TikTok Challenge

THE TIKTOK CHALLENGE

How a social media app is revamping the music industry

Story, Photo, and Design by Michelle Ibañez

Like every single social media app before it, TikTok specializes in the sharing of content created by its users. Ranging between funny, sad, bizarre, or questionable videos. Most of its users thrive in the ability to share short-timed videos, and the content can be either very outrageous or very lazy.

It’s really hard to concise in words the amount of content and things someone can do with TikTok. It feels a lot safer to go with Instagram, where photo sharing and video producing is very straightforward, or with Twitter, where things are a bit more serious, and let’s not forget Snapchat, where it’s a lot more private and also a little sketchy.

As an emerging source of entertainment, TikTok holds the same group of people that make up most of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Influencers. Usually people with a significant amount of money, or sometimes none, looking for stardom in the one city that guarantees it. As stated earlier, the creation of content for TikTok can be really lazy or really complicated, just like with anything that goes up on the internet, a single moment can make you go viral.

Take into account Brittany Broski, or better known as “Kombucha Girl,” whose rise to TikTok fame came after a single video of her considering kombucha. The complexity of TikTok is sometimes easier to perceive when you watch videos where you can realize that the content creator put effort into making it. Another thing that sets TikTok apart from other platforms is the fact that your feed, the part of the app where you get your “information” from is already fed to you through an algorithm based on things you’ve interacted with.

The “For You Page” allows newcomers to see either the most viral videos or the ones that have been hashtagged that way. It allows for virtual socialization without the actual socializing that usually comes embedded in social media platforms, which is an example of how this site falls into pop culture and plays the power card in American society.

But one thing that TikTok has exponentially contributed to is the rise of music. Now you may be asking yourself, music already existed before TikTok, didn’t it? Yes, but the complexity of the app goes beyond videos like Kombucha Girl, because as you’re reading this, the app itself is paving the way for up-and-coming artists.

Many hopeful musicians have taken to TikTok, whose shareable features and know-it-all algorithm are at the top of the game, to create their own musical content. It could’ve all started with one singing video, or an acoustic cover of a popular song, people all over the world can now share their talents and become the center of a viral sensation, landing deals with companies left and right, just Google Charli D’Amelio and Dunkin Donuts, for example.

Homemade DJ’s, as I like to call them, have been on the rise. Remix after remix will flood your feed even if you don’t interact with it. It’s not your usual remixes either, can you imagine the Fugees’ Killing Me Softly as a rave song? You don’t have to, it actually exists! Bruno Mars and Melanie Martinez? Yep. Even better, Doja Cat and Paul Anka? Man, do I have news for you!

Remember at the beginning of the COVID-19-induced quarantine when everyone turned to TikTok to do the dance challenge to Doja Cat’s Say So? By May of 2020, Miss Doja’s song peaked at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart after the disco-inspired pop song was the theme of one of the app’s most popular dance challenges. Created by Haley Sharpe, who’s following count surpasses the millions, the dance was among those that catapulted Charli D’Amelio and others to viral stardom.

While the dance and the app are mostly tied to Gen Z and under, TikTok has also allowed old music to enter the mainstream online wave. Songs like Britney Spears’ Gimme More, Mike Posner’s Please Don’t Go, oldie but goodie Rasputin by Boney M, and even

Billy Joel made it on there. The app has blessed a new generation of online users with generations old of music content.

One word of advice though, don’t ask your young, wannabe-e-kid family members to tell you who Lauryn Hill is…

This past year, TikTok has become the one social media platform that has probably given America the hope that things could be okay, at a time where the world was going through political and economical changes, and yes, living through a pandemic that has pretty much changed the dynamic in which people interact with one another. TikTok allowed people to breathe a little easier and remember that things could be a lot worse.

In an article published by The New York Times, titled How TikTok Is Rewriting the World, writer John Herrman explains that TikTok “questions the primacy of individual connections and friend networks. It unapologetically embraces central control rather than pretending it doesn’t have it.” Meaning it allows for its users to build a brand with no audience, no friends to help.

Different from others, TikTok challenges the idea that you already have to have an audience in order to thrive in its platform. “TikTok... encourages users to jump from audience to audience, trend to trend, creating something like simulated temporary friend groups, who get together to do friend-group things: to share an inside joke; to riff on a song; to talk idly and aimlessly about whatever is in front of you.” Herrman explained. This is a jab at the power dynamics and the popularity contest that has been fermented in social media platforms. Whoever makes the best content wins likes and more followers, but in TikTok, this idea goes out the window.

Yes, people can follow you if they enjoy your content and want to see more of you, but it’s not really that necessary when you can add a hashtag or it floats away into the internet space, people will see it eventually.

Funny enough, even though you don’t need an audience to start creating, the ability for users to build their brand and monetize out of it is easy. Kombucha girl has gotten several features in media organizations, up-and-coming makeup artists have gotten brand deals with big makeup brands, and let’s not forget the pop culture references all of these will be part of.

TikTok ultimately seems to play a heavier role in American pop culture than other apps before it ever played, it has completely changed the game for content creators, so much that even Trump battled its relevance in society, but that’s another story for another day.