TikTok and the Music Industry

Social media app TikTok has cemented itself as a huge force in the music industry in only a couple of years, up to the point where the charts are full of songs people automatically link to TikTok when they hear them outside of the app. TikTok emerged in its current form in August 2018, after similar app musical.ly was sold to Chinese technology company ByteDance, who owned TikTok. Musical.ly was then merged with TikTok, to reach a wider (older) age demographic, with musical.ly accounts automatically becoming TikTok accounts. As of September 2020, the app had surpassed 2 billion downloads worldwide, available in 154 countries. Musical.ly’s popularity was tiny compared to this, reaching 70 million downloads in May 2016 (I couldn’t find any data more recent than this).

The difference in popularity between the two apps is most likely due to the versatility enjoyed by Tiktok. Musical.ly was primarily a lip-syncing app, and there are only so many times you can watch people lip-sync to the same song before it gets old. WithTikTok, there is a much wider range of what people do with a sound, and although lots of sounds do become popular through a video trend, there is often still variation within that. The area of video where TikTok and musical.ly are most similar is probably dance trends, and I’d argue that most people who use TikTok don’t use the app for these videos (dance trend videos are most popular amongst the same age demographic musical.ly catered to). When writing some notes for this post, I wondered why popular songs on musical.ly didn’t gain popularity outside of the app in the same way songs popularised from TikTok have permeated into the charts and radio. I think this is partly because songs popular on musical.ly were already popular in the charts before being used on the app, and also partly due to the versatility of ‘TikTok songs’ and videos, people perhaps become bored of the songs less quickly than they would with musical.ly. I think it could be fair to say that where musical.ly catapulted a number of teenagers to online fame (with many releasing music as a result of this), TikTok has done this with music as the starting point instead. Possibly due to the app’s wider and older age demographic, many users aren’t interested in following and creating social media stars, or ‘influencers’ in the same way young teenagers do, and are more interested in following and supporting musicians they have discovered through TikTok. 

The TikTok algorithm also plays a huge part in the diversity and volume of artists whose popularity has increased as a result of their music being used on the app. As every user’s ‘For You’ tab within the app is unique, it allows for sounds to go viral in smaller sections of the app, as well as some select sounds being popular on the app as a whole. Many artists receive huge popularity as a result of their music ‘blowing up’ on sections of the app, but this doesn’t make them mainstream. When asking people which artists they have discovered through TikTok, ‘CORPSE’ (commonly known as ‘Corpse Husband’) and ‘Mother Mother’ are mentioned often, although they are not mainstream artists they have over 4 and 6 million monthly Spotify listeners respectively (this video discusses ‘CORPSE’s popularity really well). In 2020, hyperpop duo ‘100 gecs’ also experienced a huge surge in fans, I would argue almost solely due to TikTok, and they now have over 2 million monthly listeners, with many becoming fans of the hyperpop genre due to TikTok.

Most recently, already popular band Bring Me The Horizon, have gained many new fans due to their 2013 single ‘Can You Feel My Heart’ randomly blowing up on the app, to the point where one of the top search results for the song on YouTube was uploaded only two weeks ago, has 804k views, and features the words ‘TikTok Song’ in the title. On the app as a whole, singer-songwriter ‘beabadoobee’’s song ‘death bed (coffee for your head)’ is an interesting example of huge mainstream TikTok popularity to look at. ‘Coffee’ was the singer’s debut single in 2017, and received little attention until a sample of it was used in the song ‘death bed (coffee for your head)’ by Canadian musician ‘Powfu’, which went viral on TikTok in early 2020. By April, the song had reached the top 5 in multiple countries, and has earned platinum status in the US and UK. Almost a year later, beabadoobee has almost 14 million spotify monthly listeners, and the song has been streamed over 871 million times. Interestingly, beabadoobee supported labelmates ‘The 1975’ on tour in February 2020, they currently have just over 10 million monthly listeners. I think this is a great example of the huge popularity artists can enjoy from TikTok while still being a ‘small’ artist, and the, I suppose, isolated ‘fame’ one receives from a viral song. I could ask many people who don’t use TikTok if they knew of the 1975 and the majority would say yes, whereas I’d be surprised if many, or any, of them knew who beabadoobee is. 

I think the weirdest example of a song blowing up from TikTok occurred last year with ‘M to the B’, as it became known as on the app, by Millie B, known by many British teenagers originally as a diss track from ‘Blackpool Grime Media’ in 2016. I am still pretty baffled by how big this song became on TikTok last year, as most people my age heard it years ago and forgot about it. The track was used on the app by many popular American creators including singer Madison Beer, who thought the song was actually about a bee. The song was released on spotify as a result of TikTok popularity and currently sits at over 20 million streams. 

A final interesting point about this new way of discovering music through apps such as TikTok is that it has seemingly changed the way in which some artists write their songs, in the sense that they are written with the goal of being popular on TikTok. Songs with a 4-16 bar, under 15 second section containing lyrics (sometimes spoken rather than sung) that can be acted out in some way are necessary for TikTok fame, they are often also fairly bass-heavy tracks with very simple melodies. Ariana Grande’s ‘Positions’, which has been said by some to be written specifically with the goal of blowing up on TikTok, has been used almost 1.5 million times on the app, largely due to it spawning a trend where the camera moves smoothly with the lyrics, the trend also features the user changing outfits/makeup etc with the transitions, which is another common feature in viral sound trends. Songs with lighthearted or silly lyrics, and ad-lib sounds, songs that many wouldn’t hear if they didn’t use TikTok seem to often become hugely popular too, ‘Lalala’ by Y2K and Bbno$ is an example of this from slightly longer ago, and a recent example is ‘oops!’ by Yung Gravy. 

I’m very interested in seeing what impact TikTok has on the music industry as time goes on, as I feel like it will definitely increase before it hits its expiry date. If you think I’ve missed ‘anything important I’d love to hear what you think, as there are definitely some things I didn’t include.