NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

The Brilliant Strategy Top Creators Use to Bypass Platforms and Keep 100 Percent of Revenue

A business that depends on resources it doesn’t control isn’t really a business; it’s a hostage to the whims and vagaries of others.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

MAY 25, 2026

Photo: Getty Images

A decade ago, when Cameo first started in Chicago and was working out of 1871, the tech incubator which I ran there at the time, only a few of us understood what the company’s long-term roadmap looked like and how utterly disruptive this little firm (with ugly videos from jocks in their cars and “D” level celebrities holding forth in their basements) was going to be for the entire entertainment industry.

One of the great ironies at the time was that the most cogent observation came from no less an authority than Snoop Dogg, now a noted Olympic commentator, who said: “There is no platform or middleman filtering my message anymore.” The idea that artists and musicians could bypass many expensive and controlling layers of agents and managers and directly reach out to and connect with their fans wasn’t exactly revolutionary, but Cameo and others were the earliest players to provide painless technology solutions and easy access to anyone and everyone who thought they had something important to say. However, the economic problem for the creators and content providers was still a sizable concern because Cameo as the platform provider took a healthy cut of the revenue earned in each transaction. It was a better deal, but not the right deal.

A business that depends on resources it doesn’t control isn’t really a business; it’s a hostage to the whims and vagaries of others. Even Steven Galanis, one of the co-founders of Cameo, advises creators to own their audience rather than rent it, which he defines as building monetization that does not depend on any single platform’s algorithm or content policies remaining consistent.

So, a few years later, along came bemyfriends, riding on the huge success of its first major customer, the South Korean pop group BTS, and offered musicians and other creators their own platform with all the basic features required to build direct and lasting connections to their own fans without any intermediaries. This platform enabled special fan events, merchandise sales, access to the performers themselves, data analytics, advertising opportunities, fan voting mechanisms and numerous other tools which permitted the platform owner to focus on their principal activity while all the commerce and other business concerns were handled by the b.stage and b.stage+ platforms provided by bemyfriends. Most importantly, all the fan contacts and other proprietary data were owned exclusively by the artists and not by the platform operators. But the glaring omission in their offerings was the very critical area of ticketing which was controlled for almost all of the major U.S. concert venues by Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment. 

The recent Ticketmaster and Live Nation litigation, where the suing states secured an initial determination that these two industry overlords were engaged in illegal monopolistic behavior (and notwithstanding the sad fact that they took the Trumpian payment path to bail themselves out of the federal proceedings), has energized talented musicians to be more entrepreneurial and aggressive in addressing the whole ticketing swamp. Here again, for artists with substantial fan bases and international followings, the attraction of building their own ticketing app and controlling their own interactions with their fans is very attractive and potentially quite lucrative.

One very significant example of direct-to-fan ticketing is the recent successful sold-out tour of Australia by GiaNina Paolantonio which employed a new free iPhone app that allows her to sell tickets worldwide to her fans without any service fees. She can sell tickets through the Headquarters app (which also works on Android phones) for dance classes, performances and concerts to her followers which number over 4 million on TikTok alone. Add another 2 million fans for Snap, Insta, and YouTube and you can begin to understand the reach and power of what she’s doing.

These are not thin or casual connections but rather relationships she’s been building since her work on Dance Moms first gave her a persistent global audience. She’s choreographed viral dance moves for Jennifer Lopez, Billie Eilish and Sombr, among others, and is now recording her music with Atlantic Records. The global app was built by GiaNina and her partners at a development firm named Clique Apps. GiaNina’s also got her own Selfie, an online digital twin that fans and followers can ask questions and get instant responses about everything GiaNina.

I wrote a piece quite a while ago noting that we’d probably all reached peak apps and that no one was looking to add more applications to their phones, but it’s a whole different story and a dream marketing scenario when an app developer is an artist who can speak directly to 6 million fans and tell them to get with the program and install her app to keep up with everything she’s doing – new music drops, hosting dance classes, extending her tours and, of course, other merch opportunities. And that’s only half of the really bad news for the twin ticket ogres.

The viral flywheel aspect of her launch goes like this. Once a fan sees how easy, cheap (actually free) and speedy this app is, they’re never going back. All consumers’ expectations are perpetually progressive and—just as Amazon set a brand-new curve and standard for delivery times and goosed the world’s expectations—every one of GiaNina’s fans will be asking her to add other artists, acts, creators and tours to her app. And every one of those fans will also be asking every other act, musician and performer why they’re still doing things the old, slow and costly way. It’s only a matter of time with millions of consumers waiting worldwide at the end of the channel that GiaNina’s building until every artist will be speeding their way to GiaNina’s door. You can never go wrong counting on smart people to act in their own self-interest.

SLUSH, SLUTS AND SCUMBAGS

 

BALLLESS BEZOS BALLROOM

 

WHITE TRASH, PERVERTS AND TRAITORS

DICKERSON - THANK YOU COLBERT

 John Dickerson

Stephen Colbert

Thank you.

John Dickerson

May 22, 2026

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Before each show, Stephen Colbert tells his Late Show audience “We don’t do the show for you, we do it with you.” It’s a cue that they’re all in it together, so don’t be stingy with the laughs, but that line also explains why so many mourn right now. It explains the wave of testimonials, the guests, up and down the register of fame, who fought to get on the dwindling number of shows to sing a song or read a poem or engage in whatever other personal incantation allowed them to get closer to whatever they felt a part of.

Colbert created a sense of ownership, not on the level of a few giggles before bedtime or a YouTube sneak at work, but ownership in the deeply felt way people talk about their wedding song or their childhood bedroom.

They feel this because “we do it with you” is a line of theology. Colbert does what all performers do-- thinks about what connects his work to the humans receiving it. But he goes further. He agonizes about what connects us as humans, what lifts us up, where the lines are between sentimentality and pathos, humor and cynicism, who deserves grace, who deserves a knee to the groin with a smile.

Colbert attends. He has long attended, which, when done with intention becomes an act of devotion.1

Wait, these are just jokes. Correct. Jokes, but not just jokes. Listen to Colbert talk about what should or should not go into a monologue and you’ll hear an entire worldview built over a lifetime. Quick to laugh. Quick to tears. Same porousness. Grief has sharpened his sense of joy. Beauty lands harder when you know how temporary everything is.

Gratitude is the sentiment Colbert viewers express the most. They can’t find the words exactly, so they produce them in rapid succession, the way holiday travelers trying to capture their feeling about the Acropolis take 87 photographs. None quite captures the thing, but the tonnage of snaps testifies to the depth of feeling.

For some, the gratitude has to do with politics, but that’s not the main thing. Watching someone attend on your behalf-- which is what a Late Show audience experiences-- creates gratitude, because the audience can feel how far back that work on their behalf has gone. This is how a person being looked at on a stage can make the audience feel like the one being seen. They leave the seats feeling like Colbert knows something about them. About love, vanity, fear, loneliness, aspiration. People see in bright lights what they had previously only felt in their bones.

To watch someone take that much care is inspiring. The Late Show crew feels it. A picture from last week at the crew party on the roof shows Colbert up on some tower talking to his staff. It looks like he’s rallying troops before a battle where they are outnumbered. The picture captures a final moment-- in the future they’ll be lost, scattered-- but it also captures the spirit of the 11 years that came before. Late Show staff don’t talk about their jobs like they’re members of a crew, but more like they’ve enlisted in a corps. Same throughline with the audience: they feel part of something.

The atmosphere around a leader reveals the leader. We know what that looks like when the leader is a monstrous baby whom none dare gainsay.2 On the other end of the spectrum are leaders who steer by fixed points-- — Evie, the kids, the faith that preceded the fame —who know where they begin and end and who inspire you to be your best self both because they demand the same of themselves, but also because they convince you-- even when you’re not certain-- that what’s being asked of you is within your power. (Guests feel it too — Colbert’s curiosity makes them want to be worth it.3)

Every night before he walks onstage, Colbert slaps himself in the face hard enough to regret it, so he won’t take the next hour for granted.

Work that is hard but reveals people to themselves is rare. How lucky to be asked to do the most that you can do. You can see it in the Late Show crew from the curb where they greet guests, threaded through the theater’s byzantine staircases, to the chair on stage, to the band and back again. You can see why. “If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve your money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself.”4

A lot of the crew can legitimately call their boss their friend. In showbusiness this can be a nearly meaningless word, but in this case has almost a ferocity to it. Even when the odds are against the moment, Colbert’s friendship has the energy of the line, “we are horribly afraid but we are coming with you.”5

Much of what has been written about the end of The Late Show has focused on how it ended. This invites a catalogue of what won’t come to an end. There are scores of people whose sense of humor, curiosity, honor and care has been drawn out of them by Colbert. That’s now all a part of their lives, their future wedding toasts, their jokes at work.

Over the years, when tragedy hit—a school shooting, an attack on the U.S. Capitol, some fresh injury to their faith in the country—people felt steadied at 11:35. They heard their fears, grief, bewilderment and convictions reflected back to them with clarity, humor and care. And there are those who take comfort at moments of intense pain from having heard Stephen talk about loss: “It’s a gift to exist,” he told Anderson Cooper in a conversation about grief, “and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escape from that. But if you are grateful for your life, then you have to be grateful for all of it.”

The tail of YouTube is long and so are the memories of all those people whose request for a selfie he treated like it was a gift to him, or whose breakups, funerals, lonely apartments and late-night drives were softened by the strange comfort of hearing someone else attend carefully to the world.6

That’s a legacy, but it’s also a model, a reminder to seek out cheer and song, to be curious, attentive and true. Available to all of us lucky enough to be in the audience.

1

After Simone Weil..

2

Robert Bolt, from the introduction to A Man for All Seasons.

3

Hi Mom.

4

Northwestern Commencement 2011.

5

Merry to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring

6

Colbert: “You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid.”