On a recent Monday morning, Olivia Shalhoup opened her laptop and steeled herself for a day of meetings. Around 40% of her work as the founder of Amethyst, a marketing and PR agency, focuses on helping musicians navigate TikTok. On this particular day, the fate of the app in the US hung in the balance, with a supreme court ruling looming, and her clients were tense. “The big thing we were talking about in every single call is: ‘What are we going to do?’” Shalhoup said. “To say that TikTok is crucial to artist campaigns right now is an understatement. No one is immune from this.”
Since its debut in 2017, TikTok has become a star-making machine, as short-form video content has eclipsed traditional forms of music promotion such as TV and radio. The app has the power to make rising artists into A-listers, propel their ascent to the top of the charts, and turn Magic FM staples like Running Up That Hill into gen alpha hits. With the help of TikTok, Lil Nas X turned the $30 beat of Old Town Road into a career-making smash, while dance challenges drove Doja Cat’s Say So and Megan Thee Stallion’s Savage to No 1 in the US. More recently, songs like Djo’s End of Beginning and Artemas’s I Like the Way You Kiss Me became global smashes after going viral on the app. The ability to track a song’s stickiness, engagement and reach is something like a label executive’s dream, offering what the author John Seabrook has called “real-time global callout data”, which in turn helps bigwigs make smart deals.
“Most label strategies rely heavily on TikTok now,” says Ray Uscata, managing director of North and South America at the music marketing agency Round. “It’s not just an entertainment platform, it’s a discovery platform. People go into Instagram to see what their friends are doing, or YouTube to see what their favourite creators are up to – but they go to TikTok to see something new.”
The key to TikTok’s success has been a feed full of algorithmic recommendations that seems to know you better than you know yourself, offering users a curated stream of content that is at times unnervingly attuned to the fads and music they’ve become obsessed with.
That’s been enough to give lawmakers pause. In April, the US Congress passed a law that forces TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to a US-based owner or face a total shutdown, citing national security concerns of potential manipulation of TikTok by the Chinese government and its collection of sensitive user data, which Joe Biden signed. On 10 January, the supreme court convened to decide whether to force TikTok to go dark in the US on 19 January. Despite widespread outcry from creators (and the ACLU slamming the proposal as unconstitutional), on 17 January the court upheld the law that threatens to make the app disappear in the US.
Music’s new kingmaker
Many marketers say they’re in limbo. “I think a lot of people are in denial,” says Meredith Gardner, co-founder of the agency Tenth Floor and a former senior vice-president of digital marketing at Capitol Records. She says that one prospective major label client was still talking about TikTok as the priority just 10 days ago. “I think a lot of people are still crossing their fingers that there will be some kind of Hail Mary,” Gardner says.
Artists and record labels see TikTok as the closest thing that the fragmented mainstream music industry has to a kingmaker today, making it tough to imagine a future without it. “If you look at the global top 50 [chart] on Spotify, compared to the viral charts, most of these songs are charting or trending on TikTok at the moment,” says Uscata. “None of these are really coming from any other platform.”
The effect is global as well. Patrick Clifton, a UK-based music and tech strategy consultant, says the power of TikTok’s network effect in the vast US market is such that it influences what people listen to on Spotify – you can click through to a tune on Spotify straight from a TikTok post – around the world.
“TikTok is a massive catalyst for music trends in the US. And because of the size and distribution of its user population in the US, it is a catalyst for algorithm trends on platforms like Spotify globally,” says Clifton. It is possible, therefore, that a US ban would shift what listeners are served on Spotify in places where TikTok will still be available, such as in the UK.
A potential ban is “going to cause a lot of chaos quickly”, says Geoff Halliday, vice-president of marketing at Downtown Artist & Label Services. “It’s like all the stages of grief. At the beginning it was mostly denial. A lot of people were like, ‘That’s never going to happen.’ And then begins the bargaining of like, ‘Well, there’s another way we can do it.’”
In the face of uncertainty, marketers are advising their artists to avoid putting their eggs in one basket. Gardner says that she is telling the artists she works with to take a tip from the pre-iTunes era and cultivate a digital Rolodex of fans. She was recently contacted by a singer-songwriter client looking for advice on how to share a substantial archive of demos and home recordings with her listeners. In another era, such a trove would seem tailor-made for TikTok, but Gardner saw it differently: “We’re encouraging them to launch a Substack.”
Are there alternatives to TikTok?
While some users eye Instagram Reels and the ByteDance-owned Lemon8, TikTok’s buzziest potential replacement at time of writing is Xiaohongshu, aka RedNote, a China-based app with 300 million monthly users, including American celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez. It’s currently at the top of the US app store, but its sparse bank of sounds, filled with amorphous, vibey tracks made by AI, feels like a poor substitute for the exhaustive music options offered by TikTok.
Most marketers have long known that TikTok can be a fickle mistress. In early 2023, the app removed music from many Australian users’ videos in a widely criticized test. And in early 2024, Universal Music Group pulled its entire catalogue from TikTok for three months amid a dispute with ByteDance over artist royalties and AI. When Uscata was brought on to help amplify UMG artist Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe! during the dispute, he and his team pivoted to YouTube Shorts, partnering with LGBTQ+ influencers to riff on the song’s lyrics.
Experts have long cautioned against funnelling what Uscata estimates is 80-90% of a typical marketing budget into an app which could easily go the same way as the once-vibrant, now-defunct Vine. “We’ve seen this movie before,” says Johnny Cloherty, founder of marketing agency Genni, referencing the UMG dispute.
Others were philosophical about the possibilities of a TikTok-free future. “Hopefully artists and labels have been focusing on direct-to-fan communications,” said Jonathan Janis, a music marketing executive in New York. “Take the algorithm out of the equation.”
A bright spot amid the ban: a return to creativity
Meanwhile, a certain set of music business professionals welcomes the change, feeling that the app has led to an industry-wide overreliance on data. Spending too long tracking TikTok insights can start to feel clinical, almost as if artists’ success begins and ends with the value they create for label shareholders. “We’re not the kind of label that’s signing artists based on virality,” says Robby Morris, a marketing executive at at the independent label group Secretly. Morris regularly works with artists who are uninterested in TikTok, even as label signees like Mitski and Faye Webster have surged in popularity thanks to it. “I can’t discount the fact that the platform did help accelerate those [careers],” he says. “But we also don’t count on that. So this doesn’t feel like an existential moment.”
There could even be a silver lining to all this, says Joe Aboud. As the founder of management and marketing company 444 Sounds, he often works with artists whose creative ambitions don’t line up with the brevity and punchiness prized by TikTok’s algorithm. “I think it could spark a creative renaissance in the industry,” he says. “Artists are feeling a lot of pressure to go viral, and it’s shifting the way that they’re making music. In some ways, having TikTok not be the ruler of the modern marketplace may allow true creatives to feel a little bit less constricted.”
