Your favorite musician's favorite TikTok show

For the first episode in our three-part miniseries on the future of music, we tell the story of Track Star, a music game show that has become a viral hit on TikTok and Instagram. Jack Coyne, the show's friendly host, tells us how Track Star came to be, why the format works so well, and why A-list celebrities like Olivia Rodrigo, Ed Sheeran, and Kamala Harris are all clamoring to be on the show. Coyne also tells us where Track Star might go next — and why the future of music content might look a lot like the past. Further reading: Track Star on TikTok Jack Coyne on Instagram The Olivia Rodrigo episode The "Every Track Star Song" playlist The Malcolm Todd episode Public Opinion Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of low stakes game shows. I'm your friend David Pierce and I finally have perfected my Nintendo Switch setup. So I mentioned on this show a while back that I needed a new game console, mostly because there's a bunch of new games coming out that didn't support my PS4. I wanted something new. The team almost convinced me to buy a Steam Deck, but then they were like, "Oh, it doesn't play the only game that you care about, which is EAFC, which used to be called FIFA." So that didn't work. So I did a bunch of research and a bunch of trying stuff and eventually landed on just buying EAFC 25 and trying to run it on my unbelievably old and kind of busted Nintendo Switch. It's not great.

• 0:48David Pierce?

  Game's a little laggy, jumps a lot. Every time you wanna like move down a menu, it takes a full second to think about it, but it works. I have the game, game's downloaded, it's all going fine. So of course, as I'm wont to do, I then got very obsessed with the setup. I bought a new controller from this company called Power A, which looks cool, but I hate it. So I'm already in the market for another controller. I've bought an adapter so that I can connect the Switch to my iPad and use it as a bigger screen when I'm on the road. I bought a thing to connect it to my TV. I bought a thing to connect it to my computer monitor. I've done way too much work to make this all work, but now I've gotten to the point where basically anywhere I am at any time

• 1:29David Pierce?

  with zero setup, I can play EAFC 25 on my Nintendo Switch. It's the dream. The game doesn't work very well, but it works. I have it and at least for now, that is enough. Also Nintendo, please release the Switch 2 because my setup is now perfect. All I need is a better console. Let's do this. All right. We're not here to talk about the Switch. We are here to do the first episode in our new three-part mini-series all about the future of music. We've done episodes on this topic before, and it's just something we really like talking about. And it turns out, music actually hits a lot of the stuff we care about most on The Verge Cast. It's about creators, it's about policy, it's about AI, it's about infrastructure, it's

• 2:12David Pierce?

  about what it means to be a person in the world. Music just covers everything, and so it's really fun to find new ways to talk about music. Today on the show, I'm talking to a guy named Jack Coin, who is a creator. He's on TikTok. You've probably seen his show, and you may not even have realized it. Super fun conversation. I really enjoyed talking to Jack. I learned a ton. We're gonna get into it. But first, I'm almost done with this game. There's this new mode called Rush. Every game is like seven minutes long. I'm just gonna finish that, and then we'll get into it. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back.

• 2:47Speaker 01

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• 3:12David Pierce?

  Welcome back. I'm so, so sorry to do this, especially right at the beginning, but I have to tell you a "back in my day" story just really quick. So, back in my day, back when I was a kid, way back in the ancient history that was the 1990s and early 2000s, MTV was the biggest thing in music.

• 3:45David Pierce?

  I probably don't have to explain the idea of television to most of you, but just in case, MTV was a TV channel that for hours and hours a day would just play shows about music. Sometimes it would just play music videos, back to back, one after another, for hours at a time. And you really cannot overstate how big a deal culturally MTV was. In particular, it felt at the time like Carson Daly and TRL, Total Request Live, were the most important brands in the music business. I'm sure there are people who will say otherwise, but that's how it felt to me at the time. I just went back and found a bunch of old TRL episodes, which you can find a surprising number of just by

• 4:28David Pierce?

  searching around on YouTube. And I kept noticing that what I remembered about TRL and what TRL actually was are two really different things. I remember TRL as the music video countdown. They would do a top 10 usually over the course of an entire episode, and it was a big deal for artists to get in that top 10. They would come on and be congratulated for moving up a spot. But most of these episodes that I'm seeing is just artists, like hanging out and talking about music. They're sitting on couches or stools or just standing in the crowd, just kind of hanging out. Some artists would bring their favorite music videos to talk about. Sometimes they would guest host and talk about all

• 5:08David Pierce?

  the most popular videos. Sometimes it had nothing to do with music at all and winds up feeling like, why on earth is this a TRL episode? Here's one good example. I found an episode from 2001 where Jessica Simpson, who at that time was like at the peak of her powers, is talking about her new music, and she takes a quiz during another music video about other music and TRL.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I'm here with Jessica Simpson. Jess, how are you on your TRL trivia? You've seen the show before.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  I have seen the show before. I hope I'm good. I'm not really good at this kind of thing, but all them are.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've put you with their fans. She'll be able to confer with her fans. We'll give you five questions. And here are your five questions. Question number one is, what was the first NSYNC video to go to number?

• 5:51David Pierce?

  Something about that clip just screams 2001 to me. I don't know why. Just everything about it. This is like a crazy blast from the past. Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about TRL and MTV recently, and really the whole idea of how we discover and get to know new music. Obviously, the whole music universe is different than it was 20 years ago. And in so many ways, we're actually much closer to artists than we've ever been. Every time an artist has an album coming out now, you suddenly see them on a million podcasts, or they're doing some like hour-long interview with Zayn Lowe for Apple Music where they walk around London, or they're doing cover songs on an Australian radio station's YouTube

• 6:34David Pierce?

  channel, like a version, by the way, one of the great things on the internet. There's more music content than ever, and we actually get more chances to see and hear from our favorite musicians than ever. A lot of the most followed people on Instagram are musicians. All of that together is why it's so interesting and almost strange to me that this little TikTok show has worked as well as it has. Welcome to the show.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Hello. Hey.

• 7:00David Pierce?

  Hey. If you can name an artist, you win five bucks.

• 7:03David Pierce?

  It's The Beatles. It's The Beatles. This show is called Trackstar, and it's all over the place on TikTok and Instagram. In case you've never seen it, it goes more or less like this. Jack Coin, the host, who's a voice you just heard, meets somebody on the street. Sometimes it's a totally random person just happening to walk by. Sometimes it's an A-plus list musician. Sometimes it's something kind of right in between. And he hands them a microphone and a pair of headphones. Jack then plays a song through the headphones, and if the person can guess the artist of that song, they win five bucks. If they get it right, they get to try again for 10 bucks or keep the five bucks and walk away. The number keeps doubling until they get it wrong or walk away and then it ends. It's a super simple premise and it really works.

• 7:48David Pierce?

  Trackstar is only a couple of years old, but it has 400,000 followers on TikTok, another 340,000 on Instagram and is continuing to grow really fast. But more than just the numbers, it's the guests that Jack gets on this show that blow my mind. Just to scroll through some of the most recent ones. Keith Urban is on here. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is here. Joe Jonas, Kamala Harris, sure. Dan Reynolds, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons. Ed Sheeran, Olivia Rodrigo, Nelly Furtado is here. Okay, sorry, you get the idea. But these are A-listers. These are big name people and they're just rolling up to listen to Jack Coin's playlists. I needed to know why this show has worked. So I called up Jack at his office in Manhattan.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  My name's, full name's Jack Coin and you can call me a content creator.

• 8:34David Pierce?

  Quick Jack backstory. He got started as a creator way back in the day when he started working for Casey Neistat, who is probably still your favorite YouTuber's favorite YouTuber. He was an assistant, an office manager, a producer, eventually made videos for Casey's app, Beam, and basically cut his teeth both as a content creator and more specifically as a content creator on the streets of New York City.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  I worked on his very first YouTube video ever with him. And his thing was just, there's a million stories out there, especially in New York City. If you look outside, you'll trip and fall into a story. And so that attitude was really ingrained in me from like the time I was 18 years old.

• 9:13David Pierce?

  Jack, by the way, calls himself a music guy, but only in the way that everyone who likes music is a music guy. He liked classic rock and pop music and just liked music. He definitely did not set out to be known for making music related stuff. But a few years ago, he was working with brands on social media content and he started a company with his brother and a friend who were both doing the same kind of thing to see if they could all just do it more efficiently together.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  We said if we put our clients together and we all help each other with our videos, we'll have extra time on the side to come up with our own original shows and ideas. I had previously had a YouTube channel. I'd worked with YouTube creators before and I just sensed that there was this huge opportunity in the moment to do something with short-form video, both on TikTok, Instagram, and of course, on YouTube. And so, we kind of carved out extra time for ourselves and resources from doing the brand work to be able to create public opinion.

• 10:10David Pierce?

  What was the thing you wanted to do first? When you were like, okay, we're gonna have this spare time to make something we want to make. Did you have a like, initial sense of what that thing was?

• 10:20Speaker 05

  Well, so, the reason we called the company Public Opinion was because it was about talking to people. That was like a shorthand way of saying, talking to people. And the reason that we wanted to talk to people is we recognized that this man-on-the-street type content was increasing in popularity, but we felt like no one was doing it great. It was a lot of like, gotcha, sort of making fun of people. Let's catch someone in an awkward or funny moment and make them look stupid. And we were like-

• 10:47David Pierce?

  I've always felt like half the internet was just people doing Billy on the street impressions.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And we felt, maybe there's a way to do this that's like nicer and more positive and maybe we can try and make people a little bit smarter with the stuff we were doing. So we were asking trivia questions about New York City and trying to educate people about New York City. That's where we got started.

• 11:08David Pierce?

  Okay. Was it, was that like a civic-minded thing? Or was it just fun and you thought New York was cool and that was a good way to do it?

• 11:16Speaker 05

  It's a personal interest thing. It's something that I've always been interested and curious about. And I think it was like, okay, guys, we gotta go shoot. We looked out the window and like, what's that building? Oh, maybe there's something interesting about that building. We could talk to people about it. And that was the entry point.

• 11:31David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  It was just like the obvious thing because we were here in New York, and I love it here.

• 11:37David Pierce?

  The Public Opinion channel is very much alive and super fun, too, by the way. And it works just the way you think. Since it's obviously currently election season, Jack has been mostly running around asking people trivia questions about New York City and US presidents and how the two kind of collide.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Which president has a parkway named after him? You're driving- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Driving on the east side. Where are you driving? I think the FDR, man. Yes. Two more questions.

• 12:01David Pierce?

  But the problem they ran into early on was that most people in New York don't actually know that much about New York. New York's whole thing, its whole appeal, is that people come from everywhere. It's a super transient town. That's what makes it so exciting. But I mean, your trivia game show isn't very fun if nobody knows any of the answers, right?

• 12:21Speaker 05

  I would say maybe our hit rate was two out of 10. People who actually knew something about New York that besides just, oh, I don't really know the answer to that question. That's not interesting content. And so it was like, our second show has to be something that's much more universal and something that everybody can talk about. Because, like I said, public opinion, what's something that is going to cast a wider net? Music was the obvious answer. And we found right away, like, the hit rate of just getting people to engage with us was higher, and their reactions and the stories that came out of talking to songs was really exciting.

• 12:52David Pierce?

  Why was music the obvious answer? I could imagine, especially as a New Yorker, like, a dozen things you might land on before music. You're like, let's do Yankees trivia, or like, let's talk about, you know, famous New Yorkers, or whatever. Like, there's a lot of places you could go other than music. Why did you land on music?

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. We definitely thought about doing sports stuff and continue to think about doing sports stuff because we have a little tangential, and it's super fun, and people are so passionate about that, and a few other things. But I think simultaneously, we recognized that there was a lot of music conversation happening on the platforms. And TikTok is a music-driven platform, right? Like, the reason videos, a lot of videos take off is the sounds that are attached to them. So we were like, let's just get into the sound and music business because that's where the platform is driving people. And we pretty quickly realized that there's a lot of interest from record labels, from musicians, from music management, PR, to attach themselves to something that's making waves in music on social media.

• 13:54David Pierce?

  This makes perfect sense to me. TikTok is many things, but it is mostly a music platform. And remember, just to reset the timeline here, this is like 2022, early 2023, as everyone is going outside again post pandemic, and as TikTok is still growing at an absolutely outrageous, unprecedented rate. Trackstar got 100,000 followers in its first month of existence, which is wild. They basically started posting videos and it took off immediately. And he's right, it's definitely true that music is as universal as anything out there. But what do you think the odds are, just as a thought experiment, that if you just walked up to some random person and handed them your headphones, that they would know the song you were currently listening to?

• 14:38David Pierce?

  I feel like pretty low, right? Just for fun, here's the top five songs in the United States right now, as I'm recording this, according to Billboard. "Love Somebody" by Morgan Wallen, brand new, don't think I've heard it, but I think I could probably pick out Morgan Wallen. "A Bar Song" by Shaboozie, that one I've got, that's been everywhere for months. "Birds of a Feather" by Billie Eilish, maybe? I think I could guess a Billie Eilish song, but I can't hear that one in my head right now. And there's like a whole genre of people who kind of just sound like Billie Eilish. So I don't know about that one. "Die With a Smile" by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars. I actually love both those artists and have literally never heard of that song until right this second. And "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter, obviously, yes, everybody knows Espresso. Even if you don't think you know Espresso, you know Espresso.

• 15:22David Pierce?

  But that's the top five songs in the country. Do you know all five? Do you think everyone knows all five? Every time I watch Trackstar, that's all I can think about. How hard must Jack have to try to find songs that people know? And how many throwaway takes must there be of just total failure where people don't know the music?

• 15:42Speaker 05

  So more often than not, younger people who grew up with the streaming platforms are much more playlist oriented and artist agnostic. They're listening to songs and sounds and they know tons of songs, but they're like, I don't know who that is.

• 15:59David Pierce?

  Oh, totally.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  And so it is harder with like young 20-somethings, because they just go on Spotify and they listen to a playlist. And then that playlist, through that playlist, they discover certain types of artists that they like. So if I can figure that out, it's helpful. Okay, you like this one band, maybe there's like a thread here that I can pull on. But but now I think there's a little bit of pushback with that generation where some people are saying, you know what, I want to go back and discover what the eighties was like. And you find these younger people who are like, I love classic rock. And some of those videos performed really well for us. Or we had a kid who was in high school and he's like, I'm really into yacht rock, man.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  Can't believe we're doing yacht rock with a seventeen year old. Here you are.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Great song. Bless the rains. I don't want to let it play through, to be honest. Let it play, let it rock. Africa by Toto. Five dollars, let's go. Introduce yourself. My name's Jack. Great name.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  And and the internet loved this kid. Because he just was talking about how great yacht rock is. And he's like sixteen years old. And he was just had an amazing run of songs and was so funny and charismatic. So when we first started, the very first episodes, I had created a playlist of like game show. I called it, I have a playlist on my phone now. It's called like game show game songs or something. And it's just like great classic songs. Like if you go at the five hundred greatest artists of all time, Rolling Stone list, and pick their best songs, like that's a good, like songs everybody kind of knows. So we just, I had a playlist set. And if you didn't know these songs, sorry, you're out of luck. And then there was like the realization of, well, if someone gets out after two songs, that's kind of boring.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  You want to encourage them to go to five or six. It's more fun, interesting video.

• 17:41David Pierce?

  So now, when they're doing a random interview with a person on the street, Jack will usually start by talking with them a little bit about music. And when it's a celebrity, it becomes a big research project to find songs that both might be in their wheelhouse, but also meaningful to them. In both cases, the goal very explicitly is for people to do well at the game, but not so well as suspicious, you know? You want to make it easy enough to be fun without making it so easy it's boring. And that's a really tricky balance.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  So there's like a dialogue. What kind of stuff do you listen to? And I think we did one early version where somebody was like, I only love jazz music. And so it's like, okay, let's do a jazz theme. And that video performed well. And you Realize like having a group of different jazz songs gives the video a theme. In addition to the person that you're talking to, there's another sort of narrative playing out there. And so shifted much more into can I try and find like groupings of songs that make sense together? Anytime we do eighties pop, it's like, it's clear what where you're going and the audience wants to know, what are the eighties pop songs that he's gonna play here? So finding those themes is helpful. And then, um, when it comes to someone who's a celebrity, it's trying to research them

• 18:53Speaker 05

  and, and understand or listening to their music and thinking to myself, what do, what do I think they were inspired by? And if I can figure that out, they're gonna have a bigger reaction. Say, how do you know that I was into this song? I just guessed it based on these other songs you've written. They sound like a like, or they, it seems like there's inspiration there.

• 19:11David Pierce?

  As with everything on the internet, the whole process isn't quite as random and chaotic and man on the street as it might seem in the videos. But I think that's fine. And we're gonna talk more about how Trackstar works and why it works. But first we gotta take a break. We'll be right back.

• 19:31Speaker 06

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• 20:01David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So let's just go behind the music here for a minute with Trackstar and talk about how the show actually gets made. Because I think something about its structure and format is actually a big part of why it works. So the whole thing just starts with Jack just wandering out into the streets of New York.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  So the way that we approached like man on the street content creation is I have a sign that I hold up that I risk in Sharpie on cardboard, write whatever the question is. And the question might be, name the artist, win $5. Or it might be like New York City trivia, win a prize. And people see that sign and they approach me and they go, what is this about? I want to win some money. I want to be a part of this.

• 20:39David Pierce?

  This is one way to do man on the street stuff. The other way, the one I think you see probably more often online is just to ambush people with a microphone and a camera. Catching people off guard in that case is part of the appeal and frankly, part of why it's fun to watch. But that was never Jack's thing. I can't tell if he's too embarrassed to do it or feels too bad, or it just feels sort of gross. But whatever it is, he didn't want to do it. So instead he'd stand there with the sign, wait for someone to come up to him. He would explain the show and then they were off and running. Jack would hand them a pair of headphones. They would put them on and then he'd hand them a microphone.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  So the handheld microphone was going back to when we run a whiteboard deciding what we wanted to do. I wanted to capture this like local news feel and give like the idea of handing a microphone to someone on the street of New York, like we wrote down on the board, voice of New York City. That's what we wanted to be, one of our intentions. So when I have a mic and I say, you know what? We're going to give you a chance to spotlight and say your piece or put your thing. That was the sort of what we were trying to indicate visually with, with the stick mic and the flags. So that was totally locked in. The headphones were both practical. So like you're not, we could cut the music however we want to. And people can sort of be in the zone.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  And then it was also a visual signifier of when you put the headphones on, you're part of the game. And then there's the branding aspect where we felt like at some point before we started the show, I'm like a headphone brand. We'll want to sponsor this show for sure because this, we're just making headphones look cool. So it was a lot of those things, I think.

• 22:14David Pierce?

  Have you gotten the headphone sponsor yet?

• 22:16Speaker 05

  We've had a few throughout the years. We've had a few different, different ones. Yeah. We've worked with Sennheiser, Bose and Beats.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  I think this kind of stuff is so clever and it's the stuff I think about all the time when I watch these really successful social shows. If you create a show that requires nothing other than a set of Bluetooth headphones, a smartphone and two handheld local news microphones, you can do that show basically anywhere and with almost no setup. Like, do you know why the Hot Ones set is all black the way it is? Or why all of those like Vanity Fair videos or the Wired autocomplete series are just on white backgrounds? It's at least in part so that they can set up that set basically anywhere. Because one thing I've learned over the years is that if you want to do a show with famous people, your show has to be able to travel to those famous people.

• 23:05David Pierce?

  And in this case, it's a heck of a lot simpler than showing up and eating hot wings and talking about your feelings. All you have to do is show up, put on headphones and listen to some music. But there is one other thing about Trackstar that's really clever and I think kind of unique in this space. It's also a game for the viewer.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  There's like a couple of different aspects of it. There's playing people snippets of songs like when you're driving around in the car and the radio is a game that everyone's played, like this is not a new idea. So it was more taking this concept of guess the artist and putting it in a framework that's going to make sense for social media. And I think the biggest lesson that we took away was people like watching the guest. They like watching the interaction, but they also like to be actively participating in what's happening. So a lot of the comments are, oh, you shouldn't put the album cover because I guessed it too soon. Or I've watched people watching it on their phone, looking over their shoulder and they're saying the answers as they're watching it. That happened like when I showed it to my mom for the first time. She's like, oh, that's Bruce Springsteen.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  And so then I realized we were on to something because there's this active participation instead of sitting back and watching it.

• 24:13David Pierce?

  Right, which is different from your average, like even celebrity interview or something where you're, you're just sort of in the audience. Like you're trying to invent something that you're both watching and playing simultaneously.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  And I think because of that.

• 24:25David Pierce?

  Which I guess is a game show, like you just made a good game show, basically.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Well, when you watch Jeopardy, right? You're trying to answer the questions as quick as Ken Jennings or whoever's on. And so I think what's cool is because of the celebrities and the regular people mix, everyone who's watching feels like if I'm in New York, maybe I could end up being on this show and maybe I could win a lot of money. Which is like, that's why we watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire, all these other shows, like we could win a million dollars.

• 24:53David Pierce?

  At this point, I think I get why the show works. It's fun to play this kind of trivia game. It's fun to watch strangers succeed and frankly, even more fun to watch them fail. And there's also something about just all kinds of man on the street content that is compelling. Like, do you ever see those videos where a bunch of dudes set up a basketball hoop or a soccer goal? And then they throw the ball to a bunch of strangers who either shoot it or kick it or get hit in the head or fall on their heels trying to do it or whatever? That all works for the same reason. I honestly, I swear to you, I think I could make that shot. I hope that I get to try someday and I will watch every single one of those videos when they cross my timeline.

• 25:33David Pierce?

  So I get why the show works, but I'm still wondering why all of these big name musicians keep showing up on Trackstar. It's not the biggest show in the world. It's doing well, but it's not, you know, earth shattering. And frankly, a lot of these artists are vastly more famous than Jack or Trackstar. It kind of seems like he has more to gain than they do. And plus, when they do come on, it's not like they do some nakedly promotional version of the game where they talk about themselves the whole time or they only listen to their own songs. There's tons of that kind of thing on the internet and it's all fine. But on Trackstar, they really are just another contestant playing the game. Sometimes literally the only promo they do is just saying their name.

• 26:15David Pierce?

  And obviously, even that is not a new idea at all, of course. Every late night guest who plays a game with Jimmy Fallon or does like the thing where they test British snacks versus American snacks, they're all promoting something without wanting to seem like they're promoting something. You know what I mean? But like, that's the Tonight Show. Jack Coin is great, don't get me wrong, but I think Jimmy Fallon is probably just a smidge more famous. And yet, apparently, every single one of Trackstar's celebrity appearances have come from those people getting in touch with him, not the other way around. That means A-list musicians are going out of their way to be on his show. Who was the first artist to reach out?

• 26:55Speaker 05

  Olivia Rodrigo.

• 26:57David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Was Olivia Rodrigo or Ed Sheeran? I can't remember the order, but those two were very early on and close to each other. It was crazy. Yeah.

• 27:06David Pierce?

  Why did they reach out?

• 27:09Speaker 05

  I guess they have savvy teams. And then I think in hindsight now, I've realized more so that this is part of the music business now is being on social media and making sure that these social platforms are aware of what you're doing in the music space. And so doing stuff on your own TikTok account is important. And then appearing in the TikTok universe is important. Or, or your streams aren't going to do well.

• 27:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think part of the reason I ask about that specifically with Trackstar is you're not doing the thing where it's like, let's do a podcast where we talk about your album for an hour. Or you're not saying like, let's rank your 10 favorites of your own songs. Like the sort of standard things people do to promote themselves and their work. People just come on and play your game, right? Like, and the most they get to say, I watched the Keith Urban one again, right before we did this. So this is like fresh on my mind. All he says is my name is Keith Urban. Like, he barely promotes himself or his work or anything like at all. He's just like, what's up? I'm Keith Urban and does the show with you. And on the one hand,

• 28:19David Pierce?

  it's slightly surprising that that's a thing artists are willing to do in this day and age, when everything is so transactional and promotional and all this stuff. But also the fact that they started coming to you just wanting to do that is like very cool and very unusual in this moment in the industry.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  I think that, and you can look at the comment section on that video. I think it's the best thing that he could have done to promote himself is to not talk about himself. Because people are saying, damn, this guy is really cool. Who knew Keith Urban was so cool and knew so much about music? And that's where they're commenting and then they're going to his profile. And they're looking at his music and they're like, is this guy? Let me explore this myself. And you give the audience the tool of feeling like they get to discover it on their own instead of shoving it down their throats. And I think that's one of the great things about the show is that we, it's not like heavy promotional.

• 29:11David Pierce?

  There are two things in there that I find really interesting and frankly, very telling and very 2024. The first is the idea that you have to keep signaling to the platforms themselves, TikTok and Instagram and the rest, that you're relevant and you're around. You have to keep making your own stuff, obviously, but also showing up in stuff with a similar focus and a similar audience to be like, hey, algorithms, other people think I matter. This has obviously been a thing forever, right? Creator collabs have been around as long as there have been creators. But there's something specific about signaling that to the platform that I find really fascinating. The other thing is the thing that keeps making me think of TRL, that maybe actually doing something that gets you out there but doesn't just feel like pure promotion

• 29:53David Pierce?

  of your latest project is more important than ever. This is the reason people post their personal lives on Instagram. It's the reason authenticity is everything, right? That stuff is what people care about now. It's what they gravitate to. And it feels more important to do and maybe harder to pull off on social media than just about on any other platform. And I think Trackstar and things like it give people a way to show up in front of an audience that feels candid and authentic and not nakedly promotional, even when it's not exactly any of those things. On a lot of the videos that Jack does with well-known artists, there are comments from people who love that the artist isn't promoting themselves.

• 30:38David Pierce?

  On the Keith Urban video, which I just rewatched, there's a ton of that. People love that Keith is just a guy who wants to show up and talk about music. And I think that works for Keith Urban. There are also, by the way, comments from people on every single one of these videos who are just like, oh, my gosh, imagine running into so-and-so in New York or OMG, I can't believe you just ran into them. I assume a bunch of those people are in on the bit, but I bet they aren't all in on the bit. And I think that vibe is really important, both for the show and for the guests coming on to it. Personally, I first found Trackstar because of one of those better-known artists. I think, I think it was Olivia Rodrigo.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Oh shawty, it's your birthday, 50 Cent. It was the number one song of the year, the year you were born. I did know that. Can you introduce yourself? Hey, I'm Olivia Rodrigo. Thanks for having me.

• 31:28David Pierce?

  But I do also have a distinct memory of seeing the Trackstar video with Malcolm Todd, who is an up and coming artist who was in Trackstar's all time most popular video with more than 15 million views.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  320 or you want to take the 160? 320. I just have to beat Olivia Rodrigo. There's one goal at this point.

• 31:45David Pierce?

  She's unbeatable.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  Oh, Black Sabbath?

• 31:53David Pierce?

  The fact that Malcolm Todd was more popular than Olivia Rodrigo, or Ed Sheeran, or any of the other names that I've mentioned so far. By the way, did I mention Oprah yet? Because Oprah was on the show pretty recently. Wild times. This all continues to surprise me. But it turns out that celebrities, even really big ones, aren't needle movers the way that you might think.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  It's interesting. I've thought about a lot, like what would happen if Taylor Swift came on the show? That'd be a huge moment, right? Biggest artist in the world. I think we would maybe gain 5,000 followers from having Taylor Swift on. I don't, I think the video itself would do really well, and then maybe some people would write about it and say, "Taylor Swift went on this social media show." But, and that would be valuable for us from a brand equity standpoint, but it would not boost the following in any meaningful way. But then down the road, you know, Oreo might say, "Wow, this guy had Taylor Swift on. We should pay him a million dollars to do something else."

• 32:51David Pierce?

  Let's talk about the something else there. But first, we have to take a break. We'll be right back.

• 33:01Speaker 06

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• 33:31David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. So Trackstar is working, it's popular, it's growing, the format is endlessly repeatable and essentially works forever. The team does want to have Taylor Swift on, just in case that wasn't clear before. And Jack also has a running list of other ideal guests. He's talked a bunch in interviews before about Bruce Springsteen, but there are lots of others, too.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  Barack Obama.

• 33:53David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  Because he does, he releases his songs all the time and...

• 33:58David Pierce?

  And nobody ever believes him, which I love. Everybody is like, there's no way he listens to these songs.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  I would actually play him the songs from his own playlist. You really listen to Million Dollar Baby by Tommy Richman? Like, that's really your jam? And then I'm imagining him... Anyway, that would be a fun one to do, just to like, put him to the test. I think as far as musicians go, there's Paul McCartney. Or Ringo even, might be more legendary than Paul McCartney. So there's like, those classic, just people who've been around for a long time, who are legends and icons are great. And then I think that there's a huge opportunity with like, hip-hop that we haven't fully tapped into, where like, an extended conversation with Nas would be really cool, and talking

• 34:45Speaker 05

  about stuff that he's listening to and rappers that inspired him, I think would be a little unexpected. And then, yeah, more non-musicians, more just like, interesting people who care about music, I think would be fun, and athletes. That's like, the real untapped one. Like, I want to talk to LeBron James. He loves music. What if, what would it be like if he and I were in a room together and I'm playing him songs and he's getting all fired up? This, I love listening to this before a game! It'd be amazing.

• 35:13David Pierce?

  Beyond that, though, it's pretty clear to me that the public opinion team has tapped into something bigger than just the 90-second setup with the headphones and the microphone on TikTok. So now, they're trying to expand outside of that.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  I mean, I think it's exciting for us to experiment and add on different layers and try different things. So we recently started doing a head to head Trackstar versus competition.

• 35:35David Pierce?

  Which I like. It's very good.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Which is fun, where you get, especially when you have two artists who have a song that they're collaborating on, or maybe it's a band with, where you can create some of that band rivalry and banter. So we're experimenting with that. And then we have another show that we do called Trackstar Presents, which is a performance show here in the studio. And we put out episodes like every week or two, and it's kind of like a Tiny Desk Concert, but with more conversation in between the songs. And that's like a half twenty minute to a half hour episode on YouTube. So it's very different.

• 36:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, is that, how big a focus is that for you right now, trying to sort of build the like longer form YouTube channel?

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Well, we just, for a long time, we had both shows, Public Opinion and Trackstar on one YouTube channel. And we recently decided to split them just because it felt like there was two different audiences. And so putting two different videos up on the same channel didn't make sense. So we finally split them and started a new Trackstar YouTube channel. And our first video was five or so minute conversation with Amelia DeMoldenberg from Chicken Shop Date.

• 36:43David Pierce?

  She's great.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  We realized, she's amazing. We realized doing, she, her press people said, could she come on Trackstar? She's gonna be in New York. Yes, of course, that'd be amazing. We filmed for twenty to thirty minutes probably each episode, and what you see on TikTok is ninety or less usually. And we're like, we're leaving so much great stuff on the floor. Like, why don't we put out a five minute episode and show people what that's like, and then add some more layers to it? And so we just put out the first one, and then we're putting out these Trackstar Presents sessions on the same channel. So we're really excited about it. The hard part about long form is you have to create the packaging. You're not just a hundred percent reliant on the algorithm to push it to people who want it. You have to get people to click in, which is a whole other game.

• 37:27David Pierce?

  Do you think you're in a position now where you and Trackstar are big enough that you can pull that audience anyway? Or does it truly feel like starting from nothing, trying to make it happen on YouTube?

• 37:40Speaker 05

  It feels like starting from from nothing because the consumption pattern is so, so different. Like when you're watching short form videos in your feed, it's like you're on the toilet, you're making coffee, you're in line for something. It's just like in the background throughout your day. Whereas YouTube is like, you've got to really dial in and pay attention to it. Even a podcast can be like, you're in your car, it's in the background, you're walking to work. Whereas YouTube, you really have to get people, and and I think it's a huge percentage of it now is happening on connected TVs. So you really got to get people to say, instead of watching Netflix, I'm going to watch Trackstar for a half hour. And so it's a big jump and hopefully we can get some people.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  But I think we have to find that people are already looking for great stuff on YouTube and get them discover us.

• 38:28David Pierce?

  A big part of making the existing channel work and the success of all these new initiatives hangs on the person in these videos that we haven't talked that much about yet. That's Jack. He's always really involved in the Trackstar videos. He's often wearing a backwards hat or like a cool overcoat. But he's always laughing and having fun with the guests. And he's the one who really sets the vibe for the whole thing in a way that I actually think is really important. He like points to the camera and demands of the person that they introduce themselves, regardless of whether it's a person that you've never seen before and will never see again, or if it is like one of the 50 most famous people on planet Earth. I love that. He's kind of reluctant to give himself much credit,

• 39:11David Pierce?

  but I really do think he's a bigger part of it than it might seem.

• 39:15Speaker 05

  I think my job is to be very sort of optimistic and kind and make people feel comfortable and sort of try and bring out a positive. Like I'm, as you watch the show, you see I'm really smiley and I'm laughing and I'm giggling all the time. That's true. That is who my personality is. But I also think that that helps make the random person on the street comfortable. Like, I'm not trying to play gotcha. I'm trying to encourage you to guess these songs correctly because when you get something right, you're excited and you're happy and you're like, oh, wow, I just won five bucks. And then I can come in and say, so tell me about your life. Like, how did you grow up or tell me about your mom or whatever? And so it's Sometimes I refer to it as like the game show is a Trojan horse to get people to open up

• 40:00Speaker 05

  because they're distracted by guessing songs. And then they're much more comfortable and willing to talk about everything else, which is like eating the hot ones, eating the hotter they get, the more you're distracted by how spicy it is. So you talk about your feelings.

• 40:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Um, so I think that's probably a, a large part of my role and, and where it comes from is my whole career of making videos and doing YouTube content. I've always been told the best part of what you do is when you're engaging and talking to regular people and, and having that off the cuff conversation, you should lean into that.

• 40:31David Pierce?

  This is the sneakiest thing about Trackstar and it's the thing that makes it different from so much music content out there. It's actually really only a little tiny bit about the music. Jack seems to have always understood this thing as a conversation show with sort of a loose music-y structure rather than a thing where the music is the point. And honestly, even the music he picks is meant to make that other dynamic work better.

• 40:58Speaker 05

  So before I go into it, or even at the beginning of the conversation, I'm asking about what do you listen to or what are some, who are some artists that have resonated with you, or I research the celebrity and I try and find things that they're, they're, they're going to have an emotional response to. And that helps open people up like, wait, you played this song? Like, how do you know that this is like the song that I danced, my first dance in my wedding? And so that's going to trigger an emotional response. So that's the intention of the songs is to try and find things that remind people of, oh man, I used to listen to this with my dad when we're on the way to baseball practice. Well, tell me about that.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  So I'm hoping that that's working. It's not easy to do like always on the spot, but that's what I'm a hundred percent striving for all the time.

• 41:45David Pierce?

  I feel like that has come up a bunch where you play a song for somebody and they're like, oh, this is, this song indirectly inspired some other song that I wrote or was like meaningful to me as a teenager or whatever. And I always assumed that was mostly research, uh, but it's, it's interesting that it's a mix of research and just sort of educational guesses about what music people like.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  You'd be surprised how often I stumble into something that I had no, didn't realize there was all this meaning behind it. And that's like my favorite moments, uh, in doing this show.

• 42:16David Pierce?

  If you think about that setup, music as a way into other kinds of content, and especially into personal conversation, you can go all sorts of ways. And that, in a nutshell, appears to be the Trackstar plan.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  There have been lots of conversations about starting a record label.

• 42:33David Pierce?

  Really?

• 42:33Speaker 05

  So it's not like happening tomorrow, but it's definitely something that's Trackstar Records could happen.

• 42:41David Pierce?

  A, it's a good name. So that's good. What would that, why do a record label? What would that look like?

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Well, it's twofold. Because of the sessions that are happening in here, we have artists come in and do covers. So there's a lot of, I think a lot of covers are blowing up online, and there's opportunity there. Triple J is like releasing stuff, and a few of those different online publishers have released songs in conjunction with artists, so there's an opportunity there. And then, like you talked about, discovering new artists. What if we got a pool of money together? And we said, we're gonna invest a million dollars in 10 artists, and we're gonna tell the story of Trackstar Records through social media over the course of a year? And it's almost like how "Making the Band" was on MTV back in the day. Can we do that through social media?

• 43:29David Pierce?

  Do you think you could?

• 43:30Speaker 05

  100%, yeah.

• 43:32David Pierce?

  I watched "Making the Band" religiously back in the day, when it was about creating the band O-Town. And I swear to you, that show would 100% work today. A super intense competition show, that's also a behind-the-scenes look at what it means to be a pop star, is like, social media gold. Actually, there was recently a Netflix show about a K-pop group called Cat's Eye that was essentially that, but they also had this very public side of it, where people were seeing the performances throughout the audition process. It was wild. The show is awesome. I would watch it a million more times, about a million more kinds of groups. There are other moves for Trackstar itself, too, as it grows and becomes more of a business. One thing I see in the comments of the videos all the time

• 44:16David Pierce?

  is people discovering new songs, thanks to Trackstar. The show does have an official Spotify playlist with all the songs, but there's definitely more it could do there. Because being a reliable source of new music, or just a reliable way to make old songs cool again, makes you very powerful in the modern music world.

• 44:35Speaker 05

  It's like, it goes back to being a teenager and saying, like, pass me the aux. Like, I'm gonna play a song that's like, you guys are gonna love. I think everyone has that, like, little piece of their, where they wanna show their friends, like, "Check this song out, this is a great song." Um, so yeah, huge part of why, why I do this and how I like to choose the songs. I just wanna play good stuff. In terms of becoming a tastemaker, like, if that's happening, that's great.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  I just want people to know about good music, I guess. And maybe there's a way to turn that into something that's a little bit more substantial or meaningful or focused specifically on that. I mean, we have playlists on, on our Spotify, like, a bunch of different playlists, so there's some stuff there.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Have you gotten labels or anything calling you, being like, "Hey, can you play this song during Trackstar?"

• 45:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, all the time. People ask us to play songs, but I can't just... The, the thing is, a lot of times it's new songs. "Can you play this brand new song?" I'm like, "Well, how are people gonna know this song that, like, no one, this artist just came out?" Doesn't make any sense. Like, like, I, if you wanna pay me to play The Beatles, I'll do that. And people are like, "We're not gonna pay you to play The Beatles."

• 45:43Speaker 05

  Like, "Damn."

• 45:46Speaker 05

  So, yeah. It's, it doesn't, it, it's hard. You have to find things that, like, are universally recognized and tend, those tend to be things that people aren't promoting.

• 45:54David Pierce?

  Remember, though, Jack is not a music guy. That's important to all of this. He's a creator. He likes telling stories. Music is just a vehicle to get there. Trackstar was just an excuse to talk to people about something they liked and cared about and knew. Everything else they're working on is the same way. And, you know, if that happens to also double as a really fun game show to watch and a way for mega-famous celebrities to be out and about and into music, all the better. It really does feel to me like a throwback to the early 2000s, when shows like TRL were all about making music feel like a hang. And they understood, before social media, before the internet made everything about the individual people, that getting to know the artists and getting to know what they

• 46:39David Pierce?

  liked and what they cared about and what inspired them was maybe even more important to liking their music than the music. Another show that I loved from around that time was Pop-Up Video, which was adding trivia and jokes to music videos way before anyone was posting memes on Instagram. Pop-Up Video, by the way, was apparently a big inspiration for Trackstar. What was the cute Beatle doing in a Tokyo jail cell?

• 47:06David Pierce?

  Should George Harrison get his own? TRL, pop-up video, making the band. The music industry has changed in countless ways in 20 years. But maybe it hasn't changed at all. And maybe if it has, we're going back to some things about the way that it was that maybe we never should have left in the first place. People are buying records again. They're listening to full albums to get away from the infinite playlisting of everything. That thing Jack is talking about where you just hear music and you sort of know the sounds, but you don't know the artist, you don't know the lyrics. That just feels bad. I had a friend who used to call it Spotify music, music that's designed to not bother you when you're not paying attention and to be just interesting enough when you are to keep you hooked. That's not good music.

• 47:51David Pierce?

  That's Spotify music. And I think people are pushing back toward looking for good music. They're also, you know, rocking wired headphones and they're looking for new ways to hang out with their favorite music and musicians and get to know them in new ways. It's new platforms, new hosts, new musicians, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. I think that line's from a song, actually. It's a good one.

• 48:18David Pierce?

  All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to Jack for being on the show with me today and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at theverge.com. I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes. You should go watch Trackstar videos. They're super fun. I see a lot of people who will find one video and then just go back to the very beginning of Trackstar and watch them all the way through. Super fun. I actually highly recommend doing so. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other early 2000s era TV shows that you think I should watch again, you can always email us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline. We love hearing from you. Send us all of your thoughts and questions. We have two more of these Future of Music episodes to do this month.

• 49:00David Pierce?

  I would love to hear what you think about all of them and other things you think we should do. This is one of our favorite series. We've done it before. We'll probably do it again. I'd love to hear your ideas. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Pore, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with your regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday and Friday because, good lord, the news never stops. We've got Alexa stuff to talk about. We're gonna do our best to avoid talking about the election. We've got a lot of Apple stuff going on. Just a lot to do. Keep coming back. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 49:43Speaker 07

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