Jessica Ryan

The library-building approach—where studios indefinitely own and exploit creative works—belongs to the pre-digital era. It's a business model designed for scarcity, not abundance.

This is shockingly close to how we approach building internet-driven live experiences with our collaborators and clients today 🤯

The traditional model is: make a thing, sell a few big licenses, call it a day. Now it's: make a thing, sell what you can up front, then go wide—AVOD, FAST, TVOD, SVOD, and social video; so the audience can actually find it.

The economic center of gravity has shifted from courting corporate buyers to serving consumer demand at scale.

Given this whitespace for venture investing via DAFs, in May 2019, MIT Solve launched Solve Innovation Future, a dedicated venture fund structured as a DAF. The structure is unique in three ways: 1) It is dedicated entirely to social venture investing, 2) it will re-invest profits in future entrepreneurs, and 3) it uses semi-standard, entrepreneur-friendly term sheets to minimize transaction costs.

But its five-second intro, a post-toke cough followed by a throaty scream, had popped up in a few TikToks of MMA fighters pummeling each other and weightlifters grunting beneath squat bars. Experience had taught 25/7 Media that when brief “recreates” of these kinds of songs burble up in those particular TikTok communities, virality can soon follow. When the number of recreates climbs into the tens or hundreds of thousands, Magana told me, two of 25/7’s core tenets become germane. The first: Once a social media user hears an audio snippet nine times, it gets stuck in their head to some degree. The second, which Magana has dubbed the Ten Percent Rule, is that 10 percent of those earwormed users will end up tracking down the snippet’s original source. 

Rather than pay one or two famous influencers to use the “Toxic” intro in the hopes of producing a trickle-down effect, the firm appealed to scores of MMA and weightlifting TikTokkers whose followings rarely top more than a few hundred. (Some were given small payments to push the song, but others were happy to do it for free.) Flooding the zone this way caused TikTok’s algorithm to funnel posts featuring “Toxic” into the feeds of users who consume gym-centric content. Inevitably, some of those users were creators themselves, and they began to weave YoungX777’s clip into videos targeting related subcultures—like the region of TikTok obsessed with highlights of soccer players bursting past hapless defenders.