ANDREW JANNAKOS: On Tik Tok Fan Reaction to His Music & Hearing His Debut Single “Gone Too Soon” for the First Time (Audio)
Andrew Jannakos talks about the life-changing experience of finding a huge audience on Tik Tok and the first time hearing his song on the radio.
Jannokos on Listener Reaction to Music on Tik Tok
AJ: I’m really glad that Tik Tok was able to do that. To see a like on a video is one thing but to actually go back and watch these duets of people like dancing down the hallway or proposing or just sitting in the car going… The biggest thing to me that I took away from every bit of it and it’s something that I hope I can continue to do is it didn’t matter. There is no border / barrier between anything with my song on Tik Tok. You could be white, black, Hispanic, Asian, mixed. There were so many different people and for me in a time where so much hate is happening in the world, like so much bad was going on. For people to connect to my song in such a positive way and to see so many different people in the community responding to it, it was just really cool for me to be able to sit back and be like “okay, I brought smiles to people’s faces today with this song”. It’s even cooler, like I said, to know with how much hate and racism and everything is going on in the world today, to have that little bit of love in a song and have so many people messaging me, falling in love with it. I’m just like “Yo, this is crazy!”
The first time I heard it on the real radio was SiriusXM, on The Highway, and we were like five minutes away from the house, and I was just about to press the button to shut my truck off, and right when I went to press the button it was like “newcomer, (intro to song),” and I was like “woah woah, no” and I cranked it up to like 65 and almost blew my speakers out, and I bawled my eyes out. Should have put that on Instagram. I wasn’t even thinking of recording it, I was just like this is crazy. It was a very surreal moment for sure. It’s crazy to think how many people have reached out and been like, “omg I heard your song on SiriusXM today.” And now I’m just going to be getting messages like, “I heard your song, here, here, here” and I’m just like oh my goodness this is incredible, it’s what every artist dreams of. For it to happen to me, it’s a God thing.