By: Monica Gomez
The first time I listened to Taylor Swift I was sitting in the back seat of my mom’s red Nissan Altima. She was picking me up from my 2nd-grade after-school program and despite my overly sweaty face and dirty hands, after playing an intense game of handball, the lyrics of “You Belong With Me” have remained permanently etched into my soul. After getting home, I sat in front of our old PC before even washing the dirty residue off my fingers and scavenged the internet for that song. Slowly typing to the best of my abilities any words that I could remember from the music or rather, the few words I knew how to spell since the spelling hasn’t always been a strong suit of mine. It wasn't until my brother helped me that I found the music video, along with the music video to “Picture to Burn '' and a few others, that I fell in love with Taylor Swift. To this day, a few many years later, Taylor Swift remains one of my favorite singers owning multiple albums, and vinyls. Simply because she happened to be playing on the radio that day after school.
Radio stations today don’t hold the same power as they did a few years back. Music is no longer made popular through radio stations, but rather there’s a new means of streaming. Young teens and school aged children have new ways of discovering their life-altering musical artists. In a place where people post dances, food, makeup, and styling videos which rose to prominence in 2020, the massive social media platform Tiktok.
While the main purpose of Tik Tok is to post entertaining videos it has managed to overpower other social media apps such as Instagram and Youtube but has also conquered the music world. A song will go viral on the platform, due to millions of people using segments of the audio in their videos. Once a song goes ‘viral’ the song will then be played and overplayed on every radio station and grocery store for the next 6 months. App creators have also developed the trend of “speeding” up music, and due to the mass popularity and success of sped-up songs on the app, it has led to artists releasing their own “sped-up” versions of songs. Similarly, multiple rising singers will get their big break from the app after their songs go viral on the app. Such as Katie Macleod whose 1-minute clip of her song “Complex” reached over 8 million people, and resulted in her getting signed with Columbia Records. While TikTok has helped ignite new artists and their careers it has also brought music back such as Lily Allen’s “Smile” released in 2006 or Mariah Carey’s “It’s a wrap” released in 2009.
While before artists catered music to a vast audience in order to reach as many listeners as possible. The artists of today don’t need a vast audience or broad spectrum of listeners, just simply need their song to go viral on Tiktok, to become a dance, singing, or an entertaining trend such as running dramatically down an empty parking lot. TikTok has become the new media that artists live up to in order to expect success in their projects, from music to shows, to film. If the internet, particularly on Tik Tok, is talking about it, the probability the show has reached mass success is highly likely.
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