By Siobhan Elizabeth Ball
Elm Staff Writer
TikTok, owned by Beijing-based tech company ByteDance, is used worldwide by over one billion people every month, according to CNBC.
Since its growth in popularity during the lockdown days of the pandemic, the platform continues to generate headline news. Recent stories relating to the tech giant focuses on the impact the app has on the music industry. Because of TikTok’s audio-visual format, songs go viral on the app almost daily, causing a boom in popular music.
One positive impact that TikTok has on music is that up-and-coming artists can gain recognition like never before. Given that TikTok videos are relatively short, the app exposes audiences to large amounts of new music in a short amount of time, enabling near-endless streaming.
According to Business Insider, many songs that are featured on the app end up charting Spotify’s Viral 50 or the Billboard 100, as 67% of TikTok users seek out songs on music streaming services.
Musician Tai Verdes caught his big break on the app. After getting rejected from multiple singing competitions, Verdes uploaded his song “Stuck in the Middle” to TikTok, which went viral on the platform, quickly pulling him into the whirlwind of the music business.
“I do not really know what is going to happen next, but I do know this — that you can go on TikTok right now and put a song on TikTok, and the algorithm will put you in front of an audience that you haven’t been before, who have never seen you, who will give you their attention,” Verdes said in an interview with NPR’s Planet Money podcast.
TikTok is not only changing the future of the music industry, but also impacting the way people engage with older music. For example, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” reached exponential streaming highs as it re-entered Billboard’s Hot 100 in 2022, 37 years after its original release in 1985.
According to The New Yorker, the resurgence in popularity for Bush’s song was thanks to its appearance in an episode of Netflix’s popular series “Stranger Things,” which lead to an unprecedented level of exposure on TikTok.
Music industry analyst Tatiana Cirisano commented on the beneficial impact of TikTok revealing that listeners are “not just listening to music in a sort of, like lean-back, passive way…they’re more likely to do more lean-forward activities, like creating playlists or listening to full albums on streaming or buying merchandise.”
However, not all those involved in the music business feel the same way about TikTok’s encroachment on the industry.
Cirisano’s comment about engagement might be true in terms of users’ tendency towards active participation, but it fails to acknowledge that this is usually in the form of duets or dance videos that manipulate the original song. Creators use songs in short clips, usually focusing on the beat drop or the chorus, mostly the catchiest parts of a song.
Artists like SZA and Steve Lacy have used this trend to their advantage by releasing sped-up versions of their songs on streaming platforms, including Spotify, according to Forbes.
Music executives like Zach Friedman, co-founder of the upstart record label Homemade Projects, said thatTikTok’s virality is a powerful commodity, but its unpredictability requires pragmatic consideration about long-term business strategies making companies hesitant to invest all of their resources in the app.
Ultimately, TikTok’s impact on the music industry is only the tip of the iceberg. It is likely that the constant growth in popularity of the app will continue to impact music in the future by creating opportunities to expose smaller artists to larger audiences, leading to a more diverse industry.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo caption: Re-branded as TikTok in 2019, the popular video sharing platform is home to billions of users that share content about anything from cooking tips to fanfiction. Most videos are accompanied by a trending song, which boosts the video in the app’s algorithm.