How TikTok Transforms the Way Music is Made.
Like everything that ends up taking the world by storm, TikTok started out as essentially a laughingstock with subjectively low quality content in high quantities. The app’s concept mimics the style of the late Vine. Users loop skits, tutorials, dances or stories over a licensed song. Yet within the past year, the sound-driven social media app had far overshadowed its predecessors Vine and Music.ly-- or any social media platform for that matter. This app found its strength (especially in its North American user base) through music. As of mid-August of 2020, the future of TikTok's stay in the American market is questionable at best, due to threats from President Trump to remove the Chinese owned app from the market. Whatever TikTok’s fate, the platform's influence on music and the music industry has shaped the sound of the past two years.
Musicians expanding their audience have to balance the artistry of their music with marketing their work on the right platform at the right time. Steering too far in either direction all but ensures that a song flies too close to the moon and goes almost unheard. Marketing anything on social media is either a humiliating period of constant trial of error or an unprepared dive into vitality from a push of good luck. TikTok has built entire careers from the ground up, but it has also caused the careers of many artists to remain stagnant. Due to the abstract use a TikTok user can find with even any song, as well as the sheer amount of times that song will be used and then be exponentially seen by other users-- the app has become hand down the easiest and most effective make a song reach the top of charts or go viral.
The most obvious evidence to this claim is the success of Lil Nas X's country hit "Old Town Road", which has broken basically every chart and streaming record a la 1980's Michael Jackson. To his own credit, Lil Nas X used memes and did what he could to promote the song, which still ultimately led to the song finding no significant airplay. It wasn't until a Billy Ray Cyrus remix and several TikTok dances and challenges featured the song that it became clear this song would break lots of records in a short amount of time. It was also obvious just how powerful of a tool TikTok was for any musician to use and a fairly simple one at that.
As much as musicians want to hold onto their artistic creativity, music has always adapted to the ways in which it is distributed and heard. It's a necessary sacrifice in order to exploit trends. Although TikTok is not a music streaming service, it has still become essential in finding new listeners and bringing them to said streaming services. A single TikTok can be anywhere from a handful of seconds to a minute, meaning that only a small section of the song would actually be used. Unfortunately it's difficult to predict what part of a song will be used when making it, but it is still possible to imply what should be used. Artists that are exceptionally good at this direction are Megan Thee Stallion and Travis Scott. Both of these artists have begun adapting their songs to the dance challenges of TikTok by implementing catchy beat rhythms and provocative lyrics in specific sections of the song, which encourages body movement (i.e. Rosalita's "TKN" ft. Travis Scott, and Megan Thee Stallion's "Savage"). Songs such as "Tootsie Slide" by Drake may also describe a specific dance to do within the song, reminiscent of the mid-2000s era of hip-hop.
Though not every TikTok featuring a song is a viral dance that relies on any lyrics, many users will use the an instrumental-focused section of song as a background for a voiceover story, tutorial, comedic irony, or a skit. A song being made specifically to promote on TikTok no longer needs to be a six minute ballad if only 30 seconds will potentially be used. While it still could run that six minute runtime, most major artists are choosing not to, and instead we're seeing them put out songs that are significantly shorter than what they were putting out even a year beforehand.