If you’ve read anything about the music industry as it has been since the 1950’s you’d know how tough it has been for new artists to break into the field.

Sometimes a musician would be lucky enough to have their live performance in some seedy bar or club be observed by a manager from one of the record labels, or perhaps a “scout”, a person paid specifically to go out looking in such places for new talent (the term and practice taken from Baseball).

But just as often the musician would have scrape up some cash to rent a recording studio for a few hours so that a handful of vinyl records (45RPM singles of course) could be bashed out and sent to recording companies in the hope that someone would be willing to listen.

The Internet, as in so many other areas of our lives, has changed all that and Lanie Gardner is merely the latest example. Who is she? Well she’s just another teenager from North Carolina who hangs around a lot on the app called TikTok. Yes, there’s a lot of garbage on the app, as recorded by Libs of Tiktok, and it’s effectively owned by the Chinese Communist Party.

But it can be something better, and often is. Two years ago a guy called Nathan Apodaca did a TikTok video of himself riding a skateboard while swigging from a bottle of cranberry juice, and then matched that up with the old (1977) Fleetwood Mac hit single, Dreams. The video went viral, as the saying goes, clocking tens of millions of views, launching the single back into the charts, and eventually landing Mr Apodaca a new RV from a grateful (and amazed) cranberry juice company.

It also got a lot of teenagers on TikTok to do their own cover versions of Dreams, including Ms Gardner. But her’s is special I think you’ll agree. Love her little hat tip to Mr Apodaca at the start. Watch. Enjoy.

Within days her cover version had gained over 20 million total views and she got 340 000 total followers. Just 10 days later she had a record deal with the Jonas brothers!

Lanie’s jaw-dropping cover also caught the attention of Mick Fleetwood himself and Kevin Jonas Sr (father of the Jonas Brothers) who welcomed her to the “Jonas Group Entertainment” family.

She’s young and pretty and talented. She also seems natural and happy and I hope the industry does not do to her what it has done to so many other young, talented people. But we cannot be so afraid of our futures that we sit paralysed. Ms Gardner certainly isn’t.