As a recent college dropout with little expectation for a successful career, Lil Nas X was living in his sister’s garage when he composed the catchy lyrics to his hit song “Old Town Road”, surrounding the idea that his “life is a movie” and that “can't nobody tell [him] nothing.” After purchasing a beat for $ 30 from a Soundcloud producer who sold his tracks at the nearby record store, Lil Nas X created the 1:53-minute hit song that eventually became the first single to reach platinum fifteen different times. How did he do it?
As a nineteen-year-old in America, his first instinct after creating the song was to upload it onto Soundcloud and share it on all forms of social media. Several well-known platforms quickly noticed the brief music snippet and swiftly created their own media interpretation of the song, blowing it up. An “Old Town Road” trend, consisting of people changing into cowboy/girl attire at the beat drop, soon became a hit on TikTok. From there, Lil Nas X had nowhere to go but up. Lil Nas X won numerous awards for the song, the most prominent of which was a Grammy for Best Music Video in 2020. Without his clever usage of social media, or more specifically Tiktok, we would’ve never been able to hear this catchy country rap song that got stuck in all of our heads. “Old Town Road” is just one example of how Tiktok has promoted music that may not have been so successful otherwise. Through a variety of TikTok challenges, small artists from all around the world are given the opportunity to promote their music in numerous ways and achieve their big hits, just like Lil Nas X.
One would expect the music that gets popular on Tiktok to be a very narrow category of similar-sounding songs. This idea seemed to hold true when a series of songs that were parodies of lullabies dominated the space — the most popular song being “ABCDEFU” by Gayle. As a voracious break-up song, for a brief moment, everyone’s for-you page was filled with clips of different people screaming out the lyrics with their own tweaks to fit the breakup they were going through. Many songs of the lullaby theme followed, narrowing the previously diverse music display. With everyone coming to the same conclusion, the song quickly became a joke and similar songs were laughed upon.
The truth is, original and popular songs on TikTok have no real algorithm or special factor that gets them to popularity. It isn’t that they are all in English — Love Nwantiti, one of Africa’s most popular songs —was also prevalent on people’s for-you pages. Interestingly, the age of the song is also not relevant. Just last year December, TikTok witnessed the rise of the song Snowman by Sia (2017) as people attempted to sing the chorus in one breath. Even Celine Dion's songs from decades ago reached popularity with dramatic renditions of the Titanic scene. Despite being researched by numerous specialists in the field, the songs have nothing in common except for the fact that the general public loves them, which raises the question of what the user's relationship with the music truly is.
TikTok videos aren’t simply dancing videos (although that category holds a large majority of the content on the app). A specific trend manipulates the lyrics of songs to create “fill in the blank sentences,” where users can put their own creative input. Users use lyrics and music to express their thoughts and emotions on the platform. Creators also utilize music as a backing track of visual media. One currently popular trend is a woman singing out “How can I explain myself?” This soundtrack, paired with a visual stimulus of an awkward or unexplainable situation, has been an effective recipe for a hit video. With this TikTok trend, the song itself has become extremely popular and made it into the playlists of people around the world. Through this process of creating small trends with songs, any audio can become the newest hit. However, with larger artists recognizing this trend, there has been a rise in the “Made For TikTok” songs, which are clearly created to promote just one or two lines on Tiktok. The trends from such songs usually do not reach maximum potential and often dilute the quality of the videos.
A small yet important part of this process is the fact that all accounts get exposure, allowing for more comprehensive interactions with music. The users of the app have cultivated a relationship with music that goes further than passively listening to songs in the background. Instead, they interact with the lyrics, using TikTok trends for creative expression, enhancing their understanding of the piece. For a majority of teenagers and young adults in today’s society, this link has allowed music to develop and become a significant aspect of their everyday life.