“I try to make content that everybody can enjoy,” Landen Purifoy tells us. “No matter where they’re from, how old they are … I try to shoot for something that will intrigue everybody and let everybody have a little bit of fun with music.” We had a chance to chat with Landen about how his life-long passion for music opened the door to online success.

Landen Purifoy
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An ear for music

“I’ve always kind of had a love or passion or whatever for music since I was little,” Landen recalls. He says his ear for music revealed itself early. “My parents noticed it when I would be playing on my Gameboy when I was little … I’d sit in the backseat of my car and I would just watch the credits of the video game and just have the speaker up to my ear and hum the music instead of like playing the game.”

A pattern began to emerge. Everything Landen loved as a kid had really big musical themes. Think “Star Wars” and “The Legend of Zelda.” “I honestly just noticed that this last year,” Landen says. “I was like, that’s why I like these games because the music is so good.” Landen also loved music class, and when his stepdad brought a keyboard into the house, Landen taught himself how to play. From there, he played in band and jazz band and sang in choir through middle and high school.

Going online

It’s clear that music has always been a big part of Landen’s life. However, he didn’t start sharing this passion online until just a few years ago. “I started around when a lot of people did in 2020,” Landen recalls. “I made my first TikTok video in June of 2020, but I started making videos in April.” Those early videos were posted exclusively to his friends on Instagram.

“I was doing this challenge where there was this calendar,” Laden says, “and for all 30 or 31 days of that month, you had to basically post a song that corresponded with the calendar. So, for example, the first day of the calendar might have been: What is a song with your favorite color in it? And all you would do is post, you know, your favorite song with a color in it.” Landen, being the musician that he is, took the challenge a step further: “Instead of just posting the song … I would learn the song on piano. And I did that for a month straight. So every single day without missing, I did this challenge where I would learn a new song every day.”

After learning each song, Landen would share the video with his friends on Instagram. They loved it. Eventually, after much encouragement, Landen started sharing his daily musical ritual on a much more public platform: TikTok.

A reluctant debut

“I did not like TikTok at the time,” Landen admits. “All my friends were on it, and they were all like zombies on their phone to TikTok … I didn’t like anything about it.” Despite this initial resistance, Landen did finally give in to peer pressure.

“I was already in the habit of posting once a day because I had just got done literally for a whole month straight,” Landen recalls. “Like it was literally in my routine at this point to make a video every day. So I just kept doing that.”

Now though, his videos had the chance to gain a much bigger audience. “I was reposting some of the videos that I had made for Instagram on TikTok, and then I would also just make new random things … And I just kind of kept doing it once a day — at least once a day. And one thing led to another and I was posting some piano videos, and some of them did well, and eventually I moved into the TalkBox.” This was a turning point for Landen.

TalkBox intrigue

“I had this instrument called the TalkBox,” Landen explains. It’s basically a tube that you put in your mouth that’s connected to a keyboard to give your voice an electronic effect. “I hadn’t played it in a long time,” he recalls, “And so people were finding it interesting.” As it turned out, the TalkBox was a curiosity that drew a lot of people to Landen’s content. And he almost never discovered it.

“My parents made me go to this summer camp and yeah, I did not want to,” Landen says. He recalls being too old and too advanced as a musician to get much out of the camp’s programming — plus, there was something more exciting waiting for him at home: “I had also just got my dream car at the time, literally like two days before I left. So I was not really happy about being there.”

But there was one class that made the experience worthwhile. “I wouldn’t be where I am right now if I didn’t go to that camp,” Landen reflects, “because I got to meet a guy named Byron Chambers,” a.k.a. Mr. TalkBox. “I had never heard of a TalkBox in my life … I just heard that this guy plays the intro to ’24K Magic’ by Bruno Mars, and I was like, okay!’”

That class blew Landen away. He sent his dad a video, and when he got back from camp, he had his own TalkBox waiting for him. His dad has gotten him one as a gift. However, even though the keyboard was Landen’s main instrument, playing the TalkBox was tougher than expected:

“You just play the keys and you mouthed the words. It makes sense. Yeah, but it’s not that easy. Like, my gosh, figuring out how the tube sits in your mouth and how to pronounce things. It was it was really hard.”

At the time, Landen didn’t have the patience to master the new instrument. “I kind of messed with it for a while,” he says, “but I never really got the hang of it, so I kind of just put it in the closet.” There it sat for a long time. That is until Landen started making TikToks.

“I was playing it every day,” Landen recalls, “and then I got better.” Landen started teaching himself: “I was really paying attention to what people were doing and how it sounded and stuff. And yeah, it went from there.” Landen still chats with Mr. TalkBox from time to time. According to Landen, “he has some cool stuff coming up that we’ve been talking about.”

Moving to YouTube

After breaking out the TalkBox, Landen’s content began drawing bigger crowds. But a big TikTok following was never Landen’s end goal. Landen explains: “When I started TikTok, I was like, okay, the reason I’m going to be on TikTok is literally to move to YouTube. If any of this goes viral and if anything happens, I want to end up on YouTube.”

From a young age, Landen wanted to make it as a YouTube gamer. Later, the dream shifted to making car content. It wasn’t until he started posting videos in 2020 that music became the focus. Then, YouTube debuted YouTube Shorts. This was Landen’s chance to build an audience on YouTube.

“I never made enough money on TikTok from the beginning. Right now, I probably make like five bucks a day for my views on TikTok,” Landen reveals. “I used to make, like, 50 bucks, 70 bucks a day at max.” With low payouts from TikTok, Landen relied on sponsorships as his primary revenue stream. “Sponsorships are still a big part of it, which I really enjoy doing,” Landen says. “I am also very into tech, so I love to get, you know, tech sponsorships as well. I think it’s really fun and interesting.” Now, however, YouTube AdSense is Landen’s main source of income.

Getting things done

Part of Landen’s success can be attributed to his strategy of posting daily to multiple platforms. It’s a lot of work to maintain that kind of consistency. So how does he get it all done?

“I’m a super scheduled person,” Landen tells us. Even though he’s self-employed, he sticks to a standard 9-to-5 schedule. “I’ll get up in the morning, have my coffee, whatever. And then by nine, I’m at my computer looking at emails and planning my day.” Landen aims to plan out his entire week on Monday. This takes away the pressure of choosing something new to work on every day:

“I think the hardest thing about being a creator … is when you are a creator, you’re self-employed … that’s where getting disciplined and, to me, having a schedule is really important.” Landen says having a set strategy and routine can help combat the self-doubt that comes with being your own boss. “You have to make sure everything’s going well to make a living for yourself … it’s easier to get down and be hard on yourself,” Landen admits. “I’ve found that taking more time to plan things out has personally been good for me.”

This pre-production work also helps Landen stick to his one-video-per-day schedule. “I take off my weekends now, but for about a year, actually, when I first started, the first year, I did not miss a day.” Landen still posts every day, but he can produce some videos in bulk. That means he can take weekends off. He also livestreams on TikTok every weekday, Monday through Thursday.

Help when needed

Despite a packed production schedule, Landen’s routine allows him to post new content to multiple platforms every single day. He also gets strategic help where it matters most: editing and management by Michael Berkowitz, cofounder of Greenlight Group.

When it comes to making videos, the only person Landen has working for him is a video editor. Landen still edits his short-form content, but long-form content takes a lot longer to record and edit. That’s in part simply because Landen talks a lot more in his long-form videos. “It’ll take me a full day to record a [long-form] video,” he says, “whereas it only takes me maybe an hour or two to record the short-form.” Long-from, however, has advantages when it comes to audience building. “You don’t ever get to see my personality or like how I talk or whatever in my short-form,” he observes, “So it’s nice to be able to have my long-form for that. You get to know me better.”

Management advantages

Aside from his editor, Landen also gets help from his management team at Greenlight Group; heading the team is Co-Founder Michael Berkowitz. “I’ve learned everything I know about thumbnails from my management,” he admits. But thumbnail strategy is just one benefit.

“Not everybody needs management. Not everybody has management. For me, though,” Landen says, “when I was starting the first year that I was doing social media, I eventually got to around a million followers on TikTok, and I still wasn’t making enough money to make a living.” This was a wake-up call.

“I didn’t know how much to charge for brand deals. I didn’t know — I didn’t know anything really … I also didn’t know how to reach out to management.” Lucky for Landen, Greenlight Group reached out to him first. “I just got an associate’s degree in music … and I was like, okay, well, I’m either going to work at the church that I’m going to in audio because that’s safe, right? Or, you know, I tried music full-time content creation.” At first, Landen wasn’t sure about signing the contract Greenlight Group offered, but he decided to try it out for the summer and see how it went.

For Landen, it turned out to be a great decision: “Personally, I couldn’t do it without Greenlight Group … it allows me to spend way more time on creating. It’s definitely worth it, I would say.”

Landen Purifoy’s channel goals

With all of these systems and support in place, Landen is ready to lean in on long-form content. “Like I said before, I wanted to end up on YouTube, and luckily, now I’m able to be on YouTube doing well on there, and I really want to be able to have consistent long-form videos.” His goal is one or two long-form videos per week — and it’s a goal that’s more achievable than ever:

“It took a while to get an editor, and so since then, it’s been a lot easier. I block off my Fridays for long-form, so that’s when I’ll record, send all the files off, and everything. But yeah … I’d love to be having, like, two long-form pieces of content every week.” This, Landen explains, could really help his channel grow.

“A lot of people don’t realize,” he tells us, “you can build a large following from short-form, but most of those people just are on short-form. They don’t really watch long-form, so you’re not going to have a bajillion views on your long-form when you start posting. It’s kind of starting from zero again.

Aside from boosting his channel’s long-form output, Landen also has plans to make a video course on the instrument that catapulted his content into the TikTok spotlight: the TalkBox. “There’s not a lot of lessons or ways to learn the TalkBox,” Landen laments. “I had to kind of teach myself, and so I’d love to make a course on that.”

Final advice

As we wrapped up our conversation, Landen had this to say to new creators hoping to forge a career online:

“If you want to be a creator, I would say do the research. That’s one thing that I did. I looked up everything. I wanted to know the best posting times. I wanted to know the best length of videos. I wanted to know the best everything. Because I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this, I might as well use any leverage I can use besides just my ideas.’”

Reflecting more, Landen concludes, “If I were you just starting out. I would do the research and I would post every single day because not only are you getting more chances to go viral; when you post more, you’re also learning from your mistakes.”

Through the ups and downs of social media, Landen Purifoy is determined to keep making music and sharing it with more people. “I’m like super blessed to be able to do this,” he emphasizes, “and it’s been able to, you know, give me a lot of stuff … it reminds me, you know, how fortunate I am.”

If you want to hear more music from Landen Purifoy — and maybe even learn to play to TalkBox, you can find him on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.