Attention, music lovers of the old school, melancholic of other times in which the records were heard from end to end while absorbing information from the booklet o Inside CD booklet: better put your wonder to the test because music industry news can be disconcerting.
Recently, the three largest record companies in the world (Warner Music, Sony and Universal Music Group) reached an agreement with the social platform TikTok, which in a certain way can be interpreted as that the luck of the songs will be played in videos of 15 seconds long.
That is how long the stories last in that social network, which is on the rise worldwide and especially among the youngest. And that repetition and viralization that reaches only a small portion of all the content that is uploaded there has become the new source of hits Generator of views of millions, far above other platforms, such as Spotify or YouTube.
That is the summary of a long note who developed the site TechRadar, entitled “TikTok is changing the rules of the music industry”, adding that “the future is here, and it lasts 15 seconds”.
To put it in context, it is worth saying that during 2020 and in full quarantine, the video platform was (after Zoom, obviously) one of the applications that grew the most in downloads and active users.
From there, absolutely unexpected phenomena occurred. Fleetwood Mac, for example, had an unusual revitalization after an unknown user of the platform reached stratospheric levels of viralization with a short clip of him skateboarding and drinking juice, while the band’s classic was playing, Dreams, from the year 1977.
But in reality there are many songs that can hit you randomly, such as the one that best illustrates bloopers on virals, known for her chorus that simply says “Oh no, no no no.” How to measure the “indecipherable carambola” that these may have hits virals in combination with algorithms, the original theme of that remix is Remember (walking in the sand), from an old girl band from the ’60s called The Shangri-las. Or, much more here and on another scale, what happened in recent years with the song The pupera, by Mona Jiménez, which today is synonymous with Friday and celebration in the social networks of Cordovan users.
“There are some elements that just ‘work’ in the app. We are looking for a 15 second vocal hook, often with clear and actionable words, a kind of call to action. Something that the user can apply to his own life, “he explained to TechRadar Dylan Easter, music partnership manager in the company of marketing in Fanbytes social networks.
The expert reveals that he has worked to position artists who on YouTube had three million views, and who on TikTok reach 17.4 million. That percentage would be a common difference between platforms.
Some sources in the music industry estimate that 50 percent of the songs played on TikTok are not licensed, which has sparked a long series of lawsuits with record labels (something that would now supposedly be solved with the signed agreement).
The “challenge” as a new standard
Often these phenomena occur with dances, movements or situations that become challenges, or challenges in the networks, which are replicated in an unstoppable domino effect of incalculable dimensions. What continues to sound is the music that accompanies the viral, while its reproduction grows exponentially.
Some analysts see a panorama in which all the singles (the format par excellence at this time in the music industry) are edited “by default” with their own challenge for its launch, almost as it happens naturally with video clips.
The music, well in the background
There are a couple of substantive questions to ask. The first and obvious one is that, like practically everything in this new pandemic reality, the music industry is extremely hit economically, with the sale of physical copies as a thing of the past (although they also explode the heart of the fan who pays whatever for the vinyls).
In this context, the figures produced by these digital platforms are of course more than tempting to point the guns at this form of consumption and see how monetization is achieved.
For the artists themselves, this also represents another interesting potential source of income, although they warn that, if the deal has been made with a major label, “they will only receive between 10 and 15 percent of the profits generated.”
And the second question is to ask oneself about the role, increasingly secondary and almost like ambient music, that is given to the songs. The songs become an instrument that no longer operates due to its own melodic, harmonic or semantic content characteristics due to its lyrics, but as an indissoluble complement as part of its exploitation within another larger platform, in this case TikTok.
To make matters worse, with the addition of the ultravolatility of these times: if the miracle does not occur in 15 seconds, a scroll and another thing, that for something they have made them infinite.
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