Jack Coyne is humanizing social media through trivia

AS TRACK STAR GREW, a hard truth emerged: Coyne could only give away so much money. On Public Opinion, contestants would often stop after three or four questions, but there are Track Star subjects who’ve done 10-20 songs and watched their total winnings catapult to four figures. What’s playing on our phones can only tell so much of the story. Not only are Coyne and his team making hour-long video compilations on Chess Records and film scores, but the YouTube versions of Track Star videos are less edited and give off a much better sense of the show’s inner workings. When Coyne is testing an Irish girl’s knowledge of Irish music, the viewer gets to see him calculating her winnings in real time and how close it’s getting to $20,000. “I’m like, ‘This is crazy, are you going to stop or are you going to keep going?’” he tells me. “And I’m anxious to the point where I’m like, ‘I don’t have that much money.’ We didn’t have that much money in the bank account. We shot that and then we had to save up money for three months to be able to pay the donation, to be able to release that video. And you see it happen. It’s fun and it’s playful and I’m joking, but Kieran’s like, ‘You fucking get her out, stop fucking around.’” One deep cut later and her round was over.

“We can’t afford to give away thousands of dollars five days a week,” Coyne tells me. “It’s coming out of our pocket, we don’t have any money, and I think the thing that resonates with people is not the game. It’s the conversation. It’s not, ‘How much money did this guy get?’ If your focus is on how much money is on the line or not on the line, we’re failing.” The important thing is the story being shared. Are the videos touching somebody? Is there an emotional connection happening between Coyne, the interviewee, and anybody who scrolls to the video on their For You Page? 

I keep thinking about Robert George, a “human jukebox” that nearly bankrupted Track Star just days before my conversation with Coyne. “Technically he won $1.5 billion off us, or something like that,” Coyne laughs. “That’s where the mechanics of the thing start to fall apart. It’s like, ‘Dude, you’re amazing. We’re going to make a big donation to your charity of choice. But, now, let’s see how far you can go.’” In-between a few-dozen guesses, George told stories about being a DJ in the DMV and brokered one of the sweetest connections between Coyne and a contestant yet. But then he became impossible to stump. “At that point, I wasn’t worried about the money. I was worried about letting this go.” Coyne eventually got the upper hand on George—thanks to “Party Fears Two” by the Associates—and donated $1,000 to the American Cancer Society on his behalf. 

But the point of a Track Star video is not to “stump” the guesser. Of course, any conversation will run stale if it goes on long enough, and Coyne and his brother can’t stand out in the NYC cold for three hours every day, but what he wants to do is play songs that turn his videos into snapshots of somebody else’s life. Why Track Star? Well, it’s become a middle ground for music lovers of all kinds. “It’s going to be important to you, and you can explain why that song is important to you and why you care about it,” he says. “So if it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard this song before,’ it’s like, oh, shit, that’s boring. What I’m always going for is they put the headphones on, I play a song, and all of a sudden their face lights up and they’re happy. They’re like, ‘Oh, my God, this song.’ That’s what it’s all about.” 

IN 2026, TRACK STAR is mostly the same show it was in 2023. What has changed is Coyne’s “competence and ability” to pick songs, interpret someone’s music taste, and communicate with them through that. Instead of Coyne and a stranger just playing a guessing game, it’s a stranger flexing their music smarts, responding to something they love, and doing monologues about it. As Coyne told the New York Times, “We are tricking people into telling a story. They’re listening to something, they get fired up, and then they get to talk about it.” And, with a money component involved, it gives their taste and knowledge some tangible worth, even if they leave their winnings behind or ask Coyne to donate them to an organization that needs it more. 

The rhythm of the Track Star editing has also improved, as has Coyne’s understanding of how to splice things together. “If anything, we’ve moved away from just saying ‘Name the artist, win five bucks,’” he admits. “That used to be the beginning of every single video. Now, we feel like people have an understanding of the show. The platforms have an understanding of how to distribute us and get us in front of people who are going to want to watch it.” In other words: the algorithm has figured out Track Star, not the other way around. Coyne and his crew can take more risks and “move outside the guardrails” of the game show format they started with. It’s not just “double-or-nothing” anymore, but an experimental storytelling vehicle that resonates with a lot of people. When he’s not making mixes for musicians he looks up to, he’s staging an emotional meetup between his mom and Ed Sheeran, or he’s learning about the most meaningful song in a stranger’s life—whether that’s New York Times editor David Remnick, Sue Molnar (a mid-fifties woman who banked $10,000, which Coyne said he’d have to pay out to her “in installments”), or a South African man who loved jazz music so much that he immigrated to New York just so he could be in the city’s jazz scene. 

In any case, social media trends don’t hold a lot of weight for Coyne, because Track Star isn’t a new idea. “They were doing versions of this show on the radio in the 1930s,” he shares, grinning wide. “Call in and guess that tune, you know?” But we are in an age where social media is becoming a valuable tool to promote work, if not the most valuable tool. Actors and musicians come on Coyne’s show when they’ve got something to plug, like Jeremy Allen White when Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere was entering theaters and Cameron Crowe when his memoir was hitting bookstore shelves. And Coyne always buries the lede, letting people “choose their own adventure” without directly promoting anything. “When we have an artist appear on the show who has a new album [coming out], we don’t really talk about the new album,” he says. “We don’t say when it’s coming out. We’re not trying to advertise, we’re trying to have interesting conversations with people. It’s valuable to put this person on this show and have them resonate with a large audience, and then people might discover them.” 

You have to think that publicists have bought into that content model, otherwise Jack Antonoff, Olivia Rodrigo, Common, Lucinda Williams, Ken Burns, Mark Zuckerberg, Billy Corgan, and Maya Rudolph would have steered clear of Coyne and his team. I mean, Christ, Zohran Mamdani came on the show in the middle of his mayoral campaign. Kamala Harris said to Coyne on-camera, “I love what you do.” Track Star has blown up, sitting at 956,000 followers on Instagram, 215,000 subscribers on YouTube, and 42.6 million views on TikTok. It’s like MTV for a digital age, but Coyne, his brother, and Kornaros have kept their mission airtight for three years: Track Star is driven by people, not clicks. “Part of the ethos of what we do is we treat everybody the same,” Coyne says. “Doesn’t matter if you’re fucking famous or you’re rich or you’re homeless, whatever. Everybody’s equal, and it’s important for us to showcase that.” That’s why you have ballet choreographer Justin Peck explaining movement through classical music, photographer Roberta Bayley giving a lesson on punk rock, and “retired K-pop stan” Em identifying the genre’s global domination all within a few scrolls of each other. 

It’s always the people you don’t know who have the greatest stories to tell. Sure, Paul McCartney and Dolly Parton are great, exciting figures, but their lives have been talked about over and over. There’s only so many places Coyne can go in those conversations, but some random person on a street corner is a discovery that he gets to share with the world. “You get to introduce someone to the world, to someone that they don’t know,” he says. “Striking that balance is really important, and the reason that we do that through music is because music is so universal. Everybody has a song that they love. Everyone has something to connect with.” On the Public Opinion side of things, Coyne’s discoveries are even more fulfilling. “The video we’re editing right now is with a dude who works in the Department of City Planning and is building pipes underneath the sidewalk,” he says. “That guy is more interesting than Tame Impala. That conversation was more satisfying to have, because I’m learning from this guy about how the sewer system works. Tame Impala is cool. He’s famous, his music is dope, and I’m curious about some of his influences. But, it’s just as interesting to learn about how the pipes work.”

In the mid-2010s Humans of New York was, like, the biggest fucking thing. My mom had the book on our coffee table for years. Now, TikTok accounts are doing the same thing, talking to New Yorkers on the street about falling in love, fashion, and apartment prices. These videos are getting millions of views and likes. To me, that has to mean people are craving stories. It means that people are curious. And curiosity is what motivates Jack Coyne. It drives every conversation he’s having, on-camera or off. He has a desire—which is practically second-nature to him now—to pull information out of people. Before Public Opinion, he worked for YouTuber Casey Neistat. “We’d work on these vlogs about New York City, and he would be like, ‘If you go outside and you have a camera, a story is going to run and hit you in the face,’” Coyne recalls. “Having that mindset of ‘if you’re out there, on the streets, it’s going to happen,’ you’re going to meet people and it’s going to be interesting. Even if you don’t have a camera and you went and spent the day walking around, talking to people, you would have a really interesting day. Then, you’d be able to go to dinner that night and say, ‘I met this guy who was feeding birds in the park and he was a Vietnam veteran.’ That’s interesting. It feeds your soul.” 

I’ve been resistant to music content creators for a long time—not because I don’t like what they do, but because their platforms are, by default design, made to take more eyes off the written word, whether that’s intentional or not. It’s easier to watch a video than to read a story, plain and simple. That’s why publications are pivoting to video, hoping that social media engagement will translate to website clicks. And, as somebody who runs one of those websites, that can be a difficult future to grapple with. 

But I’ve never scrolled past a Track Star video. And, until my conversation with Coyne last December, I never really thought about why his program was the lone exception. What’s obvious to me now is that we need more folks like him, just as much as we need art critics and curators on the printed page. Take a recent Track Star guest, Audrey, who revealed to Coyne that she moved to New York for fashion school but now works as a bartender: the interaction seems superficial at first, but then it turns into this cute back-and-forth about what rock bands a 23-year-old thinks are the greatest of all time. It’s a conversation I’ve had hundreds of times with friends, and now I get to watch a stranger have it while I’m scrolling on my phone. That’s an appealing venture, because we need people who are willing to tell the story of somebody who’d never think to sit in front of a camera and talk if somebody else didn’t stop them on the street and ask them to do so. I think you become smarter and kinder that way, just by having conversations with the strangers, artists, and thinkers walking by you. You learn as much about who you are as you do other people, even if the conversation begins by simply asking what artist sang which song. 

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.