The age-old battle of whether TikTok fame equates to real-life success.
Becoming a popular artist today is a much different landscape than it was 10 years ago. The rise in social media use makes smaller artists much more discoverable and allows you to share your music with a much wider audience. While those are some pros of social media with music, there are also some cons. You are not touring or spending time shaking hands with those who support your music and come to shows, and in some cases, you have record deals being offered to artists who have yet to even sing in front of a live audience.
And don’t even get us started on record labels using social media as a leverage point for artists to release songs. These days, everyone is chasing that viral moment…
Because of this, artists always discuss the pros and cons of finding fame through a viral moment. Zach Top, arguably one of the hottest names in country music right now, has an interesting take on this. Last year, Top had a massive hit, “I Never Lie,” which went viral on TikTok after its release, but Top had been working in the music space for years before that viral moment.
Zach Top started performing with his siblings at age seven, playing guitar in their family bluegrass band. The group had a long run of performing as a band, and in the end, Top knew that this was his calling. Top reflects on his musical upbringing and how he thinks it shaped the rest of his career when chatting with Dale Brisby for the Rodeo Time Podcast.
“Yeah, we ran around 10 years. Luckily, I didn’t ruin any relationships with my siblings ’cause I remember having… we had some brutal band practices. I was definitely the one that wanted it really bad, and I’d sit down there and play guitar three hours a day and then try and get them to, you know, do a little band practice for whatever show we had coming up or something. I was definitely an unpleasant little tyrant a lot of times, I’ll say.”
Top knows more than anyone wanting so badly to have that big break. Still, he also thinks that if you don’t get out on the road and workshop your music, relying on a viral moment or a viral hit is not the way to be set up for a fruitful and long career in the music industry.
“Especially in this age of, you know, people going viral on TikTok, and if it goes big enough, they get a record deal out of it. But they’ve never played in front of 20 people before. It was just a 15-second video, you know, and that’s not the case for all of them. But a lot of times, you see that, and I feel like they get to skip a lot of steps on the front end. That ends up probably hurting them later on and maybe damages the longevity of the career.”
When Top looks back on his early days on stage, he recognizes that they weren’t perfect, but he’s so thankful that he had so much stage time in his youth because it taught him how to become a true entertainer. Many people out there have incredible voices. However, a good voice does not equate to getting folks to buy tickets to shows, buy records, or become loyal fans. You must entertain a crowd while on stage to make those things happen.
“I think I was lucky to get the opportunity to not just practice singing and playing for a long, long time, but yeah, be on stage in front of people, be behind a microphone, learn how to keep people entertained or engaged for 45 minutes or an hour, an hour and a half or however long it was. You know, we played bar gigs (that were) three or four hours or something.
There’s a lot more to the art of being a performer just than playing and singing good, and so I feel like I got a pretty advantageous little head start, starting as a kid just learning real quick.”
Top recalled his mother used to write “scripts” his family bluegrass band of stories to tell between songs or jokes to crack if the audience felt dry. That’s a massive component of being a phenomenal artist.
Or, if you’re like Chris Stapleton, you don’t have to say much because your guitar playing and singing make up for it… but he’s in a league of his own.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion on this matter, but Top does make some great points about the benefits of being a road dog. This lifestyle isn’t for everyone, and if you have a voice and can survive away from family chasing dotted interstate lines, you’ll make it. But if you don’t have the grit for that lifestyle, the music industry will chew you up and spit you out.
Check it out; Top begins talking about this around the 15-minute mark.