ARTS
“Artists now just share their hard drives... it’s lost its meaning.” JME
exposure they need in their careers, shooting to stardom when a song of theirs goes viral. Olivia Rodrigo’s song ‘Driver’s Licence’ began as a 25 second clip and has now been streamed over 2.5 billion times. Combined with the rest of her discography, she has accumulated 7.6 billion streams. “If a song is going viral on TikTok labels are scrambling to sign that song or that artist,” stated music industry analyst Tatiana Crisano. “They’re obsessed with expanding their market share and making sure they don’t lose any market share to independent artists.” This overwhelming market share is controlled by three enormous recording labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. Together, these retain over 70% of the market share of the music recording industry and a 58% market share of the music publishing industry (intellectual property of the music, the copyright of the lyrics, melody and of the general composition).
One billion monthly users worldwide and a market value of £50 billion, TikTok is the new gold rush for music labels. With 24% of teens admitting they are on the app ‘constantly’, many major record labels are employing aggressive marketing strategies to hook onto this profitable demographic, financing upwards of £30,000 to high profile influencers on the app for a string of videos. Specialised teams monitor TikTok during this period of advertising so they can help promote a trending song if it starts to take off. If it doesn’t work, they pump similar amounts of money into the next song until they reach success. This exacerbates the oligopoly of the music industry as smaller record labels or independent artists can’t invest time and money into researching data trends increasing the inequality of opportunity within the industry. However, TikTok is a free marketplace which can help independent artists to get the
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