Viral by Design: The TikTok-ification of the Music Industry

I was in the Ithaca Target last week, shopping for stupidly overpriced Command Strips to hang up posters in my equally stupidly overpriced dorm room, when I found myself subconsciously humming along to the music over the store speakers. And then I froze, because why did this song sound so familiar? I couldn’t name the artist, or the title, and yet the chorus was already stuck in my head. Then I heard it — “Moonbeam, ice cream, taking off your blue jeans” — and the realization hit me like a truck: It was a TikTok song (Benson Boone’s “Mystical Magical,” for those keeping score)! Somehow, despite my chronically online presence (or maybe because of it) that was the first time I’d actually heard the entire track. Up until then, I only really knew it as the 30-second TikTok-viral song, the same one that even led to a Crumbl cookie collab. Although my ignorance could just be chalked up to me, admittedly, not being a huge Benson Boone fan, that moment still got me thinking: When did a “TikTok song” even become a thing or, rather, its own genre? And, maybe a bit too seriously, what does that mean for artists?

Sometime between 2020 and now, TikTok cemented itself as a sort of load-bearing wall in the music industry; success for an artist stopped being measured in album sales or streams and instead started being judged by how many TikToks their songs were featured in. It’s easy to note that the songs that do blow up on TikTok tend to share the same characteristics: happy-go-lucky vibes like Tai Verdes’ “A-O-K” (with over 1.2 million TikToks), catchy earworms like GAYLE’s “abcdefu” (2.5 million TikToks) or tracks that already had a viral-ready dance like Doja Cat’s “Say So” (over 11 million TikToks, complete with a Haley Sharpe choreographed routine that even made it into the official music video). The influence TikTok has garnered over the music industry is tangible: fans will argue online that one artist deserved an award over another because “I heard them all over TikTok,” labels now openly push artists to write songs with virality in mind, and entire careers have been launched through a single video. And for those who remain unconvinced (by, admittedly, partially anecdotal evidence), the numbers still back it up. Last year, 84 percent of the songs on Billboard’s Global 200 first blew up on TikTok, 12 percent went viral after charting, and only 4 percent had no notable TikTok presence. Simply put, TikTok virality is closely correlated to industry success. 

But here’s the actual problem (and maybe the actual point of this article): When industry  success is conflated with TikTok virality, it’s really just being conflated with money. And while, yes, musicians absolutely deserve to make a living, the obsession with creating “TikTok-ready” songs fundamentally changes how artists relate to their craft. Doechii put it best in an interview with The Forty-Five regarding the TikTok virality of her track “Denial is a River”: “TikTok is an incredible tool. But I don’t want hip hop or art to get distracted and lost in trying to make music for a computer.” Artists can’t simply create anymore; their work is produced within the framework of “How can we get this viral on Tiktok?” However, if an artist leans too hard into chasing the TikTok formula, listeners are quick to call them out for being inauthentic. Just look at GAYLE’s “abcdefu,” fans immediately suspected the track to be a “manufactured” marketing stunt, with one Redditor going so far as to call it “extremely formulaic … the chorus is extremely basic, unimaginative and easy to follow so it gets in your head. Then the rest of the song is just drab, surface level, generic lyrics that feel like an afterthought.” Artists can’t win. If they don’t chase virality, they risk being ignored, but if they do, they risk being dismissed as industry sellouts. And in the middle of that balancing act, storytelling, experimentation and artistry get pushed aside.

It’s not just the musicians being affected — how much of your playlist comes from Tiktok? How often do you actually listen to a full track, or think about the lyrics or the themes? Don’t get me wrong, I love TikTok. My TikTok screen time is an embarrassingly (and concerningly!) high number that I don’t want to admit to. TikTok is an incredible tool for discovery; it’s how I found one of my favorite bands, Cibo Matto — a Japanese duo with an Italian name who sing in French and haven’t released anything since 2014. I, alone, would not have found them in this lifetime or the next; TikTok’s ability to uplift small indie artists who’d otherwise be invisible is genuinely beautiful, but when we reduce their work to a 15-second clip, we lose so much. And thus, a “TikTok Song” is created. 

I’ll end with this: Realistically, none of this matters. Realistically, this is an amateur thinkpiece in a college newspaper that is consumed by (mostly) technology-addicted college students. Realistically, artists will continue making “TikTok songs,” and labels (and us!) will keep demanding them. And nevertheless, I will still urge you to remember you have agency. Agency to consume art consciously and intentionally. Agency to not mindlessly contribute to an industry where an algorithm determines the worth of art, of creation. “TikTok songs” are a thing. They shouldn’t be, but they are. Because this is true, the least we can do when a chorus worms its way into our heads in the middle of Target or over yet another endless scroll, is stop, listen and give the music more than thirty seconds of our attention. Because, if we don’t, then the algorithm wins, and then (in the words of Docheii) we are truly making TikTok music. (What the fuck?)

Leslie Monter-Casio is a sophomore in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. They can be reached at lm953@cornell.edu.

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