NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Brand Extensions Are Supposed to Create Value. The Grammys Show How They Can Destroy It.

BTS recently pulled its newest album from award considerations after the Grammys announced a new music category. It’s an important lesson for entrepreneurs about diluting your brand.

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

AUG 25, 2026

TS perform onstage during the 64th Annual GRAMMY Awards at MGM Grand Garden Arena on April 03, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Photo: Getty Images

I wrote some time ago about how BTS, one of the biggest bands in the world these days, was developing their own platform that would permit them to “own” a direct and persistent connection to their fans that was free of the many gatekeepers and parasites that have traditionally controlled the music industry. This would permit them to sell swag, special access, live podcasts, and eventually even tickets fee-free to their fans. Another upcoming artist, GiaNina Paolantonia, has similarly built her own platform and app in order to communicate with, connect to, and engage with her fans and followers.

The music industry is like a multi-headed hydra, however, and always has another card to play. The Grammys, an industry organ for decades, just announced a new music category specifically for Asian music in a transparent and expansive attempt to segregate BTS and all the other popular artists and bands from South Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Keeping these performers in their new and narrow vertical prevents these massively popular and emergent artists and rapidly growing music groups from dominating the main award categories which the “industry” prefers to reserve for their own in-house acts. As a reaction, BTS pulled its newest album from award consideration and urged others to do the same. Years ago, the same approach and treatment was used to keep Michael Jackson out of the Grammy Pop category even as he was declared the “King of Pop” and had some of the biggest and best-selling albums in history. And don’t get me started on the years-long shabby treatment accorded to everyone in the Hip hop world.

What really struck me about this latest move was the unbelievable proliferation of award categories that the Grammys have manufactured to continue to slice, dice, minimize and otherwise control the artists and the entire awards process along with all the acclaim, access, financial rewards and other benefits that accompany such recognition. In 1959, there were 28 award categories. Today, albeit more than half a century later, there are 100.

You can decide what real value or meaning any of the “minor” awards actually has, even assuming that the typical consumer actually understood what criteria went into each award and what behavior, achievements or results it recognized and acknowledged. The more tangential awards, of course, the less meaningful each becomes. Spread a mile wide and an inch deep, even the performers can barely bring themselves to sincerely express their gratitude for the Potemkin efforts. The brand and the bragging rights diminish in direct proportion to the number of categories and trophies much like childhood sporting events where virtually everyone’s a winner just for showing up.

Alas, the music biz isn’t alone in meaningless brand extrapolations. We’ve seen dozens of aborted attempts to spread a brand gloss over a grossly mismatched product. Colgate beef lasagna, vegetable-flavored Jell-O, Life Savers soda, Frito Lay lemonade, Cosmopolitan magazine yogurt and my personal favorite, Harley-Davidson perfume. There’s a lot to be said for sticking to your knitting. It may not be new and exciting, but it will likely keep you from falling flat on your face. Brands aren’t concrete and can stretch reasonably far, but not to excess.

There’s no one greater than JD Power at creating an award for every suitor in every automotive category and now expanding into virtually any and every imaginable area of products or services under the sun. You too can win a narrowly drawn JD Power award for the best of something accomplishment in your space—whatever it may be—and even if it’s only for your efforts on Sundays in months having 28 days. You get the idea. Winners galore and all willing to pay wonderful fees to use and promote that recognition in their advertising.

A close second in the race for exponential category growth and the clear winner in shamelessness are the fine folks at Guinness World Records, who invite the entire world to invent records of all types and sizes and then submit them to Guinness for a very costly validation process (Guinness is happy to provide paid consultants to advise applicants) along with judges and witnesses.

Once the months’ long confirmation process is concluded, Guinness provides a framed piece of paper with their brand and seal which recognizes the newly created and established record. They’ll also sell a framed “You Were There” Guinness certificate to every attendee at any Guinness record-setting event. Here again, the very DIY nature of this “record” creation process and the massive number of claimed records makes one wonder about the value of the end product and frankly what the Guinness name or brand even brings to the process. Nonetheless Guinness claims that it receives almost 1000 record proposals and applications per week and over 50,000 submissions a year. 

A pair of Chicago twin brothers who have taken and documented over 82,000 selfies since the Apple iPhone camera was front facing enabled in 2010 are the likely holders of the putative Guinness World Record for “selfies taken by twin brothers” and to date, as their application process proceeds, no one has come forward to dispute or contest this amazing achievement. Taking a page from Michael Jackson, they now call themselves the Selfie Kings. Apparently, in the world of world records, saying makes it so.

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS GIANINA PAOLANTONIO AND HER NEW APP AND HIS INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

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.