Dances, beauty, unparalleled filters, magic and a lot of humor. The superficiality and the evasion before a screen have taken the power and absorbed the time of Generation Z (1995-2009); and even without being “legal” it is already being explored by the Alpha (as of 2010).
Playfulness prevails on the Tiktok platform, heir to Music.ly and with an evident attachment to musical content. From the initial six seconds, to the fifteen that could be concatenated, today creating four videos of up to 1 minute.
The boom in the pandemic period has made them even consider extend to three minutes the average length of the tracks of commercial songs for radio supports.
What does not go unnoticed in any case is that the youngest have a completely shocking use for laymen: What do they do? Ridicule? “Morritos” changing the backgrounds or just flirting on camera?
A new context, a new danger
From the outset, the gaze has to adapt to a new context and thus be able to understand its potential, or the dangers in the age group it affects. TikTok users often share content with people their age, but there are also many videos that include their elders, who they have put to do choreography or sing in duets.
Among the variety of new “influencers” are specialists in lipsyncs (the old playback, that is, make the lips coincide with the letter as in an audiovisual dubbing). Also those who do silly faces O sounds with his throat, virtuosos who do magic or countless comic accounts with situations of daily life, as a personal reading of life compared to the interpretation of adults.
More homogeneous and with patterns
The degree of engagement with its users is similar to that of YouTube. But the particularity of this network is that the guidelines for creators have been much more defined, and for this reason it is a more homogeneous network in the format of the published pieces.
TikTok offers the rankings by categories such as virals, memes, creation, celebrities, voices and niche. The great winner of this 2020 has been Jason Derulo (1989). And this leadership has not only been due to his songs, personal account and videos, but also and especially, to the creation of Savage Love, original melody Laxed(Siren Beat) by singer Jawsh 685.
A new ‘star system’
The challenges of confinement and the cancellation of tours made many singers find in social networks a way to retain new audiences. This, and the boom in TikTok’s 14- to 26-year-old segment, have made the select celebrity club of the mass media has been drawn into these communicative formulas so as not to be left out of the new star system.
They have done so by adapting the narrative to what these audiences demand and feel credible. Not with an anodyne and marketinian echo account of his work done.
Will Smith is an example of this recent jump. His account has videos that include special effects and a very funny editing, which matches the projected personality of the actor and singer. It also grows rapidly Reese Witherspoon, as it looks natural and adapts to the profile of dances, recipes and jokes.
Rise and dark side
In the sample that we have drawn up, among the users we have selected (celebrities outside TikTok, let’s say, and those who have become famous on the platform), two relevant aspects are evident: on the one hand, from December 2019 to the current year, They have seen a sudden increase in their followers due to the confinement situation.
And, on the other hand, the protagonists on TikTok do not coincide in any case with other common celebrity lists. Not even in the case of the music sector, where we observe how Adele, Rosalía or Mariah Carey do not have even a fifth of followers of Loren Gray. A tiktoker that, although she has some singles, she simply publishes videos of her dancing or doing… nothing.
This young woman with hairpieces and doll-like appearance takes us to a third important issue: the promotion of unattainable stereotypes that could be responsible, in part, for how these networks affect the depression of young people between 12 and 16 years old.
El FOMO (fear of missing out) and the great penetration of models to emulate, where the intellectual part is disdained, causes a devastating cascade effect. Well, success is measured by unhealthy parameters and the number of cases of disorders.
Traditional celebrities vs ‘tiktokers’
In the following table, the explosion that this platform has caused in the last year becomes tangible. It also shows us how none of the celebrities more “traditional” reaches 10 million followers. An almost laughable figure compared to the number of followers that the authentic protagonists of TikTok have. Likewise, it also shows how some of them like Meghan, Vadhird or Zurita have gone the other way and are now in the pink press or in the traditional media. His access to the film or music sectors was due to other social networks such as YouTube or Vine.
The duet revolution
The duet function represents a qualitative leap in the type of relationship that users establish with the celebrities they “follow”: with it they can share the screen and song directly with the international stars they are fans of.
Singing together with someone from whom you are physically separated has been one of the revolutions and successes of 2020. Duets can now even move to trios, giving those pieces a greater tour. As we have gathered from sources of the company TikTok, it is not possible to know how many duets are made of a published song.
But what we can affirm after this observation is that the consideration of this lack of control of authorized diffusion is interesting for the artist, given the direct impact on the public that he achieves by being able to access this modality of interaction.
And there is the trick: beyond the manipulations of the image, for celebrities it is a good deal, since they achieve the loyalty and empathy of the receiver through fun.
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