Although I really can't be bothered to spend any amount of time on TikTok, I've come around to supporting the platform as an incredibly powerful place for people to share unique ideas, stories, experiences, and content with remarkably personalized audiences (as morally ambiguous as that last part can be). But I really don't like the direction it's pushing music.
I believe the heightened usage of TikTok as a music discovery service is going to push songwriters to increasingly ensure every song they write is centered around a meme-able moment or lyric that fully reveals itself in under 10 seconds. I don't think this is an unfair assumption since every past change in music discovery, promotion, or consumption has led to some corollary change in songwriting, molding it to better fit the medium. The invention of the vinyl single capped songs at around 3:00 apiece. FM radio ensured choruses came sooner. The CD ensured every song was mastered as loud as digitally possible. Streaming services ushered in a transition to albums with longer tracklists and shorter track times while also increasing the number of releases the average artist puts out. It's only reasonable to assume if TikTok remains a powerful force in music promotion, a similar molding to fit the medium will occur.
And while some of these historical molds have produced amazing records — the short runtime of a vinyl single virtually invented pop music — I don't foresee TikTok having this same positive effect. Great music is built from the successful build and release of tension and the emotionally-tugging ebb and flow of song structure and melody. This is just really hard to accomplish when the goal is to be featured in a 10-second TikTok video. Even if this doesn't affect the songwriting itself, TikTok's format will still better service songs that fit this 10 second criteria rather than those that don't, so TikTok can essentially become a gatekeeper where only songs fitting this format are allowed to go viral.
I think TikTok is an incredibly powerful music promotion tool that is making plenty of artists household names overnight, which is cool. But I'm not convinced the songwriting trends encouraged by TikTok make great art instead of just great content. Time will only tell.
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