Tyler Colin has pursued a lot of things in his 26 years. He played college basketball. He won an MTV reality show

He's tried podcasting modeling acting, but in 2019 he got pretty serious about music after seeing my car for like six months for

an hour and a half per single day. I released stuck in the middle under tie-vari days. He put it up on TikTok under that name tie-vari days and at the time

he was working at a Verizon store. I saw other people like me that had no following end up on the radio and when you see that happen

in multiple times because of one app. It's kind of like a book. You know what I'm saying? Like why not?

And before he knew it, he was fielding calls from presidents of record labels during his lunch break. He got a record deal made a debut album and is going on tour

this year. Stuck in the middle has been streamed well over a hundred million times on Spotify. If you just look at my take-doc, I really, really want people to understand how simple this is is that it's not about a strategy or anything like that.

It's about the consistency of posting your music on a platform, showing your ideas, showing that you are like an artist. That's really it. Is this on good?

And are you putting it on the platform where people are at right now? TikTok is definitely where the people are at right now. The social media apps saw a huge rise during the pandemic.

globally, TikTok has one billion monthly active users. Everyone that is understanding now with this app that it's literally the closest we've gone to human connection that we can get right now.

It's literally a window to somebody else's life. Unlike Instagram where it's been posed pictures, this and that. And then when you have something that's a value that is so raw, people are like, wow, this is something that I need to be a part of.

Now, Colin thinks he would have made it in the industry regardless. TikTok just sped up the process. But he did notice that his fans on TikTok were uniquely engaged.

They will do stuff for you because you're actually giving them value. You just made this video, you have this song, you have this melody that they really like. They want to go get that. You just gave them something.

Consider this. TikTok is not the first social media app to create stars. But for some musicians, this app has distinct advantages. And the music business is paying close attention.

From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Friday, February 4.

Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from BetterHelp online counseling by licensed professional counselors specializing in isolation, depression, stress and anxiety.

Visit betterhelp.com slash consider to learn more and get 10% off your first month.

It's consider this from NPR Facebook lost daily users in the last three months of 2021 and its parent company meta just had its worst day ever on Wall Street.

Now, there are a lot of reasons for that though in a call yesterday CEO Mark Zuckerberg singled out one of them by name.

People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly.

Facebook and Instagram are losing users and valuable advertising dollars to TikTok and they're trying to keep up, but it might not be enough.

The thing with the so unique here is that TikTok is so big as the competitor already and also continues to grow it quite a fast rate.

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