Seven months ago, amid an intense promotion rollout for her latest album Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa ventured into the world of TikTok. “I wasn’t gonna start making TikToks and this may be the only one EVER...” she teased while telling her fans to go and follow her account.
A global pandemic, postponted tour, and a possible shutdown of TikTok by the federal government later, Dua’s latest music video for her song “Levitating” was just released in close collaboration with TikTok. So how exactly did TikTok go from an almost-taboo app to one of the best promotional tools in the music industry?
TikTok joins a long list of social media apps that have been utilized as promotional material. These apps are designed to hold people’s attention, so it’s no surprise that they slowly evolve from social spaces to advertising opportunities. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, however, TikTok (unintentionally or not) contains the perfect ecosystem for music promotion unlike anything else before it.
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Most obviously, the app is focused on audio. Remove the audio from a TikTok, and its essence is gone. More importantly for the music industry, however, the audio used in each TikTok is easily displayed. Unlike Twitter or Instagram videos, users no longer have to look up what catchy song is being used. You simply look down and the audio is there for you to search up in full or use yourself. Also important for users, copyright is rarely an issue since TikTok appears to have deals with most publishing companies to allow music to be played without a problem.
It is this simple interface and encouragement of use that makes TikTok such a perfect community for sharing new music. This has given rise to a slew of new artists blowing up from their songs being circulated on TikTok. LOVEFRiDAY ‘s “Mia Khalifa” currently has over a hundred million views on YouTube from its 2018 success on TikTok. An even more well-known success story from the early years of the app is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”. While he utilized social media in its entirety to promote his song, it was his coordinated use of TikTok as a promotional tool that ultimately resulted in the unprecedented success of the song.
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Similar to Dua Lipa, other label-backed artists have found themselves trying to start up a TikTok dance craze with their new songs. Chole x Halle started the #DoItChallenge to increase promotion for their single “Do It”. It is hard to tell if the success of the song can be attributed to TikTok alone, but their push for the platform to adopt their song is nonetheless emblematic of the shift in promotional strategies for record labels. Even Sufjan Stevens, who is not usually synonymous with trendy dances, featured TikTok dancer Jalaiah Harmon in his video for Video Game.
What happens when already established artists accidentally blow up on the app? Melanie Martinez, for example, recently found that a deluxe bonus track from her 2015 debut album had “taken on a life of it’s own” instead of any material from her 2019 project K-12. While it may be said that any promotion is good promotion, TikTok is certainly a gamble on whether the material artists want to blow will.
Alternatively for new artists, the short-clip structure of TikTok has made it hard for their music to be taken seriously as anything more than a soundbite. The comments under Curtis Waters’ track “Stunnin’” reveal that listeners were taken back by how explicit the entire song is. Whereas catchy clips make it easy for songs to go viral within the app, the future success of an artist requires that their entire catalog shows as much promise. Artists like Doja Cat have fared better, with TikTok hits like “Say So” boosting her career to another a new level.
As a result, the app’s musical ecosystem is being divided between different sectors with varying degrees of legitimacy and influence. There are the TikTok stars that are clearly, at least to some of their audience, being paid to advertise a song; the indie artists trying to get discovered through the app; and the organically-grown hashtags that have made certain songs blow up.
It is increasingly becoming clear that although exposure on TikTok can be bought, it does not provide the same level of fame that comes from accidental-trends. Returning to Dua Lipa, she noted that her first TikTok was a piece of content “that my label are gonna be so bloody happy I made.” This came after her single “Don’t Start Now” had begun to climb the charts in large part to TikTok. Several months later, her latest single “Levitating” will most likley do pretty well, both for its own merit as well as the TikTok collaboration, but said collaboration will probably not catapult the song into the level of fame her label would hope. Indeed, singers, both new and old, hoping to make it on TikTok will have to keep shooting for the stars.
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