Business

What if No One Misses TikTok?

Published

3 hours ago

January 18, 2025

But I’ve never once added a friend on TikTok, sent a direct message or thought of myself as a “TikToker.” And I don’t think I’m alone. For most people I know, TikTok isn’t a place to connect with other people. It’s a place to waste time, to numb out, to unplug from reality and float in the feed. That passive, dissociative quality, while great for engagement, has also made TikTok feel more replaceable than other, more social networks. If it goes away, we’ll just get our fix somewhere else.

I’m also persuaded by the explanation given in The Atlantic by Hana Kiros, who says TikTok is a victim of its own success. TikTok’s popularity, she argues, has led lots of other social networks to copy its features. Now, users who want to drop into an infinite wormhole of short, entertaining vertical videos can go to Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or X, all of which have introduced TikTok-style feeds in recent years. And in a world where every app works like TikTok, maybe TikTok itself feels less necessary.

I’ll add one more optimistic possibility: Maybe we’re ready for a change.

What spending time on TikTok represents — to me, at least — is a kind of cognitive surrender, a willingness to stop actively directing my thoughts and feelings and to let ByteDance’s algorithm entertain me for a while. It can be a pleasant experience, and occasionally euphoric. (Every few days, my wife catches me laughing at my phone and asks, “What’s so funny?” The answer, always, is TikTok.)

But over the years, as I’ve spent more time on TikTok, I’ve also noticed how it’s starting to rewire my brain — blurring my focus, shortening my attention span, making me less interested in media that isn’t laser-targeted to my precise array of dopamine receptors. Others have reported that TikTok has become a harmful addiction for them — an app they desperately want the government to ban because they can’t quit it on their own.

It’s probably wishful thinking to believe that if the ban takes effect, millions of screen-addicted TikTok users will start reading “Ulysses” and taking long walks in their spare time. But maybe it’s reasonable to see the shrugs surrounding TikTok’s disappearance and wonder if, after years of giving that app our attention, we’re ready to invest it somewhere else.

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Business

A treasure house of composer Arnold Schoenberg's music destroyed in Palisades fire

Published

4 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

A treasure house of composer Arnold Schoenberg's music destroyed in Palisades fire

On the morning of Jan. 7, Larry Schoenberg was about to prepare the tax filings for Belmont Music Publishers, the august house dedicated to preserving and promoting the works of his late father, Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, when his daughter Camille called and told him to look outside.

“Oh my God,” he said. Thick plumes of smoke were whipping up all around his Pacific Palisades home. Without thinking he jumped into his car, his wife in the other, and they drove to their daughter’s house elsewhere in the Palisades.

The plan was to wait it out. However, before the day was over, Schoenberg’s house was gone. Eventually, the flames reached his daughter’s house, and they fled to Venice to stay with another daughter.

The inferno also blasted to ash Belmont Music Publishers, which was housed in a building behind his home on Bienveneda Avenue. For 60 years, Belmont served as a bridge between Schoenberg — often referred to as the man who invented “modern music” — and performers and scholars, providing access to his music.

The wildfires destroyed Larry Schoenberg’s Pacific Palisades house and Belmont Music Publishers, which stood in a building behind it.

(E. Randol Schoenberg)

While the majority of the composer’s original works remain housed at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, Belmont’s entire physical inventory, upwards of 100,000 items including manuscripts and original scores, along with correspondence, books, photographs and artworks, had all perished.

For Larry Schoenberg, it wasn’t merely the physical loss, but “a profound cultural blow” — yet another example of how the wildfires have destroyed a trove of L.A.’s cultural heritage.

Schoenberg revolutionized Western compositional techniques and helped shape modern music worldwide, but he also had a profound and still-present influence on the cultural life of Los Angeles.

“The scale of this fire makes it hard to handle how big the losses are,” said Joy H. Calico, chair of the Department of Musicology at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. “It’s not as if his entire legacy was lost but certainly in terms of the practical reality of performing his music, this is a serious blow.”

***

Schoenberg’s wife, Gertrud, a librettist, and son Larry established Belmont Music Publishers in 1965. Belmont was a play on the family’s surname — “beautiful mountain” — in German.

Following the composer’s death in 1951, numerous people wrote to Gertrud requesting his music. There was so much back-and-forthing with the publisher in Germany that his heirs decided to create Belmont, as Gertrud owned the rights to her husband’s catalog. They initially set up the business in a converted garage behind their Brentwood home, selling and renting curated editions of Schoenberg’s sheet music for performances.

“We’re not very business savvy people,” Larry Schoenberg recalled. “We were spending more than we were collecting.”

They also had to overcome the negative connotation business had in their home. “We grew up where business was kind of a dirty word,” he said. His father used the derisive German term “der Gauner,” which means crook or swindler.

But Belmont, which later moved to the building behind Larry Schoenberg’s Pacific Palisades house, became a business successful in preserving Schoenberg’s legacy, making his works accessible to the world.

Last September marked the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg’s birth. A flurry of performances took place in Europe and the United States, including by the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Many of these performances got their scores from Belmont.

At 83, Larry Schoenberg, a former math teacher at Palisades High School, has been Belmont’s steadfast guardian.

He maintained a whiteboard with all of the upcoming performances of his father’s music and what needed to be shipped. Everything was well labeled and organized, but nothing was digitized.

“This is just my stupidity,” he said. “Everything was backed up, except it was backed up locally. I had hard drives and thumb drives. I didn’t use the cloud, I was a little bit worried about using the cloud. Well, of course, now I wish I had everything in the cloud. What that means is essentially we have nothing.”

The fire claimed the full range of Schoenberg’s groundbreaking compositions held there, from early Romantic pieces to his revolutionary 12-tone works and transformative masterpieces like “Pierrot Lunaire.” Also lost were performance posters, a bust of Schoenberg and ephemera such as the fanciful playing card sets the composer designed.

Also gone was the irreplaceable library filled with 50 years worth of manuscripts and correspondence from conductors, such as Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado, who performed Schoenberg.

“When the conductors return the scores, they put a lot of information in there. That’s really crucial for performances,” said Larry Schoenberg. “And that’s all gone. The correspondence goes back to the ’70s. In fact, every once in a while I look at some of this correspondence.”

Last December, Larry shipped a box of 16 books to his nephew E. Randol Schoenberg. They are all that remains from Belmont’s library.

Reflecting on all that was lost, he said, “The memories are still there. I didn’t lose those yet.”

***

Arnold Schoenberg was already a towering intellectual and cultural figure when he landed in Los Angeles in 1934.

Born in Vienna in 1874, the composer also was a writer, teacher, inventor and painter.

Uncompromising and innovative, he devised the 12-tone method, a musical structure that broke with the traditional rules of tonality and composition. Although it prompted (and still does) enormous debate, it was also considered by many the future of music. The Nazis, however, labeled his music “degenerate.”

Several playing cards spread on a table.

In 1933, after receiving a telegram from his brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, saying “a change of air is recommended,” the composer, then 60, and his family fled Berlin on the midnight train to Paris, leaving everything behind, according to his grandson E. Randol Schoenberg, known as Randy.

Schoenberg spent a brief time in Boston and New York, before fleeing the harsh East Coast winters for Los Angeles. “It is Switzerland, the Riviera, the Vienna Woods, the desert, Salzkammergut, Spain, Italy — everything in one place. And along with that scarcely a day, apparently even in winter, without sun,” he wrote Anton Webern, the Austrian composer and conductor.

His arrival was part of the exodus of German-speaking Jews who emigrated from Nazi-occupied Europe that helped usher in a golden age of classical music in Los Angeles, with many writing film scores.

Arnold Schoenberg stands outside his home.

In 1936 Schoenberg bought a Spanish Colonial in Brentwood, and the house became a center of cultural life for European exiles, entertaining the likes of Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel.

There, Schoenberg befriended Hollywood luminaries. Shirley Temple was a neighbor, and Harpo Marx was a friend, as was George Gershwin, who was also his tennis partner. According to Randy, his grandfather was playing a match with Gershwin when his wife gave birth to Randy’s father, Ronald, in 1937.

Schoenberg, who taught at UCLA, had a reputation as a gifted teacher whose tutelage held cachet. When the German conductor Otto Klemperer came to the city to perform at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he studied with Schoenberg.

With finances tight, he took on private students, a great deal of them composers who had come to California to work for the movie studios. “They wanted to learn what sort of tricks and techniques, you know, how do I make my music sound like this?” Randy said. “They would come for a couple lessons and then put it on their resume, ‘studies with Arnold Schoenberg,’ and never come back.

“He got wise to this and decided to charge a lot for the initial lessons. And if the person turned into a real student, he would reduce the rates.”

Several of Schoenberg’s “real” students, such as John Cage, Alfred Newman and David Raksin, became hugely successful, and their relationships helped to perpetuate the composer’s lasting influence in Hollywood and beyond.

Posthumously, Schoenberg’s impact is undeniable.

Film composers have long used his pioneering 12-tone technique to produce dissonance and unpredictable melodies, such as Jerry Goldsmith, in his benchmark score in the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes.”

While Schoenberg’s music continues to be played all over the world, his notes are all over Los Angeles.

The music building and main concert venue at UCLA are named after Schoenberg. In May the opera “Schoenberg in Hollywood” will be performed at UCLA. It presents three imagined vignettes from the composer’s life.

His heirs who have diligently tended his legacy have also been important civic and cultural figures in the life of this city. In addition to his son Larry, Ronald is a retired judge. He lives with his wife, Barbara, the daughter of the composer Eric Zeisl, in Schoenberg’s original Brentwood home. Their son Randy, a lawyer, won a significant case before the Supreme Court in 2004, leading to the government of Austria returning five Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis to the family of Maria Altman.

The Schoenberg family, four members of which have lost homes in the fires, say they hope to create digitized scores from the manuscripts kept in Vienna as well to recreate other documents and correspondence that exists in the hands of others around the world. Larry Schoenberg said they’ve received a wellspring of support and encouragement from all over the world.

“It’s astounding to think about how that legacy was moved out of central Europe because of the peril there — only to find it facing a different crisis here,” Calico said.

Business

How TikTok Evaded a Ban Again and Again, Until Now

Published

11 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

How TikTok Evaded a Ban Again and Again, Until Now

In mid-2023, TikTok had just eluded an effort in Congress to ban the video app, the latest Houdini-like escape for the young tech company. For several years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, lawmakers and officials had trained their sights on the app, saying its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk.

Inside TikTok, a small group of employees started formulating a plan to ensure that the regulatory threat would never reappear, three people with knowledge of the project said. The employees pitched a campaign of TV commercials, messages to users and other public advocacy to turn Washington’s attention elsewhere. They called it Project Achilles.

But TikTok’s leaders lost interest by the end of the year. Several, including Shou Chew, its chief executive, seemed to think the threat of a ban was no longer imminent, the people said. Project Achilles never became reality.

The misreading of the political winds could not have been greater.

Just a few months later, Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok unless the app’s owner, ByteDance, sold it to a non-Chinese company. On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the law. TikTok is set to be removed from app stores on Sunday, when the law goes into effect.

The ban will end a remarkable eight-year roller-coaster ride for TikTok in the United States. The company wriggled its way out of political danger time and again. The threats to its very existence came so often, from so many directions, dealing with them became almost second nature for executives — perhaps to the point of complacency.

All the while, TikTok reached new heights of popularity and public influence. It boasts 170 million monthly U.S. users, giving the company confidence that those masses could help beat back whatever regulators aimed its way. Behind the scenes, TikTok conducted secretive negotiations with government officials and advertising blitzes aimed at rescuing it.

But in the end, the company ran into a well-organized and focused effort among Washington officials that it could not stop. Its biggest gamble yet was that it could overturn the law and avoid a sale altogether — a bet that failed.

Many social media companies have skyrocketed in popularity only to fade away nearly as fast, and others, like Facebook and X, have faced tough scrutiny in Washington. But none have been effectively forced to erase their presence in the country. Only TikTok will have that distinction.

“The vast majority of people I’ve talked to have said TikTok will figure something out, without a very clear answer to what that something will be, because they always have,” said Joe Marchese, a venture capitalist and former TV network executive. People “can’t picture it not working out.”

TikTok is already appealing directly to President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has vowed to save the app, somehow. Mr. Chew posted a direct appeal to Mr. Trump on TikTok after the Supreme Court decision, thanking him “for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States.” TikTok declined to comment on Project Achilles.

Late Friday, the company said that unless the Biden administration made it clear to service providers that they could continue providing services to the app after the law took effect, “unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on Jan. 19.” But on Saturday, the White House press secretary called TikTok’s statement “a stunt.” And Mr. Trump indicated in an interview with NBC News on Saturday that he would “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day extension once he takes office on Monday.

TikTok users are grieving, often couching their dismay in dark humor. Few seem to believe the app will be blocked on Sunday.

“In 2020 I did an interview about the TikTok ban, and I was saying the same thing: ‘I don’t think it’s going to get banned,’” said Yumna Jawad, a recipe developer and content creator who goes by Feel Good Foodie. “Five years later, I’m still doing the same interview.”

It ‘Can Change Somebody’s Life’

Before it was TikTok, it was Musical.ly, a Chinese lip-syncing app popular with teenagers and tweens.

Musical.ly’s two founders had nearly run out of venture funding for an education app when they decided to pivot to D.I.Y. music videos in 2014. The app let users film over 15-second clips of popular songs, often accompanied by a distinct brand of hand choreography.

As Musical.ly grew, ByteDance took notice. It paid around $1 billion for Musical.ly in 2017 and ultimately folded its technology and users into an app that ByteDance had launched internationally only a few months earlier: TikTok. By 2018, TikTok was roaring into the rankings of the most downloaded apps in the United States.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, TikTok became a mainstay in Americans’ lives. The app, with its endless stream of short-form entertainment, was perfectly positioned for a period when many people had more free time than ever. Or, as the musician Curtis Roach put it in the video that would make him one of the pandemic’s earliest breakout stars, a time when many people were “bored in the house.”

“I joined just to post my little funny videos, and TikTok turned into something that can change somebody’s life,” Mr. Roach said in a recent interview.

TikTok seemingly left no corner of culture untouched.

Emma Straub, an author and owner of the independent Books Are Magic bookstores, recalled seeing backlist titles like Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles” suddenly in high demand after BookTok made them popular again. In the culinary world, TikTok sent feta cheese and, later, cucumbers flying off the shelves as home cooks clamored to recreate viral recipes. Jane Wickline leveraged parody videos into a role on “Saturday Night Live.” TikTok was the most downloaded app in the United States and world in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Almost overnight, teenagers became household names. By November 2020, Charli D’Amelio had amassed 100 million followers, making her, at that time, the most-followed person on TikTok in the world. She became, at age 16, famous for recording dance videos in her bedroom. By 2021, her family would have a reality show on Hulu.

“It was a vehicle for my kids and us to follow their dreams,” said Marc D’Amelio, Ms. D’Amelio’s father.

Regulatory Reality

As TikTok’s popularity surged, so did scrutiny from the U.S. government. But TikTok managed to evade almost everything officials threw at it.

The first serious effort to ban the app in the United States came in the summer of 2020 from Mr. Trump, during his first term as president. TikTok was already on edge after a ban in India. Then Mr. Trump raised concerns that ByteDance could hand over sensitive TikTok user data to the Chinese government.

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he said in July 2020.

Mr. Trump later hedged, saying he did not mind if Microsoft or another “very, very American” company bought TikTok instead. In August, he issued an executive order that effectively barred app stores from hosting TikTok. It gave companies a 45-day deadline to comply.

TikTok sued to block the executive order. As the deadline approached, the company tried to find a path that would assuage Mr. Trump’s fears by having two American companies take a stake in a new U.S.-based company, TikTok Global, which would go public within a year. But at the 11th hour, the deal appeared to be imperiled by the Chinese government and conflicts over ByteDance’s involvement.

Suddenly the ban seemed imminent — and yet TikTok emerged unscathed.

That fall, two federal courts agreed with TikTok that the executive order was unlawful and stopped the ban from going into effect. Shortly afterward, Mr. Trump lost his bid for re-election, complicating policymakers’ approach to addressing the concerns they had about TikTok and shelving the contentious deal.

TikTok wasn’t out of the woods. The Biden administration had many of the same national security concerns about the app. And some states began acting on their own against it.

By early 2023, more than a dozen states had blocked the app from government-owned devices and networks, joining previous bans by the Army and the Air Force. That April, Montana passed a law to block the app outright in the state to protect its citizens’ data from China. TikTok sued, saying the law was overreaching and violated the First Amendment.

Congress had also started discussing a ban in earnest — conversations that multiplied after lawmakers grilled Mr. Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, in a five-hour hearing in March 2023. TikTok had also been working for years on a proposal to show it could operate independently from China, but that same month, the Biden administration started to seem increasingly skeptical of it in public.

That fall, Republican lawmakers began accusing TikTok of amplifying pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel videos and a decades-old letter by Osama bin Laden through its algorithmic feed.

Yet by the end of 2023, TikTok had escaped defeat again. A huge lobbying campaign that included flying TikTok stars to Washington helped fend off the proposal that Congress had been discussing.

The company’s legal case against the Montana law prevailed, too. That November, a federal court ruled that TikTok wouldn’t have to go dark in that state after all.

By December 2023, more than 150 million people were using TikTok in the United States.

‘Lower the Temperature’

With both the congressional effort and Montana’s ban behind them, some of TikTok’s top leaders seemed to believe the worst of the threats had passed.

Mr. Chew agreed to a rare profile in Vogue Singapore. Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of policy for the Americas, and Zenia Mucha, who oversees TikTok’s marketing and communications, were among executives who flew to Singapore, where Mr. Chew was based, and downplayed the near-term risk of a ban to company leaders, two people familiar with the trip said. After all, President Biden had just joined the app around the 2024 Super Bowl.

Ms. Mucha reflected that the company needed to “lower the temperature” and keep TikTok out of the news, according to four employees who heard her use the phrase when dismissing efforts, like Project Achilles, to prepare for a ban.

What ByteDance and TikTok didn’t realize — despite their well-paid policy staff and millions in lobbying expenditures — was that a small bipartisan group of lawmakers was secretly working on drafting a new law designed to withstand every legal challenge that TikTok had raised in the past. It was formally introduced last March.

TikTok was blindsided. It scrambled to respond, flying creators to Washington and sending pop-up messages to users, urging them to call their representatives to oppose the legislation.

But this time, its campaign failed. Congress passed the bill rapidly, with rare bipartisan support, and Mr. Biden signed it into law in April, less than eight weeks after its introduction — leading some aides to nickname it “Thunder Run.” Unlike Mr. Trump’s executive action, the law was upheld in the courts.

A Last Hope

Despite TikTok’s looming ban, it was largely business as usual inside the company.

Two weeks after Mr. Biden signed the TikTok law, Mr. Chew and his wife joined dozens of celebrity guests at the 2024 Met Gala in Manhattan, which TikTok sponsored. The company told advertisers like L’Oreal and Victoria’s Secret that it wasn’t backing down from its U.S. business over drinks in New York and on the French Riviera at the ad industry’s annual confab in Cannes. It said it would sponsor the Washington Capitals hockey team in September.

TikTok executives have, at times, made light of the possible ban, suggesting in one staff meeting over the summer that it would one day be the subject of a Hollywood film.

In October, Mr. Beckerman held a gathering for his team in Lima, Peru, flying dozens of employees there, three people with knowledge of the outing said. The team outings were typically a mix of business and fun — but the jaunt struck some as surprising given the company’s situation. (TikTok said a hurricane had forced it to switch from an original destination of Miami.)

Now, TikTok is pinning its last hope on Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump, who now has 14.8 million followers on his TikTok account, publicly changed his stance on the app last March. He has vowed to save it, though his options, even as president, are limited. He cannot overturn the law on his own, and it is not clear how he might stop its enforcement. He could try to exercise a one-time 90-day extension for TikTok if he determines sale talks are underway that would meet the terms of the law.

TikTok does not seem to be giving up. The company is spending thousands to be the headline sponsor of an event on Sunday, the day the law is scheduled to go into effect, celebrating the conservative influencers who helped shape the 2024 election. On Monday, Mr. Chew will attend the inauguration, alongside former presidents, family members and other important guests.

TikTok’s stars do not seem to believe this is the final blow, either. Bethenny Frankel, the Bravo star and entrepreneur, said she had a hard time believing that TikTok could be gone on Sunday. TikTok’s users will figure out a way forward, she said.

“They’re club kids, and they’re going to figure out where the after-party is,” Ms. Frankel said. “They’re not letting the club get shut down.”

Business

Trump names Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson as 'special ambassadors' to Hollywood

Published

12 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

Trump names Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson as 'special ambassadors' to Hollywood

President-elect Donald Trump has named actors Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson as “special ambassadors” to Hollywood.

Trump said the three actors will be his “special envoys” and report back to him with on-the-ground knowledge of the industry to bring Hollywood back “bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”

“These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest,” Trump wrote in a post Thursday on his Truth Social platform, calling Hollywood a “great but very troubled place.” “It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”

Exact details of this new position and how the actors would bring back production from overseas were unclear from the post.

All three actors have publicly expressed their support for Trump, with Voight speaking at his inauguration festivities during his first term, and Stallone calling him the “second George Washington” during a gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Gibson had a years-long exile from Hollywood after making anti-Semitic remarks during a 2006 DUI arrest in Malibu. He apologized for his behavior and had a comeback in 2016, directing “Hacksaw Ridge,” which was nominated for a best picture Oscar.

Hollywood has faced a tough last few years, with cascading challenges for the industry starting with the pandemic, the dual labor strikes of 2023 and a cutback in production. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a frequent Trump critic, has proposed an increase to California’s film and TV tax incentive program that supporters say could help lure back runaway production from other states or countries.