From 'Toosie Slide' to 'Old Town Road': Here's how TikTok has changed the face of pop music

[FearLess]

I've written about what TikTok is and how to use it but one thing I didn't count on is how it's changed the face of music.

When I took a closer look I found that has a lot to do with its origins, it's algorithms and the users it attracts.

I'm going to unpack each aspect and give examples of how it's benefited some songs on the charts from Lil Nas X to Drake and Dua Lipa. 

THE ORIGINS – 

Back in 2018 when Chinese company Bytedance closed the lip-sync-video app Musical.ly, that it purchased at the end of 2017, and migrated its users to TikTok. 

The app, also known as Douyin in China, lets its young users create and share short videos with unique soundtracks or hit songs.

Less than a year after the rebrand, the application gained po[CENSORED]rity and became the most downloaded app in the U.S. in October 2018. What allowed TikTok to become such a huge platform so quickly? According to Rolling Stone, TikTok has benefitted from greater resources, an algorithm that encourages videos from a wide selection of users not just the most po[CENSORED]r ones, and targeted outreach efforts that ensure prolific users are up on the latest trends.

THE ALGORITHM -  

According to Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, a lot of social networks end up creating a timeline of highly personalised internet content that leads to a sense of isolation.

So, if you only follow people on social media who look like you or share your interests, for instance, you could get stuck in an echo chamber. 

According to artificial intelligence researcher Marc Faddoul, in an article published on Vox, this is the case on TikTok. In his non-scientific research he found that when he followed one person who fit a certain description it set up a series of suggestions that followed that description. 

In the same article a TikTok spokesperson pushed back and refuted that finding, saying: "We haven’t been able to replicate results similar to these claims."

They added: "Our recommendation of accounts to follow is based on user behaviour: users who follow account A also follow account B, so if you follow A you are likely to also want to follow B." This algorithm is commonly known as collaborative filtering, a type of recommendation that can also pop up on dating apps.

Whatever the real formula is for the algorithm, it often results in clusters of dance challenge or lip sync challenges going viral. It also results in young people finding others who enjoy the same challenges or types of videos as them.

So, simply, if you're someone who enjoys cooking tips, you'll get a whole lot of cooking videos on your "For Your Page (FYP)" which pops up just as you log in. The more you view of that category, the more you'll get. I have found it to have time wormhole kind of effect, where I think I'm just going to pop in to watch one video and then it's been an hour and my phone battery is about to die. 

THE USERS -

South African TikTok stats are hard to come by. But I was able to get some interesting data on one of its largest markets, the USA. 

According to Hootsuite: 

- TikTok’s biggest age group in the US is 18-24 year olds, which account for 42%. That’s followed by 13-17 year olds at 27%.

- 13-26 year olds are as likely to use TikTok as Facebook and Twitter- Approximately 60% of users in the US are female, versus 40% male.