How Tik Tok has changed the music industry

For some years now, Tik Tok has been known as a place to upload dancing videos, singing videos or overall funny content. What many don't realize is how it also has become a marketing tool for artists, labels and everyone involved in the music industry.

Back in 2019, a media company called Flighthouse hired 20 influencers to help push the song Sunday Best by Surfaces out to their millions of followers. A song that now has a total of 750.000.000 streams on Spotify alone, and still reminds me of the beginning of lockdown, whenever I listen to it. The Tik Tok and influencer strategy has later become one of the ground pillars in music marketing. Fact is, Sunday Best is only one out of hundreds of songs this has happened to. Once a song “gets assigned” a trend, and influencers have picked up on it, you can easily spot that same song on the Billboard “Hot 100” list within the next 24 hours. Although the artist might be somewhat unknown, or the song has been out for decades, Tik Tok has the power to push any song into the spotlight.

This happened to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, a song that was released back in the 70’s but recently went viral on Tik Tok. According to a report by Music Business Worldwide, not long after going viral the song reached number 1 on iTunes, number 6 on Spotify’s US chart and re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time since its original release in 1977. Warner Music Group’s Global Catalog Division also states that in October of 2020, plays of Fleetwood Mac’s catalog were up by 68% and the track had been listened to more than 230 million times over the first two weeks after going viral.

Artists have been handed a new promotion tool not just in the form of Tik Tok, but social media in general. We now have Instagram reels, Snapchat Spotlight, Youtube Shorts, and it feels like every single day a new app or feature made to help you go viral, gets launched. We see many up-and-coming artists with no management team, PR-company or label behind them take to Tik Tok to try and get a head start on their career. This was the case with American up-and-coming singer Emmy Meli, who went viral in the Fall of 2021 with a video of her singing one of her own songs called I am Woman. She posted the Tik Tok to her then 5.000 followers, blew up over night, and woke up to hundreds of thousands of views. In as little as six months, the original video now has 33,4 million views on Tik Tok, nearly 80 million streams on Spotify alone, Emmy Meli herself has a following of half a million people on Tik Tok, and is now signed to Sony Music’s Disruptor Records.

Back when the world shut down, people grasped towards four things; knitting, banana-bread, sourdough and Tik Tok. A lot of hours were spent at home endlessly scrolling through Tik Tok, connecting with friends online, as no one was able to meet up in real life. Quickly, this became a worldwide sensation, and in no time the influencers that already had somewhat of a platform grew even bigger. This created “Influencer music”.

Many influencers started releasing music and while some of it was good, a lot of it was … questionable. Influencers being handed a music career was something that many people, especially music artists, found unfair and took to the internet to spread awareness about. When an interview of Addison Rae guesting Elle’s iconic “Song Association” game and answering the question, where she sees herself in 5 years with “hopefully with 2-3 albums out” started going around, it didn’t help the situation whatsoever. People thought this showed no understanding of the music industry from her part, and no understanding of the hard work that gets put into building a career, writing songs and releasing albums. Some of the biggest pop stars in the world don't have 2-3 albums out yet.

It is exciting to see what the future brings for the music industry, but I’m sure it will be something we can’t even imagine.