Is There a Bad Way for Songs to Go Viral?

Thirteen years ago, the then-unknown teenager Rebecca Black posted her song “Friday” to YouTube, hoping to spark her music career. We all remember what happened next. The song, which amassed 171M views and 881K comments on YouTube to date, was pushed up the Billboard charts, peaking at No. 58 on the Hot 100. “Friday” was a true cultural phenomenon — but only because it was a laughingstock. 

“I became unbelievably depressed,” Black said of the song’s meme-ification — and the cyberbullying that came with it — on Good Morning America in 2022. “And [I felt] trapped in this body of what the world would see me as forever. I hadn’t even finished growing.” 

Many music makers dream of waking up one morning and realizing a song of theirs has gone viral overnight. But, as Black’s experience shows, not all virality is created equal. At best, it can bring a Hot 100 hit, radio play and a slew of new, lifelong fans. At worst, it can be the artists’ worst nightmare.

One such worst-case scenario recently took place with Gigi D’Agostino’s 1999 Italo dance track “L’amour Toujours,” which was recently co-opted by the German far-right. In a popular video posted to social media, a group of young men sang the song outside a bar on the German island Sylt, replacing the original lyrics with a Neo-Nazi slogan that translates roughly to “Germany to the Germans, out with the foreigners.” As they chanted the xenophobic lyric, one of the men raised his arm in a Nazi-like salute. Another put two fingers to his upper lip in a seeming allusion to Adolf Hitler’s characteristic mustache. 

After that, several events in Germany, including Oktoberfest in Munich, looked into banning the song, and D’Agostino replied to an inquiry from German newspaper Der Spiegel with a written statement, claiming that he had no idea what had happened.

Granted, the circumstances of virality are rarely that bad, but songs commonly end up on an “unintended side of TikTok,” as Sam Saideman, CEO/co-founder of management and digital market firm Innovo, puts it. “We try to educate our partners that sometimes you cannot control what uses of your song [are] on the internet.” While Innovo “may plan a campaign to [pay creators to] use the song in get-ready-with-me makeup videos,” he explains, another user’s totally different kind of video using the song could become far more popular than the originally planned use, pushing the campaign organically onto another part of the platform and away from its target audience. 

For example, Twitter and TikTok users twisted “Cellophane,” FKA Twigs’ heartbreaking 2019 ballad about unrequited love, into a meme beginning in early 2022. Oftentimes, videos using the song pair Twigs’ voice with creators that are acting melodramatic about things that are clearly no big deal. Even worse, one popular version of the audio replaces Twigs’ voice with Miss Piggy’s (yes, the Muppet character). 

“Digital marketers are able to boost certain narratives they support,” says Connor Lawrence, chief marketing officer of Indify, an angel investing platform that helps indie artists navigate virality. “It happens a lot — marketers boosting a narrative that is most favorable to the artist’s vision to hopefully steer it.” Saideman says he likes to keep a “reactionary budget” on hand during his song campaigns in case they need to try to course-correct a song that is headed in the wrong direction. 

But digital marketing teams can’t do much to fix another bad type of song virality: when songs blow up before the artist is ready. “I am actively hoping that my baby artist does not go viral right now,” says one manager who wished to remain anonymous to protect their client’s identity. “They need to find their sound first.” Omid Noori, president/co-founder of management company and digital marketing agency ATG Group, adds, “It’s a real challenge when someone goes viral for something when they aren’t ready to capitalize on it, or even worse, the song that took off sounds nothing like anything you want to make again.”

Ella Jane, an indie-pop artist who went viral in 2020 for making a video that explained the lyrics to her song “Nothing Else I Could Do,” says that going viral early in her artistic career had positive and negative effects. She signed a deal with Fader Label and boosted her following, but she’s also still dealing with the downsides four years later. “I’m grateful for it, but I think because my first taste of having a successful song was inextricable from TikTok, it has cast a shadow on my trajectory in some ways,” she says.

Over her next releases, Jane says she chased the algorithm, like many of her peers who experienced TikTok hits early in their careers, trying out lots of different video gimmicks to hook listeners. “It doesn’t reflect who I am as an artist now,” she says. “That feeling is addicting, and you feel like you’re withdrawing from it when your videos don’t hit. It can leave artists at a point where they’re obsessed with metrics.” This obsession has been reinforced by some record labels who use metrics as the only deciding factor in whether or not to sign a new artist.

“This is no different than hitting the lottery,” Noori says. “Imagine you get the $100 million jackpot on your first try… It makes artists feel like failures before they even really get started.” 

As artists are increasingly instructed by well-meaning members of their team to make as many TikToks as possible, some have turned to sharing teasers of unfinished songs as a form of content — which have occasionally gone viral unintentionally, despite not even being fully written and recorded. That’s what happened to songs by Good Neighbours, Leith Ross, Katie Gregson MacLeod and Lizzy McAlpine, leading many of them to rush to finish recordings so they could capitalize on their spotlight before it faded.

“People put a lot of pressure on the recorded version,” says Gregson MacLeod, whose acoustic piano version of her song “Complex” went viral before she had recorded the official master. “If it is not exactly like the sound that went viral, if you don’t sing the words in the exact same way or use the exact same key, sometimes people decide, ‘We’re not having it.’” While she says she was ultimately happy with how it all turned out, not everyone is so lucky. Within two weeks of the song’s virality, she rushed to release a “demo” version to match the rawness of her original video, as well as a produced version, earning her a combined 43 million plays on Spotify alone. 

McAlpine, however, decided to run away from her unfinished viral song. After posting a popular video of herself playing a half-written song, she told her fans in a TikTok video, “I’m not releasing that song ever because I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel genuine. It never felt genuine. I wrote it for fun. It wasn’t something I was ever going to release, or even going to finish… That is not who I am as an artist; in fact, I think I’m the opposite… I’m not concerned with overnight success. I’m not chasing that… I want to build a long-lasting career.” 

Noori says TikTok virality in particular has led to a “huge graveyard of one-hit wonders,” something that is far more common today than the bygone days of traditional, human gatekeepers. “With the algorithm, how do you even know who saw your content?” he asks. 

Still, there’s an argument to be made that perhaps, as P.T. Barnum famously said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” “I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot and whether or not it is true for virality,” says Saideman. “And it’s hard to say.” 

Black ultimately reclaimed “Friday” and her music career in 2021 by getting in on the joke, turning the decade-old cult hit into a hyperpop remix, produced by Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs and featuring Big Freedia, Dorian Electra and 3Oh!3. From there, Black continued to release music as a queer avant pop artist and played an acclaimed DJ set at Coachella in 2023. Still, the original version of “Friday” is her most popular song on Spotify by a long shot, even though it was released before the streaming era began.

“The beauty and curse of these platforms, especially TikTok today,” Saideman says, “is that they are remix platforms. When you put your music on them, you are opening your music up creatively to other people using it in positive and negative ways. You can’t have one without the other.”

This story was featured in Billboard’s new music technology newsletter ‘Machine Learnings.’ Sign up to receive Machine Learnings, and Billboard’s other newsletters, for free here.

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