A post-TikTok music industry won’t necessarily be a better one

On January 3, the TikTok user @nawn.sense posted a video of her furiously strumming a guitar in her lap. She was covering Glorb’s “The Bottom 2,” a parody rage rap song composed using AI voice models trained on characters from Spongebob Squarepants. The original was immensely popular if clearly disposable, but her version commanded attention the moment she released a gnarled and nearly horse-like bellow of “Gary hit ‘em with the Awwwwwwwww.” It immediately reminded me of Exuma, a Bahamian folk singer from the 70s who passed away without his due recognition. Nawn.sense’s music had already reached more than Exuma’s ever did on its own — 9 days and 18 million views later, she posted a video of herself recording in a studio, with the words “Thank You” imposed at the top.

Nawn.sense’s success represents one of the most attractive elements of TikTok: how its algorithm can reveal undiscovered or unsung artists to a wider audience, and said audience gets to decide which artists get more exposure by engaging with TikToks using their music or creating new videos using their sounds. Over 170 million people in the United States have downloaded the app, and Nawn.sense is one of the thousands of musicians whose lives have been changed by TikTok — and may be one of the last.

In April 2024, the United States congress passed a bill that would force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell TikTok or close it down by January 19, 2025. The bill was the culmination of years of panic from the national security community and politicians of all stripes, who feared that the company’s alleged connections to the Chinese Communist Party would lead to a harvesting of American citizens’ data. ByteDance has denied these accusations in public and congressional hearings to little effect, and has claimed that a sale is not realistic given the app’s value (the Chinese government, which must sign off on any sale, has pledged to block any divestment, citing the value of TikTok’s algorithm).

The bill is now before the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in the case on Friday, January 10. Analysts believe the Court will likely uphold the bill; that means there’s a decent chance that by January 19, an app downloaded by around half of the people in the United States may cease to function in the near future (the app will likely not disappear from phones, but it will be removed from stores, and updates will no longer be offered). Nearly eight years to the day after TikTok’s spiritual predecessor Vine was left to wither and die by its owners at Twitter, TikTok may soon meet the same fate.

TikTok’s potentially unceremonious end would represent the conclusion of an era that, for better or worse, changed the way music is made and how we listen to it. Even as concerns that TikTok may not be compensating musicians fairly still simmer, countless artists around the world have experienced tremendous success after posting on the platform. The government turning off TikTok’s spigot is a drastic move with few precedents; as a thought exercise, how different would the world look if YouTube had been banned before it was purchased by Google? Would another video streaming service pop up and replicate it perfectly? Or would our cultural and informational ecosystems be changed forever?

Every TikTok user’s For You Page will likely have a slightly different exposure to what’s currently viral. For example, I followed Yeat’s ascent from Slayworld member to rap superstar, but didn’t hear Gigi Perez’s “Sailor Song” until I saw @nawn.sense cover it. Across the music landscape, today’s charts are now populated with artists who first got some traction on TikTok.

Naturally, the music industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to game TikTok’s algorithm. After the success of Gayle’s 2022 single “abcdefu,” TikTok was flooded with similar songs with an aggressive cutesy quality derivatively labeled as “TikTok music” by listeners. Pop wasn’t the only genre affected by homogeneity; Metro Boomin celebrated when UMG pulled all of its music from TikTok during a contract dispute, with the producer decrying all the “lifeless and soulless” music made with the sole intention of going viral.

Musicians like Halsey, ones already entrenched in the industry, have found themselves facing new career pressures: In 2022, Halsey claimed that their label refused to release any of their music unless it first went viral on TikTok. It was an indication that for the major labels, payola doesn’t exist on TikTok in the way it might on radio or streaming services: artificially creating a hit isn’t as easy as dumping a few million dollars into TikTok promo. “There's a million examples of a lot of very expensive campaigns that had no return," Nina Webb, head of marketing at Atlantic Records, told NPR in 2022. "Like, we can't do it. It has to come from fans or the artist because you're talking to Gen Z. They smell everything out."

Questions of data harvesting aside, TikTok is also far from an innocent content vector. According to NPR, internal documents cited in a suit filed last year by 14 states attorney generals allege that ByteDance’s own research outlined serious potential harm from TikTok — the app can become addictive after just 35 minutes, the algorithm may intentionally demote conventionally unattractive people, and “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.” (A representative for TikTok accused NPR of “cherry picking” details from the suit in their report).

Still, TikTok has dramatically altered who can be a success. I know at least four middle-aged people who separately went to the sold-out Duster show in Toronto; they all individually felt like the oldest person there. A slowcore band that released two albums at the turn of the century before a near two-decade hiatus, Duster’s music became popular on TikTok around 2020, and they suddenly found themselves with a new audience that wasn’t even born when they released their first album.

Duster’s success in 2024 embodies what TikTok excels at: recontextualizing. TikTok’s algorithm is frighteningly good at predicting what you will probably like from analyzing what you already do, and pairing these two categories together. As dystopian as this new reality of music discovery is — controlled by an untouchable panopticon that may or may not have deep totalitarian connections — this powerful engine has led to very real material gains for musicians. What will replace this source of income in an impoverished industry if TikTok suddenly disappears, or becomes gradually defunct? Should it be something similar, or fundamentally different?

I’m sure that Nawn.sense has wondered what would have happened if TikTok had gone offline in December, days before she uploaded her cover, much like I’ve wondered if Exuma’s story would’ve been different had there been fewer gatekeepers. It might be overly optimistic to hope that using TikTok has made younger generations more curious, or that whatever benefits it’s had for musicians are worth mentioning given the toll TikTok has on the mental health of its usership. But TikTok has undoubtedly given its users a peek at musical history’s secrets and a tangible stake in its potential futures. Here’s hoping that they hold on to that, whatever app comes next.