TikTok is changing music
There’s a tug of war between artists, platforms, and record labels, and we’re not sure who’s winning. (Photo: Pixabay)
A deep dive into data from TikTok, Spotify, and Chartmetric by the Vox team in collaboration with The Pudding shows how TikTok and artists emerging from the platform are changing the music industry.
Through their investigation, they found that between January and December 2020, over 1,500 songs went viral on TikTok. Out of those viral songs, 125 artists got their “big break”, meaning they got a boost in TikTok and Instagram followers, plus monthly listeners on Spotify.
Data shows 67% of TikTok users are more likely to seek out songs on music streaming services after hearing them on the app. Spotify in particular has a direct relationship with a budding artist’s success on TikTok. A lot of artists report that they get a huge spike in streams after their track goes viral on TikTok, with some even going from 0 to more than 3 million monthly listeners in less than two months. About a quarter of the 332 emerging artists who appeared in the Spotify Top 200 in 2020 came from TikTok.
Not only that, a significant portion of these artists that get their big breaks from TikTok end up signing major record deals. In 2020, 367 record deals were made, and 129 or about a third of these deals happened because the artist had a song that went viral on Tiktok.
And record labels are getting more aggressive in snatching up rising TikTok artists who are guaranteed to get them that big check from Spotify. For the most part, independent artists are incredibly wary of this since major record labels have a bad rep of being predatory and taking advantage of artists, but TikTok might be changing that, too.
The good and the bad
There is an ongoing debate now about whether or not artists even need to sign with major record labels. Artists usually sign with record labels for support, resources, and access to opportunities that they otherwise would not have, but artists who go viral on TikTok hardly start from scratch. They already have success and a community of people who are interested in them and the content that they make. They have leverage.
We’re also seeing that major labels are getting less and less of Spotify’s market share, from 87% in 2019, 85% in 2018, 82% in 2019, to 78% in 2020. Slowly and steadily, independent artists are taking up more of the market share.
So what do labels do? They offer better deals. Since the TikTok takeover, it’s become more and more common for labels to offer a 50/50 licensing deal, when before it was far more common for record labels to take 85% of the royalties for each track.
The music industry is changing in favor of emerging artists because of TikTok—but at a cost.
Established artists like Halsey, Charli XCX, FKA Twigs, and Florence + The Machine have been expressing frustration recently because their labels are now demanding TikTok viral moments. In Halsey’s case, her label was putting her release on hold until that viral wow moment happened. Coincidentally, Gen Z audiences are growing increasingly skeptical of obvious formulated TikTok hits and the lack of originality that tends to go viral on TikTok.
As we move forward in a world where some artists go from zero to viral in less than a day, and some artists are being forced to compromise their content for the sake of that very same virality, there are likely to be more shifts in the industry. Let’s hope that more of these changes will be for better rather than for worse.
