ARTS
TikTok: The Music Industry’s Latest Disease
WILLIAM HAWKINS & ZACHARY HOLLEY
and as a result, record labels are constantly analysing this data with artists encouraging them to throw all of their musical talent into the first 30 seconds of a song. ‘Tootsie Slide’ by Drake utilised its understanding of this data. Its chorus begins 19 seconds into the track, lasting 13 seconds and detailing the moves to a line dance, clearly designed with no other intention than to be a TikTok dance trend. It worked. TikTok users have put their spin on the song in over 5 million videos. Similarly, Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’, was a hit TikTok song with 2.238 billion streams on Spotify with his song only 1.53 seconds long with a chorus and multiple hooks within the first 30 seconds. The short video platform only further incentivises more effort put into these first 30 seconds. A more niche trend is songs designed to be lip-synced by creators on the app. ‘Just Did A Bad Thing’ by Bill Wurtz exemplifies this with a vague and easily relatable song. It is straight to the point with the 15 second famous jingle at the start of the song holding enough attention to receive a stream from a music hosting platform.
TikTok is a short-form, video-sharing app that allows users to create videos on any topic, and its dramatic rise to popularity has had undeterminable effects on modern media to come. TikTok’s chokehold on the music industry has become ever present, as artists and record labels seek to capture the attention from an impressionable audience with dwindling attention spans; TikTok is drastically altering the music industry and the way we consume music. Tik Tok and the modern streaming music industry is a match made in heaven. Songs are beginning to be designed solely for virality in clips worth 15 seconds to be danced to or lip-synced. This has already had observable effects: There is a 24% chance on Spotify the average listener will skip a song within the first 5 seconds, a 29% chance they will skip the song within the first 10 seconds and 35% chance it will be skipped within the first 30 seconds. This is key because artists do not get paid unless somebody streams a song for over 30 seconds,
29
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker