So your song went viral on TikTok. What’s next?

Switched on Pop

Vox Media Podcast Network

Music Interviews, Music History, Music, Music Commentary

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On TikTok, pop stars — Halsey, FKA Twigs, and Florence Welch among them — have been complaining a lot lately about their labels forcing them to make TikToks. As people spent the early part of the pandemic staring at their phones instead of flocking to concerts, the short-form-video social-media platform upended music discovery. In many cases, it gave unknown musicians a pathway to enormous audiences and allowed them to burst into the mainstream on the backs of their TikTok hits. It’s a story as old as the music industry itself: No-name musician gets big overnight and lands a record deal. But until recently, it’s been hard to say just how big and how overnight, so Estelle Caswell from Vox and Matt Daniels from The Pudding spent seven months manually compiling and interrogating the data of who went viral, who got signed, and whose careers dropped off. Their resulting short documentary, We Tracked What Happens After TikTok Songs Go Viral, is a definitive dive into the 2020 class of viral TikTok stars. Although the platform is clearly a dominant force in new-music discovery, they found that streaming music is still overwhelmingly dominated by legacy artists. And since these established acts are now competing for the same eyeballs as their lesser-known colleagues on TikTok, it’s getting harder and harder for the latter to break out. So what happens after you go viral on TikTok? Listen to Switched On Pop to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is sponsored by FX's, Fleischmann is in trouble.
0:04.0	Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Daines, Lizzy Kaplan, and Adam Brody,
0:08.2	this drama tells the story of recently divorced Toby Fleischmann who dives into the world of
0:13.4	app-based dating. The kind of success he never had in his youth. Then, his ex-wife disappears,
0:19.1	leaving him with her two children and no hint of her return. FX's Fleischmann is in trouble,
0:24.6	now streaming only on Hulu. Welcome to Switched on Pop, I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.
0:42.8	In the last few weeks, there's been this meme circulating of major pop stars,
0:46.6	Halsey, FK Twigs, Florence Welsh, Charlie XCX, all lamenting that their labels are requiring them to
0:53.2	become TikTok content creators. The conversation TikTok came up a lot, right? So I'm like,
0:58.5	TikTok-a-talk-a-hoo. Well, I didn't really want to be here, so obviously I'm just like wanting
1:03.1	to get this over with and get on with my life. I just hate this. It sucks. You know, in just
1:08.9	two years, the short-form video, social media platform has utterly upended music discovery,
1:14.8	in many cases giving unknown musicians a pathway to enormous audiences, and it's become increasingly
1:21.0	important, especially during the pandemic as people flocked to their phones over going to concerts.
1:26.0	I've even reported stories about Ty Verdes and Benny, artists who seemingly came out of nowhere
1:30.4	to burst into mainstream pop because of TikTok. But I wasn't aware of how prevalent this trend really
1:36.8	has been, until I spoke with two journalists who've uncovered the extent of how TikTok has changed
1:44.1	music in a multi-month-long data investigation into what has happened to the pandemic 2020 class of
1:50.4	TikTok viral stars in a documentary video for the Vox.com earworm series. Honestly, the numbers
1:56.8	were not what I was expecting, and so I invited them on the show to break it down for you all.
2:01.3	My name is Estelle Cazwell. I'm a video producer at Vox.com.
2:05.4	I name some adaniels, and I am a journalist at the pudding.
	...

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