TikTok Killed the Radio Star

by Kenny Cox

I vividly remember my first introduction to the world of TikTok. It was early January, and my friend texted me a video of someone in a grotesque, utterly nightmare-inducing bunny mask lip-syncing to Flo Rida’s hit single “Whistle”. As the bunny’s terrifying mangled teeth gnashed along to 2011’s patron saint of hitting the club, one thing became certain to me instantly — TikTok would be a platform unlike any other. And as TikTok rises, it seems poised to challenge the music industry as we know it today.

For the few that have somehow missed the app’s domination of the internet, TikTok is a social network that allows users to create looping videos accompanied by music clips and other sounds uploaded by users. As nearly a year has passed since my first introduction to the app, TikTok has devoured the world with its own set of jagged bunny mask teeth. At the time of writing, TikTok has surpassed one billion individual users on the site. As a comparison, Facebook currently has 1.2 billion users. Scrolling through the internet, it feels almost impossible to miss people sharing elaborate dance routines to a Mariah Carey track, or YouTube videos compiling countless TikToks together. But with all these disparate elements of TikTok, one thing seems to be binding them together — music. The app’s design centered around music clips have allowed songs to be shared and spread at a rate unlike any other app. 

TikTok’s effect on the music world can be seen as recently as just a few months ago, as songs that became viral hits on the app crossed over into real-world, chart-topping success. Perhaps the most notable example of this phenomenon is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”. The song’s success began with TikTok users making videos of themselves doing things like square dancing with farm animals and transforming into cowboys in early 2019, but exploded on the charts over the summer, shattering Billboard records by remaining at #1 for 19 consecutive weeks. The song to end its reign? Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” another song that inspired countless videos of teenagers transforming into goth makeup and comedic bits taking advantage of the song’s understated beat drop. And mere weeks after that? Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” a song that was released in 2017 but did not break into the mainstream until TikTok users breathed new life into the song two years after its release. 2019’s biggest hits have been directly tied to TikTok, and as the site continues to grow in popularity, there seems to be no stopping this trend.

What’s significant about this trend is not just that TikTok hits are turning into global smashes, but how this is happening. Typically, record labels would push a song to radio and streaming service playlists, book late-night talk shows and award show performances, roll-out social media campaigns, and countless other promotional campaigns. But through TikTok, this tried and true formula is shattered. Since the app’s main focus is on music, it allows users to spread and share music faster than radio or promo teams ever could. An independent artist with no label nor representation could find enormous success overnight, while other, more established musicians with label backing could struggle to capture much of an audience on the app.

Artists have begun to acknowledge the role TikTok has in boosting their careers. In his interview with Genius, rapper and comedian Zack Fox discussed with Kenny Beats how TikTok played a role in turning his track “Jesus is the One (I Got Depression)” into a hit. “This song is bigger than all the serious shit I’m working on,” mentioned Kenny Beats, “and it’s TikTok’s fault!” Rapper Sueco echoes this in an interview with The Ringer, where he said: “When I saw TikTok, I instantly went: This is how it’s done”. Even Lil Nas X, TikTok’s biggest success story, credits the app for his rise to stardom: “When TikTok hit it, almost every day since that, the streams have been up. I credit them a lot.”

While it seems that TikTok has become an app for artists to gain fans and get their music heard, what does this mean for music’s future? It could mean that songs will be designed not for radio plays or mass appeal, but to rack up views on TikTok. Rapper Supa Dupa Humble describes how he strategized making music to be used for TikTok memes:” Songs and memes are like rockets and space shuttles… Especially after understanding how memes work, we understand TikTok could be really vital when it comes to the success of a song.” By cracking the code for meme-making, TikTok becomes the new format for which artists mold their work for. Most TikTok hits have much in common — bass-heavy, dramatic beat drops, catchy melodies that lend well to repeat plays, and short track lengths to fit well into the app’s 60-second video format. In fact, there are even step-by-step guides for turning music into a TikTok sensation. To make a song work now, it has to work in a TikTok. And artists seem to more and more be molding their tracks to fit the TikTok formula for the next viral sensation.

But this chase to cash in on the success of TikTok might lead to no finish line. While certainly, TikTok has become the biggest app of 2019, can TikTok’s future be guaranteed? Consider the fate of TikTok’s predecessor, Vine. While the app seemed like it was the next big thing in 2013, within three years, the app was shut down, with Vine’s creators citing massive drops in usership as a reason for its demise. TikTok is all the rage today, but much like Vine, it could be gone in a few short years. Designing music for TikTok feels less like music’s future, and more like a route for flash-in-the-pan success. 

But who am I to say? Perhaps TikTok lives on, and brings with it the rise of the 60-second song as a standard format for a hit, or turns teenage lip syncers into the music world’s premier tastemakers. TikTok’s future is unclear, but how it is shaping the music landscape of 2019 is a fact that simply cannot be ignored.