Should you ever get a horse, you will naturally need to take it to the old town road.
TikTok Fast Tracks
If the Bible of TikTok and the music industry is ever written, its Genesis chapter will feature singer Lil Nas X, who was only 19 in 2019 when he posted a genre-bending rap-country song to his SoundCloud and social media accounts.
With rumored production costs totaling $30 for the drum track, “Old Town Road” has since become the most successful single of all time. It sat atop the Billboard Hot 100 for nearly five months and went 15 times platinum, in no small part because it was an early TikTok meme, adopted and reused by millions of creators in their own videos.
It’s not that TikTok — a video-sharing app owned by Chinese-based tech company ByteDance — set out to be a music industry king- and queenmaker but that’s what it has become. TikTok has taken an ever-growing role in minting global hits, launching new artists, foregrounding world music and plucking obscure performers from the shadowlands of the internet. Just five or so years into the app’s existence, its hit-making properties are still, in many instances, organic and unpredictable.
Even the parents of many TikTok users — the lion’s share of whom are under 25 — would have been unborn or infants when ’70s rockers Fleetwood Mac recorded “Dreams.” Yet the song reentered the charts in 2020 after the viral — and much copied — TikTok video of laborer Nathan Apodaca (@420doggface208) rolling down a highway on his skateboard, drinking juice and lip-syncing to the 1977 hit.
Most TikTok challenges start with a song and some lip-syncing and/or dancing, with those that go viral becoming trends. Alongside golden oldies, there are plenty of contemporary examples. Doja Cat’s 2020 song “Say So” became a gigantic trend on TikTok and has since racked up nearly 5 million YouTube views. Acts such as Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion and Popp Hunna have also tasted the audience-exploding potential of being featured on the apps hallowed “for you” page.
“TikTok has taken an ever-growing role in minting global hits, launching new artists, foregrounding world music and plucking obscure performers from the shadowlands of the internet.”
For obvious reasons, many eyes are now on the correlation between rhythm and algorithm. A study by MRC Data last year found 67 percent of TikTok users are more likely to listen to songs on streaming services after hearing them in 15 to 60 second snippets on the app — a music marketer’s dream, if only trends could be manipulated. Which, more and more, they can.
TikTok has its own division for monitoring music trends on the app and “promo levers” to boost the popularity of certain songs to make them more discoverable. Artists, marketers, record labels and influencers have likewise converged, with money changing hands in the hope that top influencers — or more commonly, a diverse spread of cheaper “micro” influencers — will use a song in a way that will help shoot it into the stratosphere.
Dedicated agencies are now on hand to assist artists and labels with music promotions, and TikTok-focused consultants can even be hired to offer advice on creating music that will thrive on the app.
Just remember, when the charts are dominated by tracks that last between 15 and 60 seconds, it started here.
On the upside, almost all of the TikTok afficianados would be too young — or too disinterested — in recalling Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” we venture. Yet some of us cannot help thinking of that tale, every time we hear about the popularity of TikTok. Although unlike the story, in this case we will find something beating under those floorboards. You just wait. … Oh, and if you’re wondering about the picture of Andi Sue Irwin there (Penthouse Pet, September 1993) we can explain that. We set out to search the Penthouse Vault archives looking for a nice woman on horse shot we could use — to tie with the “Old Town Road” and so we could quit thinking about dogface. Searching for these things can be a challenge, not so much for the horse as finding the woman wearing clothes on the horse, you see. Then we ran across this adorabe photo of Andi Sue that Earl Miller shot — proving, obviously, that with us you CAN believe your lion eyes. We went with that, for (perhaps painfully now) obvious reasons.
