“And I think all of that now is moving on to the internet and being captured on the internet. “In LA, you have these houses and apartment buildings full of groups of struggling creative people,” says Lorenz, who first reported on the Hype House in early 2020. Taylor Lorenz, the newly appointed Washington Post columnist who is writing a book about the creator industry, notes that creative people cohabiting and collaborating is hardly a new concept. If social media rewards and amplifies the individual over the collective, how can creator collectives flourish? And Petrou’s moment of reflection ultimately underscores the show’s bleakest revelation, that the utopian promise of a content house – collaboration, community and cross-promotion – is fundamentally at odds with the demands of the industry. Hype House paints a dispiriting portrait of fleeting internet fame where escalating pressure to produce content, feverish fandoms and oppressive public scrutiny fuel anxiety, ennui and isolation. And maybe it’s time for me to focus on that, too.” “People are separating into their own avenues and people are growing in their own future careers, and I think that was the whole goal of the house. “I feel like it’s kind of setting yourself up for failure,” he says in the documentary. They are designed to incubate talent and build a collective brand, but launch the individual careers of the most famous in the group. The business model of content houses is inherently contradictory. Prototypical e-boy Lil Huddy moved out, signed a record deal with Interscope and released his debut album in September of last year. The D’Amelios got their own reality show and clothing and makeup lines soon after leaving, while Rae recently starred in Netflix’s He’s All That and signed a multi-picture deal with the streaming giant. Awakening to their influence naturally meant monetising it, and the house’s most successful inhabitants quickly moved onwards and upwards. He wistfully laments the naive optimism and pure creative spirit that made the Hype House work at first, propelling former members like Addison Rae and sisters Charli and Dixie D’Amelio to mainstream superstardom.Įarly on, these kids were dancing like no one was watching, although of course everyone was. Despite Petrou’s repeated attempts at patching things up, the house is on the verge of falling apart (spoiler: it basically does). Some members are accused of not pulling their weight, others refuse to make content at all. Throughout the show, tension is high and morale is low. We were just growing and having fun, but it just doesn’t work any more.” we were like, just kids messing around, hanging out, filming the content. “They all felt like just normal kids, and I think that was the part that kept us all so humble in the beginning. “ TikTok was very new, so these kids didn’t feel like they were famous yet, even though they had five, 10, 20 million followers when we started,” says Petrou, who is presented as a caring, paternal house manager, to his girlfriend Mia Hayward. The space had been co-founded in 2019 by Petrou and Chase Hudson, a fellow TikTok star-turned-pop-punk artist who now performs under the name Lil Huddy. In a scene from the Netflix reality show Hype House, released in January, 23-year-old influencer Thomas Petrou contemplates the future of his TikTok content house.
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