There is a direct correlation between a song going viral on the video-sharing app and its popularity on music streaming platforms.
“Tik-a-Tok-a-Who?”, was Adele’s response to her management’s suggestion to promote her music to younger audiences on Tiktok, the video-sharing platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance. “If everyone is making music for the TikTok, who’s making music for my generation?”, she asked. Adele might resist, but the platform has nonetheless been popularising and promoting her song Easy on me, with creators using it in almost one million videos in the first month after its release, making it viral on the app alone. That is because the creator culture on TikTok is changing the way hits are made, how music is promoted and how the world discovers music, even for those artists who choose not to engage with it. In early 2019, an unknown 19-year-old college drop-out from Atlanta, Georgia, made headlines around the world. Living at his sister’s house and feeling bit lonely, in December 2018 he had bought a simple beat for $30, recorded a song, half country and half rap, and posted it on Soundcloud and social media. The artist made news because Billboard magazine had removed the song from its country charts, after it took off in popularity, entering both the country and general Hot 100 charts. The artist’s name was Lil Nas X and the song Old Town Road, which has since become the most successful song of all time, the first-ever song to reach 15 times platinum. Much of this success can be credited to the song becoming an early TikTok “meme”, picked up by millions of users. Old Town Road has become the origin story for a remarkable series of viral musical successes on TikTok. In each case, artists have shot to popularity, because their songs were used by millions of TikTok users in their videos. Virality on TikTok is powerful yet unpredictable. Some of 2021’s biggest global hits gained little traction when they were initially released to small audiences. Africa’s most successful pop song ever, CKay’s Love, Nwantiti, was released in 2019, but shot to fame only in 2021 and has now been used in more than 7 million TikTok videos. Similarly, Australia’s Masked Wolf found himself in the spotlight in 2021, making Barrack Obama’s summer playlist and having been nominated for five ARIA awards. While his song Astronaut in the Ocean became a global hit more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, it was released two years prior by a small Australian label.
