but it's important sean you can't leave madcon in the dust it's important sean mendes is a mega star now and yes he was uploading covers to youtube but his biggest platform was vine and it really makes you think would he have got this far without magcon also i was so triple g girl boss gasoline gatekept when i realized that the girl who was the dj at mancon was the girl who sings i can take your man if i want to i also find it interesting that even though cameron and sean were both in mad con and they're both making music to some degree at the moment they're in such different stages not an attack just a fact all right let's talk about tick tock and his stretch again that chair needs some wd-40 before we get into the juicy tick tock discussion i just wanted to make a hundred thousand iq point if an artist released a song that does well on its own without social media support they're going to be called an industry plan correct so i guess if you want to be a pop star your options are be an industry plan be mega rich get big on a given social media network and port your audience over or hope your song goes viral through some trend or because someone more famous recognized and shared it let's say you don't have the connections to be an industry plan which i have nothing against by the way i hate the really negative connotation associated with being an industry plant like if the music hits the music hits it has been said several times on the internet i can't make the music not but if i'm going to shake my ass i'm going to shake my arse and that's that on that so we're saying you don't have the connections and you're not mega rich i think that depends on what you're you know that wasn't a question so you're either relying on your song going viral or building a big enough platform to then pour your audience over to your music and this is where it gets interesting with the nature of the content being so quickly consumed and how fast trends move i would say that tick tock is both the easiest to grow on but then also has the biggest cliff to fall off in terms of losing momentum let's go back to that let's go back to that youtube venn diagram from before i think we need to add another section for people who don't fit into oh how do i put this nicely they have neither but they're still successful oh my god i don't know how else to say it i'm done i'm over i'm cancelled let's say their strengths lie in places that aren't necessarily talent or personality is that better let's add a circle for aesthetic you might be like well what the does aesthetic mean in this context well audience member that is so graciously sat through the vast majority of this video i will tell you right now the aesthetic category is for people who are hot and their job is being hot every day i wake up hot and get in my hot car and go to my hot job and do my hot little tasks so for example the tick tockers that just do the big dance trends and then some sexy lip singing the job is being hot and that's okay if i was built like that i would be shaking my ass for a case to fight sponsorship as well before we put some names on the chart oh my god a hair just fell onto me while i'm talking the curse of bryce hall before we put names on the chart let's talk about the tick tock algorithm and the translation from tick tock song to chart song at this point if a song does really well on tick tock it's going to do well on streaming and it's probably going to do well on the charts as well that's why all the main pop girlies are trying to like make dances and trends to their songs as soon as they release them if it catches on and videos that have the sound have like hundreds of millions or even billions of views a chunk of that audience is going to stream the song now imagine you personally decide that you're going to start making music and you also have a tick tock following of 70 million people the audience just boom boom boom you know boom boom pow maybe the black eyed peas had it right all along there is so much money behind tick tock is at this level and it's because record labels also see the absolutely insane possibilities that come out of having someone with a relatively clean image and an audience of 70 million people why am i talking like this is a conspiracy it's like this is widely known the first example i would like to talk about is build a by bellaport she's the third most followed person on tick tock with 69 million followers miss porch came out swinging on this track and i did not expect it her regular tick tock content let's just say i'm not the target audience but i went through her profile and she did sometimes upload videos of her singing and she was a good singer so the song huge the music video is almost at 100 million views in like a week and if you compare that with dixie who uploaded a song at the same time and it had like six million views in the same period of time 100 million for six million that's a big difference there's obviously a bunch of reasons that go into that difference but i would say in addition to being a catchy song the music video is solid there's some big money behind this song and to put that much money into all the editing the production for the music video without having any prior music before that you can tell that the record label can see the importance of a solid debut for miss bella i think she's gonna go boss now i'm not gonna start talking about dixie damiel and just rat on all of her songs because she deals with that a lot already but she seems like a nice person but if she's gonna make music her career something's gonna shift and i do think she's making changes and heading the right direction but that that she stumbled on that one hog day song i'm still not over it the kid's buppery of it all for one day one day i was really really really really sad for one day one whole day i missed you really really really bad however one whole day features wiz khalifa that's a big deal but even that be happy song was just it's kids bob it was definitely a thing that happened yeah let's say that and then you have miss addison ray coming into girl boss at the speed of a thousand mlms i don't think she's really in the same category as dixie and bella because she's kind of got that she's the man revamp thing coming on and at the end of the day after a day being on set she just goes chills and eats salad with kourtney kardashian so but the key thing is huge following lots of money i've been seeing some interaction on tick tock and on twitter between anderson ray and charlie xcx and their angels oppressed the fans are like nah i would rather die than see those two color but i'm like if it hits it hits and if she works with addison addison's got a huge platform it's a win for charlie as well so i will be streaming so all of these people that i've been talking about are coming into the music area with established huge following the cool thing about tiktok is that you don't have to be massive to start something there's an australian tick tocker called peach prc and i really like her songs and i wouldn't have found her without tic toc and i really like those small artists that are kind of coming into the hyper pop space and making really fun and exciting music if it weren't for social media i would not be at a hyper party yelling play chase icon at the dj yes the dj ignored me actually my track record with the cresting songs is pretty much zero to summarize i think the influencer to pop star pipeline is an interesting one it started off with your paris's and your kim's and then headed into the myspace notoriety and then we had vine and mad con and youtube and now we're kind of at this area with tick tock where you can turn into a mega star quite quickly i think social media is more and more a way for artists to get found and in my opinion the more music the better and if the music sucks at least we'll have something to talk about i am exhausted from talking that is so much talking that was sick and twisted if you've made it this far thank you first of all and if you enjoyed it feel free to leave a like let me know in the comments your thoughts or if you like this format and you have topics that you want me to talk about feel free to leave them in the comments i do talk about more of this long-form type of thing on my podcast so be sure to check that out so yeah thank you all so much for watching and i'll talk to you all soon also if you see me dropping a single mind your business in the stream bye welcome to the end screen here you will find another video for you to watch and a link to easily subscribe to my channel so make sure you subscribe let me roll my eyes now i can't remember how to roll my eyes it's getting weird

Channel: Mike's Mic

Views: 944,881

Keywords: mike's mic, mikesmic, commentary, influencer music, troye sivan music, dixie damelio, bella poarch, build a b, paris hilton, tiktok, addison rae music, dixie damelio music, conan gray, dodie, jake paul

Id: lve9Fl7ly2Q

Length: 29min 2sec (1742 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021