TikTok Offers Viral Fame to Any Musician Who Can Figure it Out. But What About The Real World?

The other day I went to a show for an American musician who had, in the past year, garnered millions of streams across Spotify and TikTok. His singles had been used as the backing tracks on TikTok, with hundreds – if not thousands – of users soundtracking their break-up experiences, aesthetically pleasing moments and dances.

But when I saw him in Australia, the audience was small. While that kind of turnout isn’t surprising for someone just starting their career, his numbers online pointed to an expectation that he would have a bigger crowd and much more support. It made me wonder: Does the algorithm actually serve the growth of an organic crowd?

During Steve Lacy’s infamous 2022 global tour, audiences knew maybe one of his songs and only 15 seconds of it. Lacy had spent large chunks of the year going viral, multiple times and with multiple songs, on TikTok.  At one show, Lacy stopped singing the lyrics to his hit “Bad Habits” in an attempt to show-up fans who only knew the small part that had gone viral. While the pandemic is partly to blame – leaving fans to discover music solely through online sources – TikTok’s influence on live music had worked its magic. It was obvious that, for a younger generation, the app was becoming the place for music discovery.

Label heads and PR execs now pander to the platform, pushing artists to produce content to get in front of the eyes of as many people as possible. In theory, it’s a good strategy. But it’s hard to say how much of those views trickle down into streaming or long-time artist support.

“It all comes down to the audience behaviour,” Huw Araniego Ellis, who has worked in the Australian music industry over the last 20 years, told VICE.

“There’s a huge difference between enjoying something for 15 seconds or enjoying an attractive person engaging with it, or a comedy stitch, to wanting to shell out $80 to sit through another 90 minutes of music that you might not be interested in.”

But having millions of streams online doesn’t always dictate real life success. In being a global platform that allows users to interact with content from anywhere and everywhere, sometimes the locality and strategy of building your name from a grassroots level gets lost.

“Fans aren’t necessarily fans of the artist or songs as a whole, but the moment created (eg. a 20 second part of their song that went viral),” says George, an agent for upcoming Australian talent and the Managing Director for Hy-Lo Creative Studios.

“You haven’t created a genuine fan. Alternatively, I’ve also seen some artists slowly start to become moreso known as content creators. They do covers, sing live versions or do open verse challenges. Great way to engage people, but can sometimes take away from your legitimacy as an artist.”

George says you can see it through streaming platforms like Spotify, where you can get good numbers but not sell out a show, because the fan base hasn’t been established on the ground.

“They haven’t established a tangible connection, where a fan is properly invested in your art but also the brand behind the artist. What we see in the music world is fans being drawn to one or the other.. it’s hard to achieve both, and that’s what makes the great ones stand out,” he says. 

When it comes to TikTok, Paul Brown, who’s worked in the industry for the past decade and now runs the Heavy music magazine Wall Of Sound, says that sometimes, the bands that he’ll work with will appear to do well with a song on the app – but in reality the success is a result of a fanbase halfway across the world.

“I'm working with a band at the moment who is essentially a heavy metal version of Gorillaz,” says Brown.

“He's found success with one of these songs [on TikTok], which has completely cracked the Japanese market. But when it comes to that translation for Australian audiences, they're not exactly jumping on what he's doing.”

While being able to connect with fans around the world is one of TikTok’s biggest drawcards,  Brown says it’s hard to convert users on the app to loyal followers across the board.

“It's essentially like they're coming across one of the videos and they’re sharing it around, but then when the next thing comes up in their feed, they're just scrolling right past it, because it's not relevant to what they saw in that first video,” he says.

While artists can have a large following, many of those followers gained are usually through viral moments. That means fans aren’t really fans, and often not even fans of the music. They’re fans of the personality behind it. 

“[The videos] that do pop off, they're not necessarily popping off there because of music,” says Alec Mallia, the lead singer from Sydney’s electronic rock band, Autosuggest.

“It's not necessarily [the music] that translates, it's an indication that [the artist is] personable in 15 second increments.”

In 2022, Mallia wrote an article that depicted the role of TikTok on his mental health. While he gained followers by posting several videos per day and going viral on the app, the stress that came with TikTok’s constant need for interaction and its tricky algorithms led to a breakdown of ego. He likens it to a gambling addiction.

“The moment the algorithm changes on a platform like that, you feel it immediately,” he says.

“What makes a good gambling product is when you know that you can win but it's completely unpredictable when you will win. So there’s this idea that every video that you post could be an opportunity to blow up.” 

“And short form video is good, but for it to be effective you have to go viral for the thing you're trying to sell. So Allday, he's always doing those random, funny videos, and the return on effort and investment for those little videos that would actually trickle down to his music, I think would be inconsequential because he’s a major label artist”.

“But to do content for the sake of content will get no one anywhere.”

A month or so ago, TikTok used Australian audiences as lab rats to test how popular music was accessed on the platform, leaving many artists limited to the number of songs they could post. The test demonstrated the disproportionate influence TikTok had over the music industry, especially in Australia, which relies on only a handful of outlets to promote music. Over the last few years, TikTok has quickly become one of the largest options – and it’s free.

With algorithms and rules that can change any minute, TikTok leaves artists who become reliant on the platform – especially independent ones – in vulnerable positions.

TikTok is aware of the friction the app is causing, deliberate or not, and has developed a distribution company, SoundOn, to remedy that. So far, it’s had mixed reviews.

“SoundOn can also distribute to other music platforms. As a result, fans' loyalty transcends TikTok and helps artists build audiences on other streaming services and DSPs,” the TikTok website says.

Artists can upload their music to TikTok and earn 100% royalties in the first year and 90% in the second. Tiktok will even upload the artist's tracks to platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. While it sounds simple and quite straight-forward, ultimately SoundOn is just incentivising artists, desperately, to stay on TikTok. A fact that Mallia says is not surprising –  for any social media platform.

And while TikTok is surpassing the more traditional routes of music promotion one factor is being cut out: the middleman. Labels and PR agents may increasingly become less needed as artists are able to more easily self-promote to millions of people at a time. Editorial media, and radio, are in the same boat. 

But what kind of effect will that have on the real-life, in-show success of artists, who are able to garner millions of hits online but nothing else? Will fanbases be less loyal or more? 

That’s anyone’s guess. We already know that songs have been re-structured to have viral, 15-second moments, and that fans usually only interact with those viral moments. Platforms are now conglomerates with multiple streams of influence and TikTok looks to be moving in the same direction. And maybe that’ll help a certain sect of artists while the more underground ones ,who experiment with their sound, are left scrounging in the gutters. We’ll just have to see.

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