TikTok didn’t only become one of the largest social media platforms in a little over a year but has also been the biggest disruption to the music industry since Spotify.
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Video Notes:
TikTok is an audio-based platform - while you can make 15-60 second videos without music, most videos include it. And TikTok is built on users easily being able to copy trends and make their own videos.
This means that when you hear a song on TikTok, you don’t just listen to it, you can actually use that song in your own content as a tool to be creative with.
Songs on TikTok are used in trends and memes as a soundtrack to the content. The hook is now not only the catchy part of a song, but it represents content, virality and experiences.
When Olivia Rodrigo made the top-charting song “Driver’s Licence”, she made it with that 15-second increment in mind and the song became an instant trending sound on TikTok.
After its release in January 2021, it became the fastest song to surpass 100 million streams in Spotify history. It took her 8 days. By April it had become 2021’s first song to surpass 1 billion global streams.
Rodrigo also became the first artist ever to debut her first two singles in the top 10, became 2021’s first artist to spend 50 days at #1 on US Spotify Charts, and when her full album, SOUR, released, the entire album topped the US Top 50 on Spotify.
That is the power of TikTok.
Rodrigo’s name has been used in hashtags that have received over 3 billion views and over 5 million TikToks have been made to the audio from her first 3 singles. Music discovery is now happening by seeing a TikTok, and hearing a trending sound over and over again until it’s stuck in your head. We are now seeing artists deliberately think about how their music will be used for these 15-second clips.
But not only new artists are finding success with TikTok - the platforms discoverability works equally well for older artists. After a TikTok went viral with Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” as the soundtrack, Dreams topped the Billboard 100 list for the first time in 43 years and became the best selling song on iTunes.
A year ago, no one knew who Bella Poarch was. Today, she has over 70 million followers and is the third most followed person on TikTok, the result of capitalising on one viral video - the most liked video of all time on TikTok - which thrust her into the limelight.
Now artists like Justin Bieber, Benny Blanco, and Tyga are collaborating with her to promo their music. Why? TikTok turns every creator into a radio station by allowing them to choose what music they want to play in their videos and making their viewers discover new music.
If a popular creator posts a song on TikTok it can immediately reach millions of people. These people can then use the song in their own videos which will reach even more people making for an extremely strong ripple effect - and one good hook can spawn an entire career.
The artist Kid Laroi made a 15-second hook that became so popular that he made an entire song out of it. This one hook propelled his entire career, making subsequent songs like “Without You” reach 500 million streams on Spotify since its release in 2020. He’s now worked with musicians like Miley Cyrus and appeared on Justin Bieber’s latest album.
Bella Poarch has now leveraged her massive following to launch her own music career. By promoting snippets of the song “Build a B*itch” for weeks before release, over 800 thousand videos had already used the soundtrack when it released on May 14th 2021. By June 6th, the song had been viewed over 155 million times on YouTube and streamed over 62 million times on Spotify.
Music is being discovered on TikTok and then you go to Spotify to stream it. Look at basically any Spotify top chart and you’ll see a large number of songs that used TikTok to trend into the mainstream. When TikTok has so much control over music discovery - does that mean that they can launch their own record label or even a streaming service for music?
TikTok is now expanding its max video length from 60 seconds to 3 minutes which is just about the average length of a Billboard 100 song. It seems like they are making moves to become the dominating platform for music.
By having such a massive edge on the discovery of music, the ability to increase monetisation for artists, and the opportunity to upload entire songs to the platform - I think TikTok poses a massive risk to Spotify’s music streaming dominance.
