tik tok on the clock
i don’t have tik tok, but i’ve heard plenty of stories from people who do. i feel very well aware of tik tok trends (i have a younger sister who shares a room with me, i experience second-hand tik toking) and popular tik toks are usually reposted on all social media- twitter, instagram, youtube, and they even pop up on my dad’s facebook feed every once and a while.
tik tok has been the source of many people’s entertainment these years- it’s where new artists have sprung up from, it’s where people share their everyday lives, it’s where people post the videos that make you laugh. there’s a little bit of everything on it, and we hear of many success stories that happened because of tik tok.
in the vox video we were assigned in class titled “We tracked what happens after TikTok songs go viral”. in the video, they take data from 2020-2021 of about 367 artists who obtained their first label deal during that time. out of those 367, about 129 of them happened because they went viral on tik tok.
i think it’s safe to say that tik tok has changed the music industry a lot. almost all songs i hear nowadays are songs that are being used on tik tok. i remember on school bus rides, the songs that would play on the radio would be the same ones i would hear from people’s phones who were scrolling through tik tok.
another one of the things we were assigned was an article on the endless scroll many social media sites use. a little game my sister loves doing is choosing a song that has been popping off recently (in this case, boy’s a liar pt. 2), and then scrolling through to see how many times a tik tok using that audio is used. of course, tik tok only uses a small snippet, but curiousity takes the best of us! if we’re hearing the same song over and over again while we scroll, naturally we’d like to see what else is using it. according to the article posted above, the average person spends nearly four hours on their phone a day.
and a large chunk of those are likely from tik tok, for avid tik tok users out there! so say we’re on tik tok for 2 hours of that day… of course the songs we hear on tik tok repeatedly are going to be popular.
for the final half of this post, i decided to go to the billboard top 100 for this week. i know one person isn’t enough to decide everything- as there are tons of sides of tik tok to explore- but i asked my sister to tell me which ones she has heard on the app.
of the top 10 songs for this week, my sister was able to recognize 9/10 of them soley because of tik tok. as i stated earlier, this isn’t enough to decide whether or not tik tok has changed the music industry, but i think it’s definitely saying something. by just a quick search on tik tok, one can even find how many times each song has been used as an audio for videos.
tik tok probably won’t be dying anytime soon, so the music industry is evolving in order to fit this new trend of artists gaining popularity through there.
