TR.BIZ: 11.27.2025

From Miss Piggy to Boy Throb, this is your late-mid-week check-in 💫

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re discussing how AI is eating the music industry, the Campbell’s Soup executive who hates his customers, if this is the last Black Friday, and a surprise Thanksgiving recipe I plan to make.

🚨 REMINDERS 🚨

• 📖 Happening December 3 at 9AM PST / 12PM EST / 6PM CEST, Sarah Labrie will be doing a deep dive into memoir, essay, and beyond: RSVP here!

• 🤓 The next Trend Report Live™ is happening is December 7 at 5PM in Barcelona! We’ll likely treat this as a Trend Report™ holiday party too so…come on through, Barcelona! RSVP HERE!!

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💥 Soft Powers: Boy Throb

Boy Throb is a real-and-not boy band that came onto the scene less than a month ago with a mission: to get a million followers so that its member — Darshan, who is in India — could join the group in America via green card. Cut to today and the group has fulfilled their mission, all as a debate rages if the effort is real or if it’s faked, driving home connections between TikTok stars, nepotism, and “industry plants.” “Boy Throb thrives off of a very 2025 tension,” Mara Dettmann observed this week of this cultural quandry. “They’re too bad to be an actual band — but too sincere to not be.” That latter thing is why Boy Throb is real, or that none of this matters: people are starting to share media about its members, revealing very real Hollywood dreams a lifetime in the making. This is where the real Hollywood is and can be, where people can build dreams outside of the system as a way into it, as all of these guys are very North Hollywood “types” who the traditional entertainment system is trained to reject. Is Boy Throb actually going to win a Grammy? No, not at all. Is there a brilliant television comedy producer who probably cast the right talent and developed the perfect storyline to make this stunt? Yes, which reveals what Boy Throb actually is: a hype house for 2025, a comedy pilot “stunt” designed to resonate bigger entertainment buzz as it gamifies our likes and uses humor as means to move an effort forward. It will be studied and it will tie to a bigger media activation.

🤩 Hollyweird Insider, I: Music is the first to cave

As the AI bubble threatens to pop, it appears we now know which creative industry will be ruined first — and we should have known all along: the music industry. First it was the Velvet Underground, then it was Xania Monet, then it was Breaking Rust, then it was the Charlie Kirk song: this is what the colonization of art by tech looks like, not that proper Hollywood is art — but it does show how listeners will “no longer care” about real talent, treating real human skill and the development of such skill as both disposable and “not good enough,” as audiences deintellectualize and crave the even more mindless. Truly sad stuff! The shot to the temple is Warner’s recent deal with Suno, which will offer AI likenesses of artists like Dua Lipa and Charlie XCX (but artists will have “full control” of their likenesses) (Sure.). The hype game is being pushed hard by Suno, positioning it as a “creator tool” by brain dead tech people as aspiring and not-as-talented-or-creative people out themselves as slopheads. See the viral post by the brand’s head of creators, where they try to link an aspiring-but-failed music history with AI tools. People rightly and loudly dunked on that. I know I dig in and shit on AI a lot, but know that it’s multi-faceted: I’d be all for this if it wasn’t just the environmental toll and that it’s stealing from real human creativity while preying on our insecurities and our intelligence as it creates an environment where no one knows what the truth is all while being used as a key tool by the far right and other fascist forces. None of it is good! That is what the music industry is aligning with, which shouldn’t be a surprise as it happily slurped down the TikTok playbook without considering its own integrity. What will be next? Podcasts or movies? We’ll see!

🤩 Hollyweird Insider, II: Why is Miss Piggy having a moment?