“TikTok is basically like a machine gun shooting out viral songs”

June 6, 2022 6:58 PM

Vox and The Pudding tracked what happens after TikTok songs go viral (SLYT). To understand how going viral on TikTok affects an unknown artist's career, Vox and The Pudding identified a cohort of 125 artists and analyzed how their careers developed after their big break. “It turns out, this is way more than a story about algorithms or going viral. It’s a story about the longstanding tug of war between artists, platform and music industry giants. You might be surprised who’s winning.”

Some notes for people who’d rather read than watch:

• When a song goes viral on TikTok, people want to stream it on Spotify, and it also gets added to playlists. The artist’s other songs often get added to playlists as well. About a quarter of the songs that land on “The Spotify 200” started off as TikTok viral hits by new artists.
• Because a lot of viral artists are independent, labels have started to monitor TikTok, and compete with each other to snap up viral hits and their creators. The advances of 50k to 500k look impressive (“The more virality you have the more zeroes you’ll see"), but traditionally, the contracts are tremendously lopsided: the impressive-looking advances are essentially loans that must be repaid before any other royalties are paid out, the labels get the rights to the viral song forever, and they keep 85% of the royalties.
• However, TikTok popularity and a viral hit now give unsigned artists unprecedented leverage. Many of them have negotiated contracts which make them equal partners, allowing them to benefit from a publisher’s clout and marketing efforts while keeping the rights to their music and more of their royalties. Of all the record deals in 2020 and 2021, a third of them were inked after a viral hit, and of the cohort of 125 artists the researchers tracked, nearly half of them landed a major record label deal.
• Many artists in the cohort were likely offered deals — and decided not to take them, preferring to manage their own careers. Singer-songwriter Tom Rosenthal says “I’m [the record labels’] worst nightmare, really, because I’m older than 19.” His data suggested that his viral song's popularity was growing steadily on its own, and he’d only be willing to work with the labels if they paid him significantly more than he was on track to make by himself. Later, he created a record label based around investing in artists, rather than taking advantage of them.
• Although there’s never been a better time to be a DIY artist, it’s a grueling career. “If you want to make it today, you either have to have money to hire people or you just need to also become a video editor, also become a graphic designer, you definitely have to wear a lot of hats for sure,” says producer / artist L. Dre. To increase the chances of going viral, and to please the algorithms that govern their careers, many artists are bumping up the amount of posts they create from 3-5/week to 3-5/day. That's what it takes to compete with other artists willing to put in that amount of work, and with other kinds of content that pulls viewers away. Labels can help with content creation — but the people who get signed to labels now already have to be good at it to go viral in the first place. “Is music just content now? Are musicians just content creators?” Vox and The Pudding ask. L. Dre adds, “I’m at the whims of these almighty algorithms at all times. Like they pretty much decide, you know, whether I’m going to eat dinner or whatever.”
• Many of the artists in the cohort started to tour and play at festivals after going viral, meaning they’ve been able to channel TikTok success into committed fans and longer-term financial gains.

Related: Musicians say their labels are pressuring them to go viral on TikTok

posted by shirobara (28 comments total)

Mother Mother had a 10 year old song go viral last year. They immediately jumped into a studio and cut a new album that's doing well, having gone back to the same independent producer who produced the viral hit. There's definitely opportunity there to capitalize on.
posted by fatbird at 7:07 PM on June 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

If it gets us a new season of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, I'm in.
posted by phunniemee at 7:46 PM on June 6, 2022 [12 favorites]

Terrific video. TikTok has so many brilliant/fiendish innovations that make it the juggernaut it is today, but most of them come down to removing friction. Launch the app for the first time and videos just... start playing. Want to use the song from that video? One button. Want to duet with that video? One button. It's a viral machine because the bar for participation in that virality is lower than in any other platform.

Really feel like this post's title should have been "My money don't jiggle jiggle, it folds" tho
posted by gwint at 7:47 PM on June 6, 2022 [19 favorites]

dammit phunniemee
posted by gwint at 7:47 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mother Mother had a 10 year old song go viral last year.

The Spotify algorithm delivered Hayloft to me five years ago, and I definitely remember thinking that this was exactly the kind of quirky thing that only an algorithm would surface.

Not surprised to find out it went viral, because there's a thousand songs about finding your boyfriend cute but only one about your hick dad shooting your boyfriend to death after he catches you canoodling in the hayloft
posted by Merus at 8:18 PM on June 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

@Merus, have you heard the re-release on their new album?
posted by fatbird at 8:26 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

> Really feel like this post's title should have been "My money don't jiggle jiggle, it folds" tho

I actually deleted TikTok after about a month because I am way too prone to watching hours and hours of people dancing, cookies being decorated and so on. (My particular interest is how "the economics shape the entertainment," to quote Hit Makers.) I had to google this, and now am luxuriating in this fabulous viral content.
posted by shirobara at 9:32 PM on June 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

many artists are bumping up the amount of posts they create from 3-5/week to 3-5/day. That's what it takes to compete with other artists willing to put in that amount of work, and with other kinds of content that pulls viewers away.

I feel like this arms race with the algorithm is probably the single point of failure in the whole infernal machine. Good for the artists who are keeping control of their legalities, because I'm sure the labels and streaming services are half sitting back and waiting it all out.
posted by rhizome at 9:55 PM on June 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

And now that I've watched the video, my prediction is that the algorithm itself is co-opted by the labels, or by something larger that the labels are a part of, since AB InBev and Yum! Brands and Adidas probably also aren't excited to become the beggar in their endorsement relationships.

I feel like I should have a better idea of where the algorithm power struggle lies, but we've seen algorithms corrupted on Facebook even still today. Capitalism isn't going to give up either.
posted by rhizome at 10:39 PM on June 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wonder if in the future (or maybe in the now, I dunno) this algorithmic rule will give rise to AI "virality agents". Not bots in the traditional sense, but more like systems that can analyze your content and compare it against available data on the algorithms du jour, trends, etc to advise on how to edit and tweak your posts, music, graphics, videos, etc. to increase your odds of going viral. Maybe even automatically do so if you let it, kind of like spell check but for viral content.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:19 PM on June 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

What was interesting to me about this is the urgency that the labels feel. What they care about is getting a bigger slice of the overall Spotify pie every month, which means that if a song is viral this month they want to sign the artist NOW so the self-produced hit shows up as a “EvilCorp Records artist” on this month’s allocation numbers. The charts in the video showed a surprisingly (to me) long tail for how long a viral hit continues to get streams but still it’s not anything like the traditional pace of finding and signing artists.
posted by bgribble at 3:58 AM on June 7, 2022

I wonder if in the future (or maybe in the now, I dunno) this algorithmic rule will give rise to AI "virality agents". Not bots in the traditional sense, but more like systems that can analyze your content and compare it against available data on the algorithms du jour, trends, etc to advise on how to edit and tweak your posts, music, graphics, videos, etc. to increase your odds of going viral. Maybe even automatically do so if you let it, kind of like spell check but for viral content.

For folks who run websites, this discipline is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google offers Google Search Central (fka Google Webmaster Console) to inspect your site and give you feedback on how to ensure that it ranks more highly on its search results.

The challenge is that English words and grammar change over time but are relatively stable in the short term, and Google's PageRank is always being tweaked or changed by dozens of engineers who are flipping and adding a hundred different sliders; plus you're in competition with other folks who want their pages to rank higher. There's a mini industry of SEO experts who are continuously retained to study the current state of the algorithm and advise their clients about how to stay on Page 1 of search results. There's a similar phenomenon going on with Amazon where startups study Amazon's recommendation and search algorithms and then buy up independent Amazon Marketplace sellers to scale up their ability to sell better on Amazon. And, for virality, add in the continuous fickleness of human attention.

So, my adjustment to your proposition is that a service like this that is part SEO, part fashion consultant will emerge and probably already exists, but because it involves anticipating human attention and trends, it's likely to be offered by a human, and not a bot.
posted by bl1nk at 4:33 AM on June 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

It turns out, this is way more than a story about algorithms or going viral. It’s a story about the longstanding tug of war between artists, platform and music industry giants. You might be surprised who’s winning.

Once a certain critical mass of virality is reached the winner here is always the platform. It's always TikTok or Youtube or Amazon Kindle. Yes, there's a bunch of wild individual success stories for artists, but that's mostly to keep others hooked on hope and amp up their content creation while the platform continues to revel in audience engagement and attention revenue.
posted by bl1nk at 4:41 AM on June 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

This is SO depressing. There is not, and hardly ever has been, a neutral and easy path to getting your music recognized, but it's getting ever more ridiculous and most artists cannot even begin to play this awful game.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:01 AM on June 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

the impressive-looking advances are essentially loans that must be repaid before any other royalties are paid out

That's.. what an advance is?

The question is whether (as with book advances) the large majority of artists make more from the advance than they ever would have from their song, virality being short-lived.
posted by escabeche at 5:25 AM on June 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

kind of like spell check but for viral content.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:19 PM on June 6

as dramatized by Auralnauts
posted by eustatic at 5:36 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

There is not, and hardly ever has been, a neutral and easy path to getting your music recognized,

I used to like it when a friend (OK, a person I fancied) said "Hey, we should go see Clowns Smiling Backwards at the GB", and then we did that, and the support was Plastic Tornadoes, who I liked more than CSB, and so I saw Plastic Tornadoes at the Empress (when they added a mandolin player and changed their name to Hurdy Gurdy), and there was this weird support guy called Rob Clarkson, and when I saw him next he was supporting this band called Frente! (who were awesome), and now I hope I've got as far as mentioning someone that someone here might recognise (if only for their terrible breakout song, and not "Labour of Love" which was the real gem).

So, um, yeah.
posted by pompomtom at 6:25 AM on June 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

I mean: Rob Clarkson is also awesome...
posted by pompomtom at 6:27 AM on June 7, 2022

Ooo, thank you for reminding me of Labor of Love, that was a good-ass song
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:35 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is also definitely even affecting how established artists are expected to interact with TikTok and some labels are holding back releases and expecting their artists to drum up a viral song.
posted by urbanlenny at 7:41 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ah, all this stuff is so fascinating. Saved to watch later!
posted by Going To Maine at 8:38 AM on June 7, 2022

All I see is human creativity being squashed into an insidious conformity based on some fleeting statistics where the actual artist is insignificant compared to teenage taste and the real rewards go to somebody else.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:49 AM on June 7, 2022

Reading this, I was reminded of an article I read on Cracked back in the day. And of course don’t forget Steve Albini’s classic from MRnR.

The TikTok angle is new but everything else is pretty much the same.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 10:34 AM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

All I see is human creativity being squashed into an insidious conformity based on some fleeting statistics where the actual artist is insignificant compared to teenage taste and the real rewards go to somebody else.

If it's any consolation this has been a key part of the music business ever since teen culture and recorded music collided
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:38 AM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

If this puts more money in John Darnielle's pockets so he can keep creating, I'm all for it.
posted by grateful at 12:33 PM on June 7, 2022

All I see is human creativity being squashed into an insidious conformity based on some fleeting statistics where the actual artist is insignificant compared to teenage taste and the real rewards go to somebody else.

If it’s any consolation this has been a key part of the music business ever since teen culture and recorded music collided

Historically, art has always been subordinate to capital. Probably always will be until the revolution, and even then I would assume it would be a bit subordinate to the whims of the majority since artists often like to make things that people like. (Also, quite a few musicians these days are teenagers, so…)
posted by Going To Maine at 1:32 PM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

A likely adjacent video, from Apple Music: “How PinkPantheress Found The Perfect Formula”
posted by Going To Maine at 9:30 AM on June 8, 2022

(Also possibly from Resident Advisor)
posted by Going To Maine at 9:31 AM on June 8, 2022