Ohn a recent Monday morning, Olivia Shalhoup opened her laptop and prepared for a day of meetings. About 40% of her work as the founder of Amethyst, a marketing and PR agency, is helping musicians navigate TikTok. That day, the app’s fate in the United States hung in the balance, with a Supreme Court decision looming, and its customers were tense. “The big thing we talked about on every call is, ‘What are we going to do?’” Shalhoup said. “To say that TikTok is currently crucial to artist campaigns is an understatement. No one is safe from this.
Since its debut in 2017, TikTok has become a star-making machine as short-form video content has eclipsed traditional forms of music promotion such as television and radio. The app has the power to turn emerging artists into stars, propelling their rise to the top of the charts and turning Magic FM staples like Running Up That Hill into alpha generation hits. With the help of TikTok, Lil Nas in the United States. More recently, songs like End of Beginning by Djo and I Like the Way You Kiss Me by Artemas became global hits after going viral on the app. The ability to track a song’s stickiness, engagement and reach is something of a label executive’s dream, offering what author John Seabrook called “real-time global data”, which in turn help the bigwigs make smart deals.
“Most label strategies now rely heavily on TikTok,” says Ray Uscata, managing director of North and South America at music marketing agency Round. “It’s not just an entertainment platform, it’s a discovery platform. People go to Instagram to see what their friends are doing, or YouTube to see what their favorite creators are doing – but they go to TikTok to see something new.
The key to TikTok’s success has been a feed filled with algorithmic recommendations that seem to know you better than you know yourself, giving users a curated feed of content that’s sometimes in sync with the fashions and music they’re obsessed with .
That was enough to give lawmakers pause. In April, the U.S. Congress passed a law that requires TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to a U.S.-based owner or face complete shutdown, citing national security concerns over potential manipulation of TikTok by the Chinese government and its data collection. sensitive user data, signed by Joe Biden. On January 10, the Supreme Court met to decide whether to force TikTok to go dark in the United States on January 19. Despite widespread outcry from creators (and the ACLU calling the proposal unconstitutional), on January 17, the court upheld the law that threatens to wipe out the app in the United States.
The new kingmaker of music
Many marketers say they are in the dark. “I think a lot of people are in denial,” says Meredith Gardner, co-founder of agency Tenth Floor and former senior vice president of digital marketing at Capitol Records. She says a potential client from a major brand was still talking about TikTok as their priority just 10 days ago. “I think a lot of people are still crossing their fingers that there will be some sort of Hail Mary,” Gardner says.
Artists and record labels see TikTok as the closest thing the fragmented mainstream music industry has to a kingmaker today, making it difficult to imagine a future without it. “If you look at the global top 50 on Spotify, compared to the viral charts, most of these songs are currently charting or trending on TikTok,” Uscata says. “None of this is actually from any other platform.”
The effect is also global. Patrick Clifton, a UK-based music and technology strategy consultant, says the power of TikTok’s network effect in the vast US market is such that it influences what people listen to on Spotify: You can click a song on Spotify directly from a TikTok. post – worldwide.
“TikTok is a huge catalyst for music trends in the United States. And because of the size and distribution of its user population in the United States, it is a catalyst for algorithmic trends on platforms like Spotify globally,” says Clifton. So it’s possible that a US ban could change what listeners receive on Spotify in places where TikTok will still be available, such as in the UK.
A potential ban “is going to quickly cause a lot of chaos,” says Geoff Halliday, vice president of marketing at Downtown Artist & Label Services. “It’s like all the stages of grief. At first, it was mostly denial. A lot of people said, “That will never happen.” And then the haggling begins like, “Well, there’s another way to do it. »
Faced with uncertainty, marketers are advising their artists to avoid putting their eggs in one basket. Gardner says she tells the artists she works with to take inspiration from the pre-iTunes era and cultivate a digital directory of fans. She was recently contacted by a singer-songwriter client who was looking for advice on how to share a large archive of demos and home recordings with her listeners. In another era, such a treasure would seem tailor-made for TikTok, but Gardner saw things differently: “We encourage them to launch a Substack. »
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Are there alternatives to TikTok?
While some users are eyeing ByteDance-owned Instagram Reels and Lemon8, the hottest potential replacement for TikTok at the time of writing is Xiaohongshu, aka RedNote, a China-based app with 300 million monthly users , including American celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez. It currently sits at the top of the US App Store, but its sparse sound bank, filled with amorphous, vibrant AI-created tracks, seems like a poor substitute for the exhaustive music options offered by TikTok.
Most marketers have long known that TikTok can be a fickle mistress. In early 2023, the app removed music from many Australian users’ videos in a widely criticized test. And in early 2024, Universal Music Group pulled its entire catalog from TikTok for three months amid a dispute with ByteDance over artist royalties and AI. When Uscata was hired to help amplify Good Luck, Babe! during the conflict, he and his team took to YouTube Shorts, partnering with LGBTQ+ influencers to riff on the song’s lyrics.
Experts have long warned against funneling what Uscata estimates is 80 to 90 percent of a typical marketing budget into an app that could easily go the same way as the once-vibrant, now-defunct Vine. “We’ve seen this movie before,” says Johnny Cloherty, founder of the marketing agency Genni, referring to the UMG conflict.
Others were philosophical about the possibilities of a future without TikTok. “I hope artists and labels have focused on communicating directly with fans,” said Jonathan Janis, head of music marketing in New York. “Take the algorithm out of the equation.”
A positive point amid the ban: a return to creativity
Meanwhile, a number of music industry professionals welcome the change, believing the app has led to an industry-wide over-reliance on data. Spending too much time tracking TikTok news can start to seem clinical, almost as if artists’ success begins and ends with the value they create for the label’s shareholders. “We’re not the kind of label that signs artists based on their virality,” says Robby Morris, head of marketing for independent label group Secretly. Morris regularly works with artists who aren’t interested in TikTok, although label signees like Mitski and Faye Webster have gained popularity thanks to him. “I can’t ignore the fact that the platform has helped accelerate these (careers),” he says. “But we’re not counting on that either. So this doesn’t feel like an existential moment.
There could even be a positive side to all this, believes Joe Aboud. As the founder of management and marketing company 444 Sounds, he often works with artists whose creative ambitions don’t match the brevity and punch that TikTok’s algorithm seeks. “I think it could spark a creative renaissance in the industry,” he says. “Artists feel a lot of pressure to go viral, and it changes the way they make music. In some ways, the fact that TikTok isn’t the ruler of the modern market may make true creatives feel a little less limited.
