But her story wasn’t over yet. The weekend’s roller coaster continued when she logged on at the end of her shift to back up her videos, and she was the center of attention again.”I think about it sometimes,” she says. “How would the video have worked if that hadn’t happened?”
Of course, “better” is relative. The video now has over 10 million views of him. “It feels like it was meant to be,” she says. “It went viral, it was deleted, it was reposted, then it went viral Also”
But what really caught my attention was soundIf you’ve been on TikTok in late 2021, you’ve probably heard Thompson’s cover on repeat.Paris Hilton I used it,” she says. “She might have been the craziest thing ever.”
According to Thompson, it gained 300,000 followers in its first week, and continued to grow steadily over the next few months, gaining 10,000 new followers per day. “People started reaching out to me when I hit her 80,000 followers,” she says. “It was so strange, like that was the threshold. That’s when labels and managers started contacting me and deals with brands came in.”
…the brand deal she hastily accepted, whether it applies or not. “The sheets, the photo printing, the Metaverse company, none of it had anything to do with my music,” she says.
It has become a cycle. The more deals she made, the more followers she got and the more she wanted to post. That was in October 2021, about a third of Thompson’s fall semester of her junior year at BYU, past the deadline to drop a class without penalty. Thompson knew she had to consider applying to her PA school, and that she had to think about her job, too. It was one thing that her TikTok became popular, but when did she start making her real money out of it?That was the final straw.
“I dropped three out of five classes,” she says. “I got a lot of W, but it wasn’t important to me anymore. I worked less hours. I calmed down and said, ‘Music is what I care about, and I don’t care about other people.’ I want music more than anything else,” he declared.
It wasn’t just school and work. Her zip code has also changed. “Other musicians started messaging me on TikTok and wanting to collaborate,” she says.
are you based? I used to live in Utah, I think, and literally every time I was like, ‘Okay, let me know when you’re in Los Angeles,’ so I decided, ‘Why?
At least one thing remained constant for Thompson during the year’s whirlwind. That means she and her husband alone control her email, her address and all income. “I think it’s important to be careful about making too many promises,” she says.
One of the management team who messaged her early felt “roughly”. A month later the company was dissolved. But even at her stuck company, Thompson says she asks her to do things she’s not comfortable with: “One manager was so excited about signing me.” she says. “But they wanted a ‘story.’ Literally, they wrote a whole new background for me. ‘You’re still married to a man, but secretly you’re a lesbian.’ .”
If she hadn’t gotten along, she wouldn’t have signed the deal. “Imagine the weirdest shiz you can think of,” she says. “And that’s what I have on my TikTok DMs.”
However, traversing social media virality without a manager has its pitfalls. “In the early days, I think they let brands take advantage of me,” she says. “I thought $200 was a lot of money.”
now, LIKE OTHER CONTENT CREATORS, she put time and research into creating her own price list. “You have to be confident and persistent to get a fair deal.”
But that’s not enough. Thompson also says we need to be looking at the right time. “In the fall, I was making about $2,000 a month just trading brands,” she says. “But from June to September there were no offers.”
According to Thompson, such seasonality is not uncommon. “Summer is downtime for brands,” she says. “In conversations with other creators, we’ve learned that companies don’t reach out much in those months and then come back in the fall and winter as if nothing had happened.”
She says the surprise has tested her bank account, but she’s still going strong.Sam Smith’s cover now has over a million plays on Spotify, and she’s recording and mixing new original music. “Looking back, I can see why everything went wrong,” she says. “Too late for all the apps and I felt like I had ruined my chances. But I think if I waited for the right moment, the right thing would happen.”