高考英语课外阅读

外刊双语精读：

摘选了一篇Wired的文章，揭秘TikKok经济浪潮中初创公司的崛起之路。想要赚钱，不必一定要在学校读很多书。只要你有敏锐的时代嗅觉，灵活的思维、坚持不懈的努力、真诚的多方合作，大胆向目标奔赴吧！当然有一定的底层摸爬打滚经历，会让你更加珍惜来之不易的机会。

We were on the patio of a middling Los Angeles taqueria when Ursus Magana tried to talk me out of writing this story. A hirsute fireplug of a man with a slew of anime tattoos, Magana wasn’t worried that I’d spill any awful secrets. In the months since I’d first messaged him on Instagram, he’d been endlessly candid about his life as a talent manager for emo rappers, goth TikTokkers, and OnlyFans creators. He just thought I was wasting my time on a project that seemed unlikely to excite the social media algorithms that mean everything in his world. “Do you know how hard it is for an article to go viral?” he warned. “I mean, articles never go viral.”

我们在洛杉矶一家普通的墨西哥快餐店的露台上，乌尔苏斯·马加纳试图说服我放弃写这个故事。马加纳是个满身动漫纹身的毛茸茸的小个子男人，他并不担心我会泄露什么可怕的秘密。自从我在Instagram上第一次给他留言以来，几个月来他一直坦率地谈论自己作为情绪说唱歌手、哥特风TikToker和OnlyFans创作者的才艺经纪人的生活。他只是认为我在一个看起来不太可能激发社交媒体算法的项目上浪费了时间。他警告说：“你知道一篇文章要在社交媒体上走红有多难吗？我的意思是，文章从来没有走红过。”

Perhaps fearing he’d bummed me out by implying that my career was pointless, Magana put off eating his last brisket taco to whip up a blueprint for how he would guide me to stardom. It started with me ditching journalism to focus on churning out daily TikToks in which I’d offer tips about storytelling. Magana’s talent management startup, 25/7 Media, would ensure eyeballs for this content by enlisting its 60-plus clients to drive traffic my way. Once I’d built a decent fan base, 25/7 would produce a weekly podcast featuring my candid conversations with up-and-coming digital creators. I’d then parlay that success into a “big swing”: a how-to book or Netflix series that would land me a spot on The Tonight Show and a lucrative endorsement deal with, say, a manufacturer of ballpoint pens.

也许是出于担心让我沮丧，因为他意味着我职业毫无意义，马加纳先生推迟了吃他最后一个扒牛肉卷饼，制定了一个蓝图，让他如何引我走向成名之路。首先，我要放弃新闻行业，专注于制作每日的TikTok视频，其中我将提供有关故事讲述的技巧。马加纳的人才管理创业公司25/7媒体将通过让其60多位客户帮助推动我的内容，确保我的内容能够吸引眼球。一旦我建立了相当数量的粉丝基础，25/7将制作一档每周播出的播客节目，让我与新兴数字创作者进行坦诚对话。然后，我将利用这一成功，进行一次“大突破”：出版一本指南书籍或者制作一部Netflix系列，以便我能够登上《今夜秀》并获得与圆珠笔制造商等具有利润的代言合约。

I’m enough of a realist to know Magana was flattering me and that I’m much too boring to pull off any of what he proposed. But he delivered his pitch with such confidence, such zeal, that a dreamy little piece of me couldn’t help but see myself telling witty anecdotes on Jimmy Fallon’s couch. And when I caught myself flirting with that fantasy, I grasped how a genuinely talented young artist must feel when Magana lays out his plan for making them the richest person in their family by the age of 19.

我足够现实，知道玛加纳在阿谀我，而我太无聊，无法实现他提出的任何事情。但他以如此自信和热情的口吻提出了他的计划，以至于我梦幻般的一部分不禁想象自己在吉米·法伦的沙发上讲述风趣的轶事。当我发现自己对这种幻想暧昧时，我能够体会到一个真正有才华的年轻艺术家在玛加纳为他们制定计划，让他们在19岁之前成为家人中最富有的人时的感受。

Magana and his colleagues at 25/7 have made good on that grandiose promise enough times to prove that, despite any semi-delusional schemes for my future, they know what they’re talking about. In an entertainment industry still dazed by the chaos of digital platforms, Magana has emerged as a fairly reliable rainmaker.

马加纳和他在25/7的同事们已经充分地实现了那个自大的承诺，足以证明，尽管我对未来有些半痴迷的计划，他们确切知道他们在说什么。在仍然被数字平台的混乱所困扰的娱乐行业中，马加纳已经崭露头角，成为一个相当可靠的成功者。

The creator economy is projected to be worth $480 billion by 2027. In many ways, that figure represents an enormous redistribution of wealth: a tide of ad dollars and other revenue ebbing away from established studios and publishers, and flooding toward individual creators and the technology giants that host their work. But the corporations are the only ones on a secure footing in this arrangement. If individual creators want to stay afloat for longer than a brief moment, they still need managers to help them navigate the algorithmic churn.

根据预测，创作者经济到2027年将价值4800亿美元。从许多方面来看，这一数字代表了财富的巨大再分配：广告收入和其他收入的潮水从建立已久的影视工作室和出版商中流失，涌向个体创作者和托管他们作品的科技巨头。但是，在这种格局中，只有大型公司能够稳固立足。如果个体创作者想要保持更长时间的生存，他们仍然需要经理人帮助他们应对算法变动。

The old-guard talent agencies—the Creative Artists and United Talents and Gershes of the world—ventured into this terrain years ago, forming their own digital divisions to court influencers. They face stiff competition from massive newer firms like Viral Nation and Underscore Talent, which boast that the creator economy is woven into their corporate DNA. In this scrum, the upstart 25/7 Media has fashioned a niche for itself prospecting for viral talent in areas that its larger rivals often ignore—the misfit subcultures of the young, which can often cross-pollinate with other online communities to yield colossal audiences.

老牌人才代理公司——Creative Artists、United Talents和Gershes等等——多年前就进入了这个领域，成立了自己的数字部门来追逐网络红人。它们面临来自如Viral Nation和Underscore Talent等大型新公司的激烈竞争，后者都毫不掩饰地声称创作者经济融入了它们的企业基因。在这场角逐中，新兴的25/7 Media为自己打造了一个小众市场，他们在年轻人的小众亚文化领域挖掘潜力，这些领域往往与其他在线社区交叉传播，带来庞大的观众群体。

Like other self-styled social media gurus, Magana hustles to sign clients by touting his ability to game the platforms that shape our tastes. (“Influence the algorithm, not the audience” is 25/7 Media’s slogan.) But part of his pitch, and his gift, is that he’s an authentic product of the subcultures in which he operates. An ardent metalhead and community college dropout who was shaped by a turbulent immigrant experience, the 29-year-old Magana has built his company around supporting artists who are often isolated by their creativity, and by their oddness. “We understand how they feel at home when they’re doing something kind of weird, something that isn’t easily explainable,” he says. “That’s our competitive advantage.” And that is no small edge. Doing something weird at home has never offered such a wormhole to fame.

像其他自称社交媒体大师的人一样，马加纳拼命吸引客户，吹嘘自己操控能塑造我们喜好的平台的能力。（“影响算法，而不是观众”是25/7 Media的口号。）但他的销售点和天赋之一是，他是这些亚文化中的一个真正的产物。作为一个热衷于重金属音乐且曾在社区大学辍学的人，29岁的马 加纳通过支持那些常常被他们的创造力和独特性孤立的艺术家来建立自己的公司。“我们理解他们在做一些有点奇怪、不容易解释的事情时的归属感，”他说。“这是我们的竞争优势。”而这是一个不可忽视的优势。在家做一些奇怪的事情从来没有提供如此通往名望的渠道。

25/7 clients outside an Airbnb in Los Angeles.

25/7洛杉矶一家Airbnb酒店外的客户。

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

the closest thing 25/7 Media has to a headquarters is a WeWork in Playa Vista, a former nowheresville in West Los Angeles that now teems with boxy glass-and-steel office buildings and absurdly pricey condos. On my first day there earlier this year, Magana was joined by his two cofounders: Andrew Alvarado, who oversees finances, and Rafail Luzi, the head of the music division, who’d flown in the night before from his home in northern Connecticut. Rather than spring for a private office, the three men were camped out at a countertop by the common kitchen, amid other entrepreneurs chattering into MacBooks about their drop-shipping ventures.

25/7 Media在总部方面最接近的地方是Playa Vista的一个共享办公空间WeWork，这个以前是洛杉矶西部一个无名小镇，现在却充满了方方正正的玻璃和钢铁办公楼以及价格荒谬的公寓。今年初我第一天到那里时，Magana与他的两位合伙人一起出现：负责财务的Andrew Alvarado和负责音乐部门的Rafail Luzi，后者前一天晚上从康涅狄格州北部的家飞过来的。三人没有租用私人办公室，而是在一个共用厨房旁的柜台上露营，周围的其他创业者正在他们的MacBook上低声交谈着他们的直邮业务。

My tutorial in how 25/7 Media operates began during the founders’ late-morning Google Meet with an executive from the digital music distributor Vydia. The executive was keen to strike a deal involving a 25/7 client named YoungX777, a guttural, nihilistic trap-metal musician with long curly locks that veil his face.

我的教程是关于25/7媒体的运作方式，它始于创始人与数字音乐分销公司Vydia的高管在上午晚些时候进行的Google Meet会议。这位高管热衷于与一位名叫YoungX777的25/7客户达成交易，他是一位嗓音沙哑、虚无主义陷阱金属音乐家，拥有蓬松的卷发遮住了他的脸。

This article appears in the November 2023 issue. Subscribe to WIREDPhotograph: Sinna Nasseri

YoungX777 had been discovered by 25/7 in late October 2022, after Luzi and his two full-time music scouts had glimpsed promise in the data for his song “Toxic.” A sludgy sonic wallop about suicidal ideation, the song hadn’t racked up many streams. 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.

YoungX777已在2022年10月底被25/7发现，此前Luzi和他的两位全职音乐侦察员在他的歌曲《Toxic》的数据中瞥见了希望。这是一首关于自*意象的浑浊音效重击，这首歌并没有获得太多的流媒体播放量。但它的五秒引子，一个吸食后的咳嗽声接着是一个喉咙沙哑的尖叫声，在一些摔跤运动员互殴和举重者负重深蹲下被灌入了几个抖音中。25/7传媒的经验告诉他们，当这些类型的歌曲在特定的抖音社区中窜起时，很快就会走红传播。

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.

当再创作的数量攀升到数以万计时，马加纳告诉我，25/7的两个核心原则变得重要起来。第一：一旦社交媒体用户听到一段音频片段九次，它就会在某种程度上困扰在他们的脑海中。第二个原则由马加纳称为10%法则，即那些受困扰的用户中有10%最终将找到该片段的原始来源。

Confident in the algorithmic potential of the “Toxic” intro, 25/7 Media had rushed to sign YoungX777 even though he had less than 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Taking such risks is an essential part of the strategy: The firm has to snag clients before they appear on the radars of well-heeled competitors. “We’re the ones who hit you up before you blow up, so we can say we believed in you before you got big,” Magana told me. “These artists, a lot of times the only sign they have of their success is some kids sending them videos of themselves dancing to their song. We’re often the first ones who aren’t their friends telling them, ‘Hey, you’re good.’”

对“Toxic”引子潜力有信心的25/7传媒公司匆忙签下了YoungX777，尽管他在Spotify每月听众数量不到30,000人。冒这样的风险是策略的重要组成部分：公司必须在知名竞争对手关注之前抓住客户。马加纳告诉我：“我们是在你大红之前找到你的人，这样我们就可以说我们在你成名之前就相信你了。这些艺术家，很多时候唯有观看一些孩子们跳舞自己歌曲的视频时才能感受到他们的成功。我们不是他们的朋友，但通常是第一个告诉他们‘嘿，你很棒’的人。”

Once YoungX777 was on board, 25/7 Media ran its standard campaign to juice a new client’s recreates. 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.

一旦YoungX777加入后，25/7 Media便运行其标准广告活动，为新客户推出了美食餐饮板块。与其支付一两位知名网红来使用“Toxic”引子，希望产生溢出效应，该公司却吸引了大批MMA和举重的TikTokkers，他们的粉丝通常不超过几百人（有些人会得到一些小酬劳来推广这首歌，但还有些人乐意为其免费宣传）。以这种方式涌入TikTok的算法导致了“Toxic”这首歌出现在那些喜欢健身的用户的动态中。不可避免地，其中一些用户也是创作者，他们开始在目标类似次文化的视频中(比如TikTok上痴迷于播放足球运动员轻松突破笨拙后卫的区域)融入YoungX777的剪辑。

The “Toxic” intro became a TikTok and Instagram Reels sensation in mid-January, at which point the Ten Percent Rule kicked in. By month’s end, the full song was zooming toward more than a million plays on Spotify. Now, Vydia was pitching 25/7 Media on letting it take charge of distributing YoungX777’s catalog around the globe. It would use its proprietary technology to collect royalties from disparate platforms and stamp out copyright violators in exchange for a cut of YoungX777’s revenue. After much hemming and hawing, the Vydia executive ballparked his offer at around $200,000, a seemingly vast sum for YoungX777, who’d been eking out a living as a solar panel salesman.

“Toxic”引子在一月中旬成为了TikTok和Instagram Reels上的轰动，此时十分之一规则开始生效。到了月底，这首完整的歌曲在Spotify上的播放次数已经接近一百万次。现在，Vydia正在向 25/7 Media推销让其负责在全球范围内分发YoungX777的作品目录。它会利用自家专有技术从不同的平台收取版权费用，并在交换YoungX777的收入份额时打击侵权行为。经过一番犹豫不决，Vydia的高管大约估算他的报价在20万美元左右，对于一直以太阳能板销售员维持生计的YoungX777而言似乎是一笔巨额金额。

Magana and Luzi seemed underwhelmed. Luzi responded that he was certain a major record label would offer a quarter-million for YoungX777’s next album without a second thought. “If I tell one of my artists that I turned down a quarter-million dollars, I might not have that relationship any longer,” Luzi said. The call ended with the Vydia executive promising to talk to his team about increasing their offer. (Vydia did eventually reach an agreement with YoungX777, who now has more than 1.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify—a figure that translates into annual revenue that can top $450,000. Soon after the deal was inked, Vydia was sold to a new media company founded by the former creative director of Apple Music.)

马加纳和卢兹似乎并不热衷。卢兹回答说，他确信一家主要唱片公司会毫不犹豫地为YoungX777的下一张专辑提供二十五万美元。卢兹说：“如果我告诉我的艺术家们我拒绝了二十五万美元，也许我就不再有这种关系了。”通话结束时，Vydia的高管承诺会与团队商讨提高他们的报价。 （Vydia最终与YoungX777达成协议，现在每月在Spotify上拥有超过190万听众，这个数字相当于年收入可能超过45万美元。协议签订后不久，Vydia被一家新的媒体公司出售，该公司由前苹果音乐创意总监创立。）

I gleaned more about 25/7’s way of doing business during an afternoon call with Ovrthro, a 22-year-old Canadian musician and TikTokker whom Magana was eager to sign. Much of Magana’s pitch centered on how, if hired, he would promote an Ovrthro song called “Death,” which is based on a sample of the villain’s whistle from the animated film Puss in Boots 2. He talked a lot, of course, about the tactics 25/7 Media uses to “ride the algorithmic wave,” but he also stressed that the ride can be short unless a client is committed to constantly pumping out fresh content. The algorithms are designed to highlight new material, even if its quality is subpar. “When you drop one song,” he told Ovrthro, “there needs to be four other versions of the song right away.”

在一次下午与Ovrthro进行的电话交谈中，我对25/7公司的经营方式有了更多的了解。Ovrthro是一位22岁的加拿大音乐家和TikTok用户，Magana非常渴望签约他。Magana的推销重点主要是如果雇佣了他，他将如何推广一首名为《死亡》的Ovrthro歌曲，该歌曲是基于动画电影《穿靴子的猫2》中反派人物的口哨声样本制作的。当然，他当然也谈到了25/7媒体使用的“搭乘算法浪潮”的策略，但他也强调，除非客户不断投放新鲜内容，否则这次旅程可能很短暂。这些算法旨在突出新材料，即使质量欠佳。“当你发行一首歌时，”他告诉Ovrthro，“立刻需要有其他四个版本的这首歌。”

The volume of work required to stay in the algorithms’ good graces can certainly be daunting. A 25/7 Media creator named Nixxi, who derives most of her revenue from her OnlyFans subscription fees, told me she is urged to post across multiple platforms every day, and that she uploads three folders’ worth of content to her manager’s server every Sunday so that posts can be scheduled in advance. Another client, an Oregon-based musician who goes by 93feetofsmoke, said that he was aiming to release around 50 solo songs this year and produce as many as 70 for other artists. “You can’t take weekends off,” he told me. “Like, I don’t take the weekends off, ever.”

要保持算法的青睐所需完成的工作量确实令人望而生畏。名为尼克斯（Nixxi）的25/7媒体创作者告诉我，她大部分收入来自她的OnlyFans订阅费，她被敦促每天在多个平台上发布内容，并且每个星期天她会将三个文件夹的内容上传到经理的服务器上，以便提前安排发布。另一位客户是来自俄勒冈州的音乐家，他的艺名是93feetofsmoke，他说他计划今年发布大约50首独唱歌曲，并为其他艺术家制作多达70首歌曲。他告诉我：“你不能放假周末，就像我从不放假一样。”

Toward the end of his call with Ovrthro, Magana talked about how 25/7 presses its clients to help one another in commandeering the algorithms. His example involved a social media starlet named Emma Langevin, a thickly accented New Jerseyite known for her darkly comic confessional posts about makeup, food, and mental health. An object of untold thousands of crushes, Langevin let a fellow 25/7 Media client named SyKo use her photo as the digital cover for a song of his entitled “#BrooklynBloodPop!” Magana credits that photo—Langevin’s de facto seal of approval—with giving “#BrooklynBloodPop!” its initial launch into the stratosphere. Few songs were more omnipresent on TikTok in 2021, when SyKo’s bright “hyperpop” beat became the backdrop for a million videos of teens doing the 10-second dance that had virally attached itself to the track. (The song now has more than 250 million plays on Spotify and 120 million views on YouTube.)

在与Ovrthro的通话接近尾声时，马加纳谈到了25/7如何敦促其客户互相帮助，掌握算法的事情。他的例子涉及了一个社交媒体明星名叫艾玛·朗格文，她是一位因其关于化妆、食物和心理健康的黑暗喜剧告白帖子而闻名的新泽西带重口音人。作为数千人心仪的对象，朗格文让另一位名为SyKo的25/7媒体客户使用她的照片作为他的歌曲《#布鲁克林血液流行！》的数码封面。马加纳认为这张照片（朗格文的事实上的认可标志）让《#布鲁克林血液流行！》初次发射到了天际。在2021年，这首歌几乎无处不在的TikTok上，SyKo明亮的“超级流行”节拍成为数百万青少年用于10秒舞蹈的背景音乐，这种舞蹈已经与这首走红歌结合在一起。（这首歌在Spotify上已经有2.5亿次播放和1.2亿次YouTube观看次数。）

When the Ovrthro call was done, I half-jokingly noted to Magana that the collaboration between Langevin and SyKo sounded like a prime example of synergy. He said he’d never heard that word before but that he loved it and would be incorporating it into his recruitment spiels from now on. He also encouraged me to post a TikTok explaining the concept. (I later texted Magana a vintage== GIF from The Simpsons to show that “synergy” has been lampooned as corporate jargon for nearly as long as he’s been alive.)

当Ovrthro电话结束时，我半开玩笑地对Magana说，Langevin和SyKo之间的合作听起来像是协同效应的一个典型例子。他说他从未听过这个词，但他喜欢它，并将从现在开始将其纳入他的招聘演讲中。他还鼓励我发布一个TikTok视频来解释这个概念。（后来，我给Magana发了一条来自《辛普森一家》的复古GIF，以表明“协同效应”作为公司术语已经被嘲笑了将近他活到现在的年龄一样久。）

The musician Syko shows off a gold grill given to him by an LA jeweler.

音乐家Syko展示了一个洛杉矶珠宝商送给他的金烤架。

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Though Magana was excited about the prospect of adding Ovrthro to the 25/7 Media family, he was clearly more passionate about another artist he’d recently unearthed: a 17-year-old musician and TikTokker named Lumi Athena, whose social media profile lists his interests as “sushi, emo girls, and shiny stars.” Magana sensed enormous potential in Lumi’s signature style. His songs were inspired by the same hyperpop genre that SyKo had capitalized on, but they had a spacier, more haunted edge. A sample from his catchiest track, a singsong ode to debauchery entitled “Smoke It Off!” was beginning to get recreates on TikToks celebrating the weirder strains of anime.

虽然Magana对将Ovrthro添加到25/7 Media家族感到兴奋，但他显然对另一位他最近发掘的艺术家更热衷：一位名叫Lumi Athena的17岁音乐家和TikTok达人，他的社交媒体资料显示他的兴趣是“寿司、情绪女孩和闪亮的星星”。Magana感觉到Lumi的独特风格有巨大的潜力。他的歌曲受到了SyKo成功利用的超级流行音乐流派的启发，但它们有着更广阔、更有鬼魅气息的优势。他最耐人寻味的单曲《Smoke It Off!》的片段开始在庆祝动漫的更奇特衍生术的TikTok上被再创作。

Magana had first contacted Lumi via Instagram last December, and on their subsequent phone call, they’d instantly clicked. “I’m Mexican, he’s Mexican, we start cracking jokes,” recalled Magana, who teased Lumi for having pale skin. (Magana, who proudly claims that an ocean of Aztec blood courses through his veins, has a much darker complexion.) Lumi felt comfortable enough to reveal that a few record labels had already approached him with offers of $10,000 for an album—an attempt, in Magana’s eyes, to exploit an undereducated teen’s naivete about how the industry really works.

Magana在去年12月首次通过Instagram与Lumi取得了联系，而在他们之后的电话交谈中，他们立即产生了共鸣。“我是墨西哥人，他也是墨西哥人，我们开始开玩笑，”Magana回忆道，他取笑Lumi皮肤很白。（Magana自豪地称，阿兹台克血液在他的血液中流淌，所以他的肤色更深。）Lumi感觉足够自在，透露已有几家唱片公司提出以1万美元购买他的专辑，Magana认为这是试图利用一个无知的青少年对行业真实运作的幼稚认知。

Magana traces his love for music back to an experience in utero: In the spring of 1993, his pregnant mother attended a Guns N’ Roses show at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes. Both she and Magana’s father served in the Mexican army, but they were much hipper than most of their military peers. Once a year, for example, they’d make the long drive to Southern California to buy flashy clothes that they’d then resell to Mexican entertainers. (When he was a toddler, Magana had his picture taken with Alejandra Guzmán, a famous singer who’d bought sequined outfits from his parents.)

玛加纳追溯自己对音乐的热爱源自一次胎内经历：1993年春天，他*的母亲参加了墨西哥城Palacio de los Deportes的“枪与玫瑰”演出。她和玛加纳的父亲都曾在墨西哥军队服役，但他们比大部分军中同僚更时髦。例如，每年一次，他们都会长途驾驶到南加利福尼亚购买时髦的衣服，然后再卖给墨西哥的艺人。（当玛加纳还是个蹒跚学步的孩子时，他曾与著名歌手Alejandra Guzmán合影，后者曾从他的父母那里购买过亮片服装。）

But for reasons that Magana is hesitant to discuss, his parents came to believe their lives in Mexico were untenable. On an early summer day in 2000, Magana’s parents told him they were taking a surprise trip to Disneyland; he remembers being ecstatic as they passed through the border checkpoint. But instead of heading to the park, the family drove to an apartment in a shabby part of Long Beach. For weeks, Magana’s parents told him they were playing a game of make-believe, which the 7-year-old boy took to mean they’d soon return to Mexico City. “And then they signed me up for school,” Magana recalls. “And that’s when I realized like, oh, yeah, we ain’t going back home.”

但出于Magana不愿讨论的原因，他的父母开始相信在墨西哥的生活是不可持续的。 在2000年初夏的一天，Magana的父母告诉他他们要去迪斯尼乐园的一个意外之旅；他记得当他们穿过边界检查站时他非常兴奋。 但是一家人没有去公园，而是开车去了长滩的一个破旧地区的公寓。 几个星期里，Magana的父母告诉他他们在玩一个幻想的游戏，然后这个7岁的男孩理解为他们很快会回到墨西哥城。 “然后他们给我报名上学，”Magana回忆说。“那时我意识到我们不会回家了。”

Clockwise from left: Magana with the musicians Jnhygs and Syko.

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Long Beach proved to be a hostile environment for a chubby kid whose poor English marked him as an outsider. Magana was frequently taunted and beaten up by packs of older boys. He remembers being chased by gang members because his school’s bus stop was on a street they controlled. The harassment only got worse as Magana began to develop a taste for bands like Van Halen and Kiss, whose music and fashion were reviled in his rap-obsessed neighborhood.

龙滩（Long Beach）被证明是一个对于一个胖子孩子来说是个充满敌意的环境，他的糟糕英语让他成为了一个局外人。马加纳（Magana）经常被一群年龄较大的男孩戏弄和打击。他记得曾经被黑帮成员追赶，因为他学校的公交车站在一个他们控制的街道上。这种*扰只在马加纳开始喜欢Van Halen和Kiss这样的乐队，并且他们的音乐和时尚在他所在的迷恋说唱音乐的社区中备受厌恶时变得更加糟糕。

When he wasn’t busy coping with bullies, Magana could often be found in the company of his entrepreneurial ex--military mother. While her husband toiled on construction sites, she sold counterfeit perfumes and sneakers on the streets of Long Beach. Tagging along with her is an experience that Magana credits with nurturing his gift for salesmanship. “That made me so fucking fearless,” he says. “Like, you know, walking around LA with a bunch of boxes with shoes, and then going into the projects, literally the projects, and convincing these, like, fucking gangsters to buy these knockoff shoes.”

当他不忙于应付恶霸时，Magana经常与他的创业退伍军人母亲为伴。在她的丈夫在建筑工地忙碌的时候，她在长滩街头销售冒牌香水和运动鞋。和她一起走是一次让Magana相信自己销售才能的经历。“这让我变得非常无所畏惧，”他说。“就像，你知道，在洛杉矶四处走动，带着一堆鞋子的盒子，然后走进办公室，确切说是办公楼，说服这些，就像，该死的黑帮去买这些仿冒鞋子。”

The Maganas eventually saved enough to buy a small home in Pomona, 30 miles east of Los Angeles. Ursus enrolled at an artsy charter high school where he was no longer considered an outcast for his music, his increasingly shaggy hair, or his burgeoning love for the anime series Naruto. “Every time you saw him, he had a guitar in his hand,” says Ken Smith, one of Magana’s high school teachers and a close confidant. “And he always had multiple bands he was in or he was forming.” Magana had his heart set on someday making millions by fronting a metal group, a goal that became especially urgent after his family lost their house in the subprime mortgage crisis. He found more immediate success as a promoter of backyard metal shows, scrappy $10-a-head affairs where sweaty teens smashed one another in the face while dancing to songs about Norse gods and serial killers.

Magana一家最终保存了足够的钱买了一栋小房子,在洛杉矶以东30英里的波莫纳。Ursus进入了一所文艺特许高中,在那里他的音乐、越来越蓬乱的头发或愈发热爱的动漫系列《火影忍者》不再被视为异类。“每次见到他,他手里都拿着吉他,”高中老师Ken Smith说,他也是Magana的亲密信任人士。“而且他总是在多个乐队中任职或自创乐队。”Magana一心想着有朝一日凭借作为金属乐队主唱而赚得数百万,这个目标在他的家人在次级贷款危机中失去房子后变得尤为迫切。他作为后院金属秀的推广者获得了更直接的成功,那些廉价票价10美元的秀让汗流浃背的青少年在随着歌曲(内容关于北欧神祇和连环*手)跳舞时互相殴打脸部。

As graduation neared in 2011, Magana realized his future looked bleak. He was an undocumented immigrant, so he wasn’t eligible for federal financial aid to attend a university; he couldn’t join the military despite having been in his high school’s Junior ROTC program; and decent jobs were off-limits because he didn’t have a Social Security number or a driver’s license. Magana had also come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t quite talented enough to play music for a living. He was fated to be, as he puts it, “a metal kid who never made it.” Unable to see a path toward any life he desired, he heeded his guidance counselor’s advice to enroll at Pasadena City College.

2011年临近毕业时，马加纳意识到他的未来看起来一片黯淡。他是一个无证移民，所以他不具备获得联邦经济援助上大学的资格；虽然他曾参加高中的初级军事训练团（Junior ROTC）项目，但他无法加入军队；而优质的工作也是禁地，因为他没有社会安全号码和驾驶证。马加纳也意识到，他并没有足够的音乐天赋来谋生。就如他所说，他命中注定成为“一个从未成功的金属音乐青年。”无法看到实现自己理想生活的道路，他听取了辅导员的建议，选择了加入帕萨迪纳城市学院。

An introductory film class there altered his wayward trajectory. Instantly fascinated by the craft of stitching images together to tell a story, Magana talked his way into an unpaid internship with a photography studio that had been branching out into video production. Some nights he would work there until 3 am, editing footage for ad campaigns, then crash at his girlfriend’s dorm at Cal State Los Angeles before catching the Metro to Pasadena for a 9 am class. En route, he’d earn pocket change by busking for commuters.

一个简介性的电影课改变了他不知所措的轨迹。被将图像拼接起来讲述故事的技艺深深吸引，马加纳争取到了一家摄影工作室的无偿实习机会，该工作室一直在扩展到视频制作领域。有些夜晚，他会在那里工作到凌晨3点，编辑广告宣传片的素材，然后在他女友位于加州洛杉矶州立大学的宿舍里休息，之后搭乘地铁去帕萨迪纳上9点的课。路上，他会通过在公交车上表演赚点零花钱。

His reprieve from that exhausting routine came in 2013, when he applied to the new federal immigration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. For the first time, Magana was able to obtain a work permit without fear of being deported. He soon dropped out of college to accept a paid, full-time position at the photography studio. He also married his American-born girlfriend, a step that allowed him to start inching along the long journey toward US citizenship.

他从那种令人筋疲力尽的日常工作中得到了喘息的机会，那是在2013年，他申请了被称为童年入境暂缓行动的新联邦移民计划。这是Magana第一次能够获得工作许可，而无需担心被驱逐出境。他很快就退学了，接受了摄影工作室的一份全职有薪工作。他还和他在美国出生的女友结婚，这一步使他开始朝着美国公民身份长路踏实迈进。

After settling into married life, Magana felt obligated to pull in a higher salary and wound up selling solar panels door-to-door, making upwards of $80,000 a year. But he missed the buzz of spending his days surrounded by music, the art form he associated with his warmest childhood memories.

莫加纳进入婚姻生活后，觉得有义务争取更高的薪水，最终成为一名挨家挨户推销太阳能板的销售员，年收入超过8万美元。但他错过了每天身处音乐环绕的兴奋感，这是与他最温暖的童年回忆相关联的艺术形式。

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“The only time I saw my parents loosen up completely and not give a fuck, not give a fuck about anything, is when they were dancing,” he says. “When my mom was head-banging to Metallica while cleaning the house on a Sunday, when my dad was dancing salsa.”

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他说：“我唯一看到我的父母完全放松并不在乎一切的时候，是他们跳舞的时候。”“当我妈妈在一个星期天清理房子时，她陶醉在Metallica的音乐中摇头晃脑；当我爸爸跳萨尔萨舞的时候。”

Yet Magana had no clue how to gain a foothold in the notoriously shady music industry. He tried to manage a few small-time rappers, but they kept ghosting him after he’d shelled out thousands of dollars to produce their videos. “So I’m wasting all this money,” he says. “I get really fucking sad, really fucking depressed.”

然而，马加纳对如何在臭名昭著的阴暗音乐行业中站稳脚跟一无所知。他试图经营一些小型说唱歌手，但每当他花费数千美元制作他们的音乐视频后，他们就会突然消失。他说：“所以我浪费了这么多钱，真的很伤心，真的很沮丧。”

Then, in 2016, an increasingly desperate Magana created a LinkedIn profile. That profile attracted an inquiry from Fullscreen, one of the first companies to specialize in connecting digital creators with major brands. Fullscreen was looking for a native Spanish speaker, and Magana assumed the job would involve day-to-day interactions with celebrities. “They had, like, Steve Aoki on their website,” he recalls.

然后，在2016年，越来越绝望的马加纳创建了一个LinkedIn资料。这个资料吸引了一个来自Fullscreen的询问，Fullscreen是专门将数字创作者与大品牌联系起来的公司之一。Fullscreen正在寻找一个母语为西班牙语的人，并且马加纳认为这个工作将涉及与名人的日常互动。“他们在他们的网站上有史帝夫·青木（Steve Aoki）之类的人，”他回忆道。

Instead, Magana was handed a far less glamorous assignment: doing search engine optimization for Telemundo’s YouTube videos. Through trial and error, he mastered the tricks necessary to inflate a video’s views and thus maneuver YouTube’s algorithm into pushing Fullscreen’s clients to the fore. He figured out how to frame the most alluring thumbnail teasers, for example, and the best place to drop the clickable “end cards” that nudge viewers to watch another video. He also analyzed Telemundo’s traffic data and realized that a lot of viewers were using the channel’s English-subtitled telenovela recaps to learn Spanish. He also knew that those subtitles were automatically generated and often garbled to the point that many users gave up. So Magana persuaded Telemundo to write accurate captions and embed them in its videos, a move that he says boosted the channel’s viewership by hundreds of thousands.

相反，马加纳被分配了一个远不那么光彩的任务：为Telemundo的YouTube视频进行搜索引擎优化。通过试错，他掌握了提高视频观看量的技巧，从而操纵YouTube的算法，使Fullscreen的客户排名前列。例如，他找到了制作最吸引人的缩略图预告片的方法，以及放置可点击的“结束卡片”的最佳位置，以促使观众观看另一个视频。他还分析了Telemundo的流量数据，并意识到很多观众正在使用该频道的带有英文字幕的电视剧简介来学习西班牙语。他还知道这些字幕是自动生成的，并且往往被混乱到让很多用户放弃。因此，马加纳说服Telemundo编写准确的字幕并将其嵌入其视频中，这一举措使频道的观众数量增加了数十万。

Magana thrust himself into his Fullscreen work, especially as his marriage began to disintegrate: He took to sleeping in his car outside the office so he could put in extra hours. His portfolio expanded as he honed his SEO chops—he was assigned to the Ubisoft account to help launch an Assassin’s Creed title, for example, and he produced YouTube content for Telemundo during the 2018 World Cup. But he still pined to carve out a place for himself in art and music. He often talked about that ambition with Andrew Alvarado, a friend and fellow college dropout who managed a stable of YouTubers for Fullscreen. They kicked around some ideas for doing their own thing, like moonlighting as music video producers, but they never followed through.

马加纳全身心投入到他的全屏工作中，尤其是他的婚姻开始破裂时：他习惯性地在办公室外的车上睡觉，以便多加班。随着他磨练了自己的SEO技能，他的作品集也不断扩大——他被分配到了育碧公司的任务，帮助推出一款《刺客信条》的游戏，例如，他还在2018年世界杯期间为Telemundo制作YouTube内容。但他仍然渴望在艺术和音乐领域找到自己的位置。他经常与安德鲁·阿尔瓦拉多这位朋友和大学辍学同伴谈论这一抱负。安德鲁在FullScreen负责管理一群YouTuber。他们曾一起讨论过一些关于做自己的事情的想法，比如兼职做音乐视频制作，但他们从未付诸行动。

One night in early 2019, Magana and Alvarado went to a party at a gaudy, largely unfurnished Los Angeles mansion, the sort of place rented by packs of influencers to use as content mills. Magana prides himself on his knowledge of pop music, so he was surprised when the DJ made the dance floor shake with a song he’d never heard. Everyone belted out the brief chorus at the top of their lungs, but they didn’t seem to know any other lyrics.

在2019年初的一个夜晚，马加纳和阿尔瓦拉多去了洛杉矶一座华丽但大部分没有摆设的豪宅参加派对，这种地方通常由一群网红租下来作为制造内容的工厂。马加纳以自己对流行音乐的了解而自豪，所以当DJ播放一首他从未听过的歌曲时，他感到很惊讶。每个人都用尽全力高声大唱那个简短的副歌，但他们似乎不知道歌曲的其他歌词。

Magana couldn’t believe he was unfamiliar with such an obvious hit, and he asked a fellow partygoer what it was. “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X, she said, adding that it was currently the biggest hit on TikTok—or, perhaps more accurately, its chorus was a hit, having been woven into countless bite-size videos. That was why the crowd knew only two lines’ worth of lyrics.

马加纳无法相信自己对这么一首明显红透的歌曲竟然不熟悉，于是他问一个派对参与者这首歌是什么。她回答说是Lil Nas X的《Old Town Road》，并补充说这是目前TikTok上最火爆的歌曲，或者更准确地说，它的副歌在无数微视频中广为传播。这就是为什么人群只熟悉其中两句歌词的原因。

In that instant, Magana’s next move revealed itself to him. “Like a dog, I ran to look for Andrew,” he says. “Shoulder-grabbed him. Said, ‘We’re gonna start a new company! And it’s gonna be based on TikTok.’”

在那一瞬间，马加纳的下一个举动展现在他面前。他说：“像只狗一样，我跑去找安德鲁。”我抓住他的肩膀，说：“我们要创办一家新公司！而且它将以抖音为基础。”

25/7 media clients from across the US and Mexico congregate in L.A.

来自美国和墨西哥的媒体客户聚集在洛杉矶

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Magana and alvarado’s first stab at managing digital talent was a failure, albeit an instructive one. In the fall of 2019, they signed a popular TikTokker named Reagan Yorke, who’d attracted millions of followers by posting videos of herself lip-syncing and playing juvenile pranks. The two aspiring managers thought they could extend her presence onto other platforms, and thereby increase her revenue, by adding music to her creative arsenal. “We created a song from scratch, brought in producers and writers that we knew from the music industry, created this song, coached her how to sing rap, all that stuff,” Alvarado says. But the resulting video, starring Yorke’s influential friends, was a dud on YouTube.

麦加纳和阿尔瓦拉多的首次尝试管理数字人才是一个失败的尝试，但也是一个有教育意义的错误。2019年秋季，他们签下了一位名叫雷根·约克的热门TikToker，她通过发布自己模仿唇语和开玩笑的视频吸引了数百万粉丝。这两位渴望成功的经理人认为他们可以将她的存在延伸到其他平台，并增加她的收入，通过为她的创作工具添加音乐。阿尔瓦拉多说：“我们从零开始制作了一首歌曲，引进了我们在音乐行业认识的制作人和作家，制作了这首歌曲，指导她如何唱rap等等。”但是最终的视频在YouTube上却一败涂地，尽管这个视频有约克有影响力的朋友参演。

Chastened, Magana and Alvarado got in touch with Rafail Luzi, a music promoter they knew through Instagram, to help them figure out what had gone wrong. (Luzi was yet another college dropout; his Albanian parents had hoped he’d become a plastic surgeon.) Their conversations led them to conclude that even their clients’ finest content would flop unless 25/7 figured out how to game the platform’s algorithms and heed the data’s cues.

Chastened，Magana和Alvarado与他们通过Instagram认识的音乐推广人Rafail Luzi联系起来，希望他能帮助他们弄清楚出了什么问题（Luzi也是一名大学辍学生；他的阿尔巴尼亚父母曾希望他成为整形外科医生）。他们的交谈使他们得出结论，即使是他们客户最好的内容，如果25/7不搞清楚如何操纵平台算法并注意数据的提示，也会失败。

Now a three-person startup, 25/7 Media put its revamped vision into action to support Curly J, a New York–based rapper they’d signed. When they dug into the data on Curly J’s YouTube videos, they saw that more than a quarter of the comments mentioned video games—specifically the battle royale phenomenon Fortnite. So Magana and his colleagues set about finding ways to have Curly J’s music inserted into the Fortnite montage videos that were doing huge numbers during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Because Curly J was verified on Instagram, they had him reach out to the teenaged creators of those montages, many of whom were thrilled to hear from someone who’d been blessed with a blue check mark.

现在25/7 Media已经是一个三人创业团队,他们把重新定位的愿景付诸行动,来支持一位他们签下的纽约说唱歌手Curly J。当他们深入研究Curly J的YouTube视频数据时,发现超过四分之一的评论提到了视频游戏——具体来说是大逃*现象游戏《堡垒之夜》。于是Magana和他的同事们着手寻找方法,把Curly J的音乐嵌入到《堡垒之夜》的剪辑视频中,这类视频在新冠疫情早期的几个星期大热。因为Curly J在Instagram上有认证勾,他们让他联系创作这些剪辑视频的青少年,其中许多人对一位收到蓝色勾选的明星的来信感到兴奋。

“It was personalized messages to each person,” Curly J told me. “Like, to literally over 1,000 different creators.” The ones who agreed to promote Curly J’s work weren’t always reliable; many vanished with the $100 or so that 25/7 Media paid them. But hundreds of honorable creators inserted songs like “No Hoodie” into their montages, then added a link to Curly J’s social media in the description box. What would soon be known as the Ten Percent Rule kicked in as thousands of Fortnite aficionados checked out Curly J’s music. This, in turn, compelled YouTube’s algorithm to push Curly J content into gamers’ recommendations.

这是发给每个人的个性化信息，“Curly J告诉我。 “就像，字面上发给超过1,000个不同的创作者。” 同意推广Curly J的作品的人并不总是可靠的； 许多人消失了，并拿了25/7 Media付给他们的约100美元左右。 但是，数百名可靠的创作者将《No Hoodie》等歌曲插入他们的剪辑中，然后在描述框中添加Curly J社交媒体的链接。 当成千上万的堡垒之夜爱好者查看Curly J的音乐时，即将被称为百分之十规则的内容开始推广。 这反过来促使YouTube的算法将Curly J的内容推荐给游戏玩家。

Curly J (foreground) and Cade Clair at a recording console.

卷毛J(前景)和凯德克莱尔在录音控制台。

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Curly J’s connection to the hottest game of the pandemic did not go unnoticed in the corporate realm. In June 2020, Warner Records signed him to a $4.8 million deal. Shortly after, 25/7 Media hammered out an arrangement with Twitch that guaranteed Curly J thousands of dollars per month if he streamed himself gaming for a few hours each week. Those triumphs became 25/7 Media’s calling cards when courting other potential clients—proof that the fledgling firm’s approach to manipulating the algorithms could provide a path toward life-changing money.

Curly J在流行病期间与最热门的游戏之间的联系在企业界引起了注意。2020年6月，华纳唱片与他签下了一项价值480万美元的合约。此后不久，25/7媒体与Twitch达成了一项安排，保证了Curly J每个月从每星期几小时的游戏直播中获得数千美元。这些胜利成为了25/7媒体在争取其他潜在客户时的招牌，证明了这家初创公司操纵算法的方法可以为改变生活的财富提供一条道路。

As 25/7 Media expanded throughout late 2020 and early 2021, brand sponsorships became another handsome source of revenue. One of the firm’s biggest deals involved Emma Langevin, the TikTokker who would become the face of “#BrooklynBloodPop!” Langevin first caught Magana’s attention with a post in which she joked about the tribulations of being a girl who wears a Nirvana T-shirt, a sartorial choice that inevitably causes men to question how well she really knows the band’s discography. Given Langevin’s combination of beauty and self-deprecating nerdiness, Magana thought she could develop a huge following among male gamers. “She didn’t really play video games,” he says. “But I’m telling you, she’s every gamer guy’s dream girl.” Langevin soon began streaming herself playing games on Twitch, sometimes in the company of a masked, gravel-voiced musician named Corpse Husband, who has nearly 3 million subscribers on YouTube. (Langevin would become both the inspiration and the cover girl for Corpse Husband’s most popular song, “E-Girls Are Ruining My Life.”) Those streaming sessions earned Langevin a sponsorship deal with the energy drink G Fuel, which bills itself as a performance enhancer for gamers.

在2020年末和2021年初,随着25/7 Media的扩张,品牌赞助也成为了可观的收入来源。公司最大的交易之一涉及Emma Langevin,这位TikTok主成为了“#BrooklynBloodPop!”的代言面孔。Langevin首次引起Magana的关注是通过一个帖子,她在帖子中开玩笑说作为一个穿涅槃乐队T恤的女孩会遭遇什么困境,这种服装选择无可避免地会导致男性质疑她是否真的很了解这支乐队的曲目。鉴于Langevin兼具美貌和自嘲的书呆子气质,Magana认为她可以在男性玩家中获得大量关注。“她实际上并不玩视频游戏,”他说,“但相信我,她是每个玩游戏的男生梦寐以求的女神。”Langevin不久后开始在Twitch上直播自己玩游戏,有时伴随着一个戴面具、声音沙哑的音乐家Corpse Husband,他在YouTube上拥有近300万订阅者。(Langevin成为了Corpse Husband最畅销歌曲“E-Girls Are Ruining My Life”的灵感来源和封面女郎。)这些直播为Langevin赢得了与能量饮料G Fuel的赞助交易,后者标榜自己是玩家的表现增强剂。

It was harder, though, for Magana to arrange sponsorship deals for the many 25/7 Media clients whose primary platform is OnlyFans, since brands are wary of sexually explicit content. To increase those clients’ subscription numbers, Magana helped them establish Instagram and TikTok accounts where they could post erotically charged recreates of trending memes and songs—including those generated by artists within the 25/7 Media fold. Every Monday, Magana sends his OnlyFans clients a memo detailing the audio bits they should be re-creating to maximize their odds of jacking into the algorithms—for example, an out-of-context SpongeBob SquarePants clip that prompts the reveal of an alluring outfit. Such posts persuade only a minuscule percentage of viewers to sign up for an OnlyFans subscription, but that’s sufficient to generate fantastic revenue. Magana showed me data for one creator—an Amazonian goth with head-to-toe tattoos and an affection for autopsy simulators—who earns more than $70,000 per month. (25/7 Media also provides its OnlyFans clients with “chat specialists,” contractors who pretend to be the creators when responding to messages from paid subscribers.)

对于许多以OnlyFans为主要平台的25/7媒体客户来说，Magana安排赞助合作变得更加困难，因为品牌对性暗示内容持谨慎态度。为了增加这些客户的订阅人数，Magana帮助他们建立了Instagram和TikTok账户，以便他们可以发布具有性吸引力的趋势梗和歌曲的再创作作品，其中包括25/7媒体平台上的艺术家生成的内容。每个星期一，Magana向他的OnlyFans客户发送一份备忘录，详细说明他们应该重新创作哪些音频片段，以便最大限度地提高他们进入算法的机会。例如，一个断章取义的《海绵宝宝》片段，促使人们展示出一套诱人的服装。这些帖子只能说服很少一部分观众订阅OnlyFans，但这已足以产生可观的收入。Magana向我展示了一位创作者的数据 - 一个有Amazon背景的哥特女性，全身纹身，并且热衷于尸体解剖模拟器，她每个月收入超过70000美元。（25/7媒体还为其OnlyFans客户提供“聊天专家”，即冒充创作者回复付费订阅者的承包商。）

By the time I first spoke to Magana in late 2022, 25/7 Media’s success had given him some measure of financial security. “The truth is that I just retired my parents,” he told me two days after Christmas. “Let’s just leave it at that.” He owns a comfortable suburban home with his fiancée, a popular OnlyFans creator with whom he has a 2-year-old daughter. His parents have stayed busy by teaching their granddaughter Aztec dances.

到我在2022年年底第一次与马加纳交谈时，25/7传媒的成功使他在一定程度上获得了经济安全感。他在圣诞节后两天告诉我：“事实上，我刚刚让我的父母退休了。就这样吧。”他和他的未婚妻拥有一处舒适的郊区住宅，她是一位备受欢迎的OnlyFans创作者，他们有一个两岁的女儿。他的父母忙于教导他们的孙女筹办阿兹特克舞蹈。

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Magana also acknowledged that, like so many startups without outside investors, 25/7 Media remains just a few blunders away from the abyss: “If 50 percent of my talent or 50 percent of my staff doesn’t work out, my daughter doesn’t eat,” he said.

Magana还承认，就像许多没有外部投资者的初创公司一样，25/7 Media离悬崖只有几个错误之遥：“如果50%的人才或50%的员工不行，我的女儿就吃不上饭，”他说道。

In the weeks following that initial conversation, Magana came to view Lumi Athena as the client most likely to get 25/7 Media out of its classic startup bind. Recreates of “Smoke It Off!” were sprouting up in more and more TikTok communities, and it seemed only a matter of time before the Ten Percent Rule guaranteed Lumi more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify. But Magana told me that Lumi’s future lay not in creating his own music, but in producing other artists. He saw Lumi as the central figure in a new musical genre called “krushklub,” the occult-themed successor to the now-outdated hyperpop. And 25/7 Media was now planning to corner the market on krushklub talent.

在那次初次交谈之后的几周中，马加纳开始认为鲁米·雅典娜最有可能帮助25/7媒体摆脱传统初创公司的困境。《Smoke It Off!》的再创作在越来越多的抖音社群中涌现，并且似乎只是时间问题，才能让鲁米在Spotify上获得超过一百万的月度听众。但马加纳告诉我，鲁米的未来不在于创作自己的音乐，而是制作其他艺术家的音乐。他将鲁米视为一个名为“魔鬼俱乐部”的新音乐流派的核心人物，该流派是现在过时的超级流行音乐的继任者，并且25/7媒体现在计划在魔鬼俱乐部才华横溢的艺术家中占据市场地位。

As I sped north along the Hollywood Freeway one February night in Los Angeles, a jubilant Magana called to share some news. He and his partners had just gotten out of a meeting with Mike Caren, a former producer for Beyoncé and Kanye West who is now CEO of his own record label, Artist Partner Group. (Caren famously bought Jeff Bezos’ Beverly Hills estate for $37 million.) The 25/7 team was stunned when, toward the end of the conversation, Caren brought up the idea of creating a joint venture with the startup. The exact parameters of the proposed collaboration were fuzzy, but it was Magana’s understanding that 25/7 Media would receive millions in funding in exchange for recruiting and developing talent exclusively for APG.

在洛杉矶的一个二月夜晚，当我驾车飞驰在好莱坞高速公路上，一个兴高采烈的马加纳打来电话分享了一些消息。他和他的伙伴刚刚与迈克·卡伦（Mike Caren）会面，卡伦曾是碧昂斯（Beyoncé）和坎耶·韦斯特（Kanye West）的制作人，现在是他自己的唱片公司Artist Partner Group的首席执行官。（卡伦以3700万美元购买了杰夫·贝佐斯（Jeff Bezos）位于比佛利山庄的房产，这件事相当有名。）当谈话接近尾声时，25/7团队震惊了，因为卡伦提出了与这个创业公司合作的想法。拟议合作的具体范围尚不明确，但马加纳理解的是，25/7 Media将因为为APG招募和培养人才而获得数百万美元的资金支持。

Magana was elated in the moment. A joint venture would guarantee enough capital to cement 25/7 Media’s long-term viability. But in the days that followed, he became more measured in his assessment. He was worried about ceding some amount of independence, and maybe even equity, to APG, a company that would clearly be the alpha in their relationship. But he also feared that if he passed up the opportunity, he’d never learn the skills necessary to take his clients to the next level. “You know, I won’t know how to get an artist to the Grammys,” he told me. “I won’t know how to get an artist in, like, you know, Nickelodeon Splash events—like, all the mainstream levers.”

玛嘉娜在那一刻感到非常兴奋。与APG共同创办的合资企业将确保足够的资金，以巩固25/7媒体的长期可持续性。但在接下来的几天里，他的评估更加谨慎。他担心失去一定的独立性，甚至可能失去股权，给APG这个明显处于主导地位的公司。但他同时也担心，如果错过了这个机会，他将永远无法学到将客户带到新的高度所需的技能。他告诉我：“你知道的，我将不知道如何把一个艺术家带到格莱美颁奖典礼，也不会知道如何让一个艺术家参加尼克洛迪恩溅水活动，就是所有主流推动因素。”

Ravengriim, a content creator, cosplayer, makeup artist, and 25/7 client.

Ravengriim是一个内容创作者、角色扮演爱好者、化妆艺术家,也是一位全天候的客户。

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Magana thinks he needs that expertise because so many of his clients—even some with roots in the most subversive subcultures—aspire to conventional forms of validation and fame. Artists who cut their teeth on digital platforms often idealize the careers of their childhood idols, who didn’t have to stress about the exhausting churn of TikTok trends. “I mean, I would love to be in acting and movies and things like that,” Curly J told me. “I would love to have, like, major sponsorships, whether it’s commercials, you know, that you see around, whether they’re from Sprite or Gatorade.”

玛加娜认为他需要那种专业知识，因为他的许多客户，甚至一些激进的亚文化根源的客户，都渴望传统形式的认可和名望。在数字平台上起步的艺术家常常理想化他们童年偶像的职业生涯，这些偶像不必为TikTok的流行趋势而劳心劳力。卷发J告诉我：“我的意思是，我很想从事演艺和电影等工作。我很想得到重要的赞助，无论是像雪碧还是佳得乐那样的商业广告。”

As 25/7’s lawyers hashed out terms with APG throughout the early spring, Magana and his partners moved to scoop up the artists in Lumi Athena’s immediate orbit—specifically Cade Clair and Jnhygs, the two vocalists on “Smoke It Off!,” both of whom had met Lumi on Instagram. Clair, a 21-year-old Detroit native who worships Prince, was an easy get. He was desperate for any sort of career boost, since he had just 12 monthly listeners on Spotify. Jnhygs was trickier because she turned out to be shockingly young: The Metallica-loving Alabaman with a honeyed voice was just a 16-year-old high school sophomore. That meant the 25/7 Media crew had to arrange a Zoom call with her parents, who had no clue their daughter was an artist with a rapidly growing audience. “I didn’t even realize that she was making music,” Jnhygs’ mother told me. “Hearing music coming from a room, I’d think it’s just radio or something. I didn’t realize that she was actually doing it herself.”

在整个初春期间，25/7的律师与APG商讨条款时，马加纳和他的合作伙伴们开始积极接触Lumi Athena圈子中的艺术家，尤其是Cade Clair和Jnhygs，他们是《Smoke It Off!》中的两位歌手，他们在Instagram上认识了Lumi。21岁的底特律本地人Clair崇拜Prince，很容易就接受了。他非常渴望任何一种事业的推动，因为他在Spotify上每月只有12个听众。而和Jnhgys的接触要困难一些，因为她实际上是个令人震惊的年轻人：这位热爱Metallica，拥有甜美嗓音的阿拉巴马女孩，只是一个16岁的高中二年级学生。这意味着25/7 Media团队不得不与她的父母安排一个Zoom会议，因为他们完全不知道他们的女儿是一个拥有迅速增长的受众群体的艺术家。“我甚至没有意识到她在制作音乐，”Jnhygs的母亲告诉我。“听到房间里传来音乐声，我以为只是收音机之类的东西。我没有意识到她实际上是自己在做。”

Magana walked Jnhygs’ parents through the minutiae of how art gets distributed these days and how their daughter’s talent could alter their family’s fortunes in a spectacular way. “You explain to them that, somehow, that noise their daughter has been making in her room has been picked up on TikTok,” Magana says. “And now we’re here talking to you about never having to work another day in your life.”

Magana带着Jnhygs的父母了解了当今艺术作品的细枝末节，以及他们女儿的才华如何以令人惊叹的方式改变家庭的命运。"你向他们解释，不知怎么回事，他们女儿在房间里发出的声音被TikTok捕捉到了，"Magana说道。"现在我们正和你们谈论着，永远不必再工作的日子如何到来。"

Jnhygs, a 16-year-old high school sophomore, needed parental permission to shoot content for 25/7 media.

Jnhygs，一个16岁的高中二年级学生，需要父母的许可才能为25/7媒体拍摄内容。

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Jnhygs’ parents were receptive to that message, but they made Magana jump through another hoop, insisting that he also meet with their family’s Baptist pastor, who was willing to fly to Los Angeles for the occasion. Magana and Luzi met him at the airport and cued up a playlist of Christian music for the ride to the hotel. But the pastor, who showed up wearing a jewel-encrusted grill on his teeth, demanded that the duo instead blast classics by Young Jeezy. “I see no devil in these boys,” he told Jnhygs’ parents, thus granting final approval for their daughter to become 25/7 Media’s youngest client.

Jnhygs的父母对这个消息持开放态度，但他们让Magana再做一次要求，坚持他也要见他们家的洗礼派牧师，后者愿意飞到洛杉矶参加这个场合。Magana和Luzi在机场会见了他，并为去酒店的车程准备了一个基督教音乐播放列表。但这位牧师出现后却带着镶满宝石的齿套，要求二人改而播放Young Jeezy的经典歌曲。他告诉Jnhygs的父母：“我在这些孩子身上看不到魔鬼”，从而最终批准了他们的女儿成为25/7 Media最年轻的客户。

To celebrate its krushklub recruiting coup, 25/7 Media flew Lumi Athena, Cade Clair, and Jnhygs to Los Angeles so they could spend a few days creating music and TikToks in a space-age Airbnb high in Beverly Hills. (The three artists had never met in person.) Keeping his young clients focused on the tasks at hand proved to be a challenge for Magana. “These are kids,” he told me. “Really, we’re just trying to stop them from smoking weed all the time.”

为了庆祝其Krushklub征募计划的成功，25/7媒体将Lumi Athena、Cade Clair和Jnhygs送到洛杉矶，让他们在比弗利山上的一个太空时代风格的Airbnb中度过几天，创作音乐并制作TikTok视频。（这三位艺术家之前从未见过面。）对于马加纳来说，让年轻的客户专注于手头的任务证明是一个挑战。“这些都是孩子，”他告诉我。“实际上，我们只是在试图让他们不再整天抽大麻。”

Lumi Athena, a central figure in a new musical genre called “krushklub,” shoots content.

吕米·雅典娜(Lumi Athena)是一种名为“krushklub”的新音乐流派的核心人物，负责拍摄内容。

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

Artists have a reputation for struggling with the mundane aspects of life, which is partly why managers exist. One evening at the Playa Vista WeWork, for example, I listened in as Magana and Alvarado tried to explain the basics of personal finance to an important client in Texas. One of six siblings who’d been raised by a single mother, the client had earned a windfall of around $400,000 after going viral in 2021. Absolutely bewildered by the concept of taxes, he’d brought his 1099s to the nearest outpost of a national accounting chain to seek help. The advice he received there had cost him tens of thousands of dollars. Alvarado, the most financially prudent of the 25/7 founders, promised to set up the client with a limited liability corporation and automatically deduct taxes from his revenue-sharing and royalty payments.

艺术家因为经常在生活的琐事上遇到困难而声名狼藉，这也是为什么经纪人存在的部分原因。举个例子，在Playa Vista WeWork的一个晚上，我听着Magana和Alvarado试图向德克萨斯州的一位重要客户解释个人财务的基本知识。这位客户是六个兄弟姐妹中的一个，在单亲妈妈的抚养下长大，他在2021年因一段热门视频而突然获得了大约40万美元的财富。对税收的概念感到非常困惑，他把自己的1099表带到了最近的一家全国性会计连锁店寻求帮助。他在那里得到的建议花费了他数万美元。作为25/7创始人中最具财务谨慎的人，Alvarado承诺为客户建立一个有限责任公司，并自动从他的分成和版税中抵扣税款。

The client was also about to fly for the first time ever, to perform at a club in Los Angeles, and he had no idea how to handle the logistics of air travel. Magana assured him that he’d be allowed to check his massive canvas duffel bag, and that he could safely stow his carry-on in the overhead bin.

这位客户也是第一次要坐飞机，去洛杉矶的一个俱乐部表演，他完全不知道如何处理航空旅行的物流问题。玛加纳向他保证，他可以检查他的大号帆布旅行袋，也可以安全地将随身行李放在顶部行李舱中。

Many of 25/7 Media’s clients are ill at ease in the world for poignant reasons. As reflected in the inward-looking content they produce, these young artists see themselves as largely defined by their battles with anxiety and depression. “I am going to stop hyper-fixating on my mental illness,” Emma Langevin intones in one of her most moving TikToks. “And I will not make jokes about it that make the normal people I hang out with uncomfortable.” These mental health issues were compounded by the chaos of the pandemic, an event that Magana refers to, perhaps a bit curiously, as “our generation’s Korean War.”

25/7媒体的许多客户因深刻的原因在这个世界上感到不安。正如他们创作的自我关注内容所反映的那样，这些年轻艺术家认为他们在很大程度上是通过与焦虑和抑郁的斗争而定义自己的。“我将停止对我的心理疾病过度关注，” Emma Langevin 在她最感人的 TikTok 视频中低语道。“而且我不会开一些让我和正常人交往的人感到不舒服的玩笑。”这些心理健康问题在大流行的混乱中进一步恶化，Magana 将其称为“我们这一代的朝鲜战争”，或许有点奇怪。

“Due to the internet and social media culture and everything these kids grew up in, they don’t go outside, they don’t interact, they don’t want to talk to people,” Alvarado says. “They’re scared to hop on a call, they have all this social anxiety. And so, you know, the only way to get through to these types of people is to be relatable. And the only way to be relatable is to know what’s actually going on in their lives.”

由于互联网和社交媒体文化以及这些孩子们成长的环境，他们不再外出，不再互动，不愿意与人交谈。”阿尔瓦拉多说。“他们害怕打电话，他们有社交焦虑。所以，你知道，唯一与这些人有效沟通的方法就是与他们产生共鸣。而要产生共鸣的唯一途径就是了解他们生活中实际发生的事情。”

Relating to clients can become more difficult after they discover that the fame they crave can’t fix their deeper problems. “For a lot of people that become successful, they become successful because of doubt and revenge,” Luzi says. “When that’s kind of out the window and you already did it, what are you looking forward to next? And you have to look at yourself in the mirror and you gotta say to yourself, ‘Do I actually like myself?’ And for a lot of people, they really don’t.”

关于客户的关系在他们发现渴望名声不能解决他们更深层问题之后会变得更加困难。"对于很多成功的人来说，他们成功是因为怀疑和复仇，" Luzi说道。"当这个心态已经没有了，你已经达到成功了，接下来你期待什么呢？你必须面对镜子，问问自己，'我真的喜欢自己吗？' 对于许多人来说，他们真的不喜欢自己。"

That realization is too often followed by self-destructive behavior. “I’ve broken people out of hotel rooms,” Magana says. “Peeled them off of balconies, gotten their parents on the line looking for them.” A teetotaler himself, Magana believes he was well prepared for the demands of fatherhood because he’d already grown accustomed to making sacrifices to protect his troubled artists.

那种觉悟常常会随之而来的是自毁行为。“我曾经把人从旅馆房间里解救出来，”马加纳说。“让他们从阳台上下来，给他们的父母打电话找他们。”作为一个滴酒不沾的人，马加纳相信自己已经准备好面对父亲的责任，因为他已经习惯为了保护他的困扰艺术家而做出牺牲。

Thankfully, the krushklub crew got up to only mild hijinks during their time in Los Angeles. In between In-N-Out burger runs, they managed to shoot a black-and-white, frenetically edited video for “Smoke It Off!,” which Magana sent to me a few days after it hit YouTube in July. As the central refrain oozed out of my laptop speakers—“Too much / too much / oh yeah …”—I clicked over to Lumi Athena’s Spotify account to check on his progress. He now had more than 3.8 million monthly listeners.

幸运的是，Krushklub团队在他们在洛杉矶的时间里只是玩了一些小把戏。在频繁光顾In-N-Out汉堡店之间，他们设法在几天之后的7月份将一部黑白急速剪辑的“Smoke It Off!”视频发送给了我。当中心的重复声音从我的笔记本电脑扬声器中流溢出时——“太多/太多/哦耶……”——我点击了Lumi Athena的Spotify账号，查看他的进展。他现在已经有超过380万的月听众了。

The following month, Lumi returned to LA to pursue a fresh musical direction. “TikTok kinda, like, stole my sound,” he told me shortly after he woke up one afternoon in late August. “Like, after ‘Smoke It Off!’ popped off, they just run off with my shit.” When 25/7 Media told him that his songs were getting surprisingly high traffic from users in Chile, Lumi decided to invent a new genre he dubbed “Latinklub”—essentially krushklub leavened with strains of reggaeton. His time in LA was thus being spent writing and recording new tracks, a process that involves hanging out in an Airbnb Jacuzzi until inspiration strikes, then retreating to the studio until 4 am.

以下月份，Lumi回到洛杉矶追寻新的音乐方向。他在八月底的一个下午醒来后告诉我：“抖音有点偷了我的声音，就像，在《Smoke It Off!》火爆之后，他们就拿走了我的东西。”当25/7媒体告诉他，他的歌曲在智利用户中意外地获得了很高的流量时，Lumi决定创造一个他称为“Latinklub”的新流派——基本上是夹杂着雷鬼舞曲元素的krushklub。他在洛杉矶的时间主要用来写歌和录音，这个过程包括在一个Airbnb的按摩浴缸里待到灵感出现，然后再退到录音室直到凌晨四点。

“Like, dude, I already made it in the fucking US,” Lumi said. “But if I managed to figure out how to crack the Latin space, shit, it’s gonna be a way, way bigger impact.”

“像,伙计,我在美国已经红了,”Lumi说,“但是如果我设法破解拉丁市场,妈的,影响力会大得多。”

After weeks of internal debate, 25/7 Media’s founders decided to pass on the joint venture opportunity with APG. Alvarado had lobbied for the deal, contending that it would address all of the startup’s financial anxieties. Magana countered that the rapid success of Lumi Athena, whose flagship song “Smoke It Off!” has now been played more than 235 million times on TikTok, proved that 25/7 Media wasn’t yet at the point where it needed to surrender any independence. As is usually the case, Magana won the argument through force of personality. “I’m the Napoleon of the group,” he told me with a laugh.

经过数周的内部辩论，25/7媒体的创始人决定放弃与APG的合资机会。阿尔瓦拉多曾游说该交易，他认为这将解决创业公司的所有财务焦虑。马加纳反驳说，鲁米·雅典娜的快速成功，其旗舰歌曲《Smoke It Off!》在TikTok上的播放次数已超过2.35亿次，证明了25/7媒体还没有到需要放弃任何独立性的时候。通常情况下，马加纳凭借个人魅力赢得了争论。“我是团队的拿破仑，”他笑着告诉我。

Magana’s faith in 25/7 Media’s prospects is rooted in his belief that bigger competitors are too stuck in their ways to emulate what the startup does best. “It’s going to take CAA 20 years to have enough agents who look like me,” Magana says. It is certainly a bit hard to picture someone with his résumé and mosh-pit style climbing the ladder at one of Hollywood’s institutional powers. But the status quo always becomes less important to decisionmakers when they realize they’re missing out on piles of money.

Magana对25/7 Media的前景保持信心，源于他深信那些大型竞争对手太局限于自己的方式，不能模仿这家初创公司的最佳实践。“考艺术家经纪公司（CAA）要花20年时间才能有足够多像我一样的经纪人，”Magana说道。确实有点难以想象，一个像他这样履历丰富且独具特色的人会在好莱坞的机构束缚力量之一攀登高峰。但当决策者们意识到他们正在错失大量金钱时，对现状的态度总是变得不那么重要。

To keep 25/7 growing as a fully independent enterprise, Magana is seeking new ways to drum up revenue. When I was in Los Angeles, for example, he confessed that he had several boxes of silicone vaginas in his trunk, the remainders from a failed effort to create branded merchandise for one of his OnlyFans creators. “He’ll come up with some crazy ideas,” Alvarado says. “And some of them I don’t even know where to start. But I really appreciate him always just saying what’s on his mind, because out of the 10 crazy ideas he has, at least one of them’s gonna end up working.”

为了让25/7保持作为一个完全独立的企业不断发展，Magana正在寻找新的方法来增加收入。例如，当我在洛杉矶时，他坦白说，他的车里有几箱硅胶阴道，这些是他曾尝试为他的OnlyFans创作者创建品牌商品的失败余留物。“他会提出一些疯狂的想法，”阿尔瓦拉多说。“其中一些我甚至都不知道从何开始。但我真的很欣赏他总是直言不讳，因为在他十个疯狂的想法中，至少有一个会成功。”

Ravengriim shooting content （Ravengriim拍摄内容）

Photograph: Sinna Nasseri

I patiently listened to Magana talk through a lot of brainstorms, and many were indeed as half-baked as his plan for reinventing me as a TikTokker. But there were also moments like the time on Google Meet when he showed me an electrician’s Instagram page. As I perused various photos and Reels of an attractive young woman installing circuit breakers and wiring light fixtures, Magana outlined one of the next phases in 25/7’s evolution: managing creators who specialize in performing blue-collar jobs.

我耐心地听着Magana讲述了许多脑洞，其中很多确实像他重新定义我成为TikTokker的计划一样半生不熟。但也有一些时刻，比如在Google Meet上，他向我展示了一个电工的Instagram页面。当我浏览各种照片和创作的时候，看到一个迷人的年轻女性正在安装断路器和布线灯具，Magana详细阐述了25/7公司发展的下一个阶段：管理专注于执行蓝领工作的创作者们。

“She is basically glamorizing the freedom of being a self-sufficient woman in an industry that is not female dominant,” Magana said. What if he could wheedle the Instagram algorithm into pushing the electrician’s Reels onto the feeds of 18-year-olds disillusioned with the idea of going into debt for college, who fantasized about finding another way to achieve their dreams? Or maybe their 45-year-old parents, who are prone to doomscrolling through Reels about lazy teens? Then 25/7 Media would cut deals to do recreates of music on the account, so that a new song could make inroads with people in the building trades.

“她基本上把成为一个自给自足的女性在非女性主导的行业中的自由愉悦化了，”马加纳说道。如果他能够巧妙地引导Instagram算法将这位电工的短视频推送给对于上大学负债感到幻灭、幻想着找到另一种实现梦想的18岁的年轻人，或者可能是他们那些常常沉迷于关于懒惰青少年的短视频的45岁父母呢？那么25/7媒体将会达成交易，为此账号重新创作音乐，以便新歌能够进入建筑行业的人的心中。

“What do you do when you work construction?” Magana said. “I know—because I worked construction when I’d work with my dad—you listen to music. So why the fuck wouldn’t you pay her to just use that song?”

“你在建筑工作时都做些什么？”马加纳说。“我知道——因为我和爸爸一起工作过建筑——你会听音乐。那你为什么不给她钱让她用那首歌呢，该死的？”

It was only in hindsight that I had questions about all the specifics Magana conveniently elided. While he was stringing together one enthusiastic sentence after another, I was sold on his vision. And if the algorithms truly want me to pick up carpentry rather than type these words, maybe I’m being a fool to resist.

只有事后我才对马加纳方便地遗漏的所有细节提出了疑问。当他一句接一句地充满热情地说着话时，我对他的愿景深信不疑。如果算法真的希望我学习木工而不是输入这些文字，也许我抗拒是愚蠢的。