How TikTok Defines the Charts
Unknown artists are able to gain millions of streams through video sharing app TikTok. But how does this fleeting viral fame influence the music industry?
Written by Kasey Clarke
Photo courtesy of XDigital News
One year ago TikTok was pretty much a joke. Now, it's exercising major influence over the music industry.
The video and music-sharing app was rebranded with the name TikTok after its predecessor, Musical.ly, was bought by Chinese tech company ByteDance in late 2017. When Musical.ly and Tik Tok officially became one app in August 2018, it seemed like Tik Tok was just Musical.ly under a different name. The content stayed the same, primarily lip syncing videos, interspersed with other videos that would end up in YouTube cringe compilations.
Then, in late 2018, TikTok user and cosplayer @nyannyancosplay posted a video using a snippet of the song “Mia Khalifa” by iLOVEFRiDAY. The video featured @nyannyancosplay dancing to the lyrics “Hit or miss / I guess they never miss, huh? / You got a boyfriend, I bet he doesn't kiss ya.” The clip went viral, gaining millions of views and inspiring hundreds of remakes. According to Insider, by the end of 2018, there were “nearly 274 million videos with #hitormiss on TikTok.” This spawned TikTok’s rise in popularity. Dances or jokes with catchy songs in the background would become trends and would eventually reach a point where the sound itself would become popular. Lurkers who downloaded the app as a joke began making their own content that was genuinely funny and enjoyable.
The first artist to noticeably benefit from TikTok was Lil Nas X. A short snippet of his debut single “Old Town Road” went viral on the platform. Most often, the videos would either feature users dancing to the song or somehow comically turning into a cowboy. However, Lil Nas X’s success is not entirely due to TikTok. Once Billy Ray Cyrus joined in on the song’s remix, a lot of attention was brought to the song, and Lil Nas X maintained his virality through subsequent remixes and an engaging Twitter presence. Although Lil Nas X had help other than TikTok, Blanco Brown’s rise to stardom further proves TikTok’s power in the music industry.
Blanco Brown’s debut single “The Git Up” also played off of the western trend that took off at the end of last year, but his song didn’t catapult to the top of the charts by any legendary country stars willing to make a remix. Instead, “The Git Up” enjoyed sustained popularity on TikTok through a dance challenge created by @ajani.huff. Brown fully embraced TikTok’s use of his music: first by posting a tutorial for the dance trend on his YouTube channel, then by featuring TikTok and some of its popular creators in the music video for the song. “The Git Up” peaked at #1 on the US Hot Country Songs chart in July of this year.
The app has proven its ability to make songs go viral again and again. Rising star Tierra Whack had two songs get big on the app: “Hungry Hippo” and “Pretty Ugly.” KYLE and Lil Yachty’s “Hey Julie” got a boost from TikTok popularity. Y2K and bbno$’s “Lalala” currently sits at 63 on Billboard’s Hot 100 while Saweetie’s “My Type” has risen to 28. All of these songs were featured in different forms of trends on the app.
But the real power of the app is its ability to create a following for artists who were previously unknown. Blanco Brown’s success with a debut single is not an isolated case. Almost a year after its release, Lonely God posted a TikTok encouraging users to use his debut single “Marlboro Nights” in their videos. Now, a clip of the song has been used in over 300,000 videos, many with hundreds of thousands of views. On September 10 he posted another video thanking TikTok users for getting his song to 37 on the Billboard Rock chart. Lonely God now promotes his other music through his TikTok channel. Similarly, indie artist Limbo had her song “Airplane Mode” become popular through the app. The song now has nearly 23 million Spotify streams, 20 million more than her second most popular song “Tired.” Like Lonely God, Limbo has posted on her TikTok asking followers to listen to her other music. However, these requests don’t seem to be particularly effective, and these artists become fleeting one hit wonders. This story repeats itself again and again, with Beach Bunny, Absofacto, Seuco the Child, Stunna Girl, and more. The Spotify Viral 50 chart tracking social streams is becoming a precursor to Billboard charts because of TikTok.
The problem this creates is that no one really understands what makes something go viral. Who knows why @nyannyancosplay’s original video blew up? Maybe it was because her dance was copyable, or because it merged popular trends on the app, or maybe because “Mia Khalifa” is a diss track to a porn star in response to a tweet that wasn’t even real. It could be any of these and other factors coming together in just the right way. But if TikTok is becoming a music discovery app in addition to a form of social media, independent artists might be driven to use the app for music promotion. But when a song gets popular on TikTok, users only hear a 10 or 20-second snippet of a song. If small artist’s paths to charts and radio play are paved by making a catchy enough hook, it could begin to transform songwriting by making small, removable song “clips” the most important features of a song.
Fortune reported that popular songs are getting shorter and shorter due to the changing economics of streaming. Because earnings are based on streams, artists are motivated to make many short songs rather than fewer long ones. So, as exposure is gained through bits and pieces of songs, artists are also benefited by releasing songs as bits and pieces of music. This means a 10 minute song that can be preserved on an album is more usable and profitable if it is cut into two-minute parts.
Another issue with TikTok is that it censors content: primarily LGBT, religious, and political content. The Guardian recently published an article detailing how ByteDance uses TikTok for “advancing Chinese foreign policy aims,” including reframing the Hong Kong protests. Because users congregate on the For You Page generated by the app’s algorithms rather than sharing content between followers, it is hard to tell when posts get flagged and taken down or suppressed.
According to Global Web Index, 41% of TikTok’s 1 billion monthly users are between 16 and 24 years old. Young people using the app are already able to see their influence on the music industry, but these censorship issues could create deeper problems if TikTok continues to rise in popularity. At the moment, TikTok’s tastemaking capacity can be tracked on the music charts, but it is unclear what breadth of impact it may have on youth culture as a whole.