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Warner Music Group and TikTok struck a multi-year licensing deal allowing creators on the short-form video app to use WMG music on Tuesday, marking the first publicly announced deal between a major music company since the popular social media platform since licensing renegotiations began about 18 months ago.
The companies said in a joint statement that the multi-platform agreement licenses the full repertoire of Warner Recorded Music and Warner Chappell Music to TikTok, TikTok Music, CapCut, and TikTok’s Commercial Music Library.
It is the first sizeable deal struck since WMG’s Chief Executive Officer Robert Kyncl took over in January, and it marks the cooling of what has at times been tough negotiations between TikTok and the music industry establishment.
Kyncl and TikTok’s chief execurtive Shou Chew said the agreement would benefit artists.
“We are very excited to partner with Warner Music Group to create a shared vision for the future in which artists, songwriters, music fans and the industry can all benefit from the power of discovery on TikTok platforms,” Chew said.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Kyncl described the deal as an “expanded and significantly improved partnership for both companies. We can jointly deliver greater value to WMG’s artists and songwriters and TikTok’s users.”
TikTok has been engaged in ongoing negotiations for roughly the last year over remuneration to the 100-plus rights holders through whom it must license music played on its app. Billboard reported that TikTok had struck short-term licensing deals in 2020 with most major music companies–shorter than the 18-24-month licenses common between the music and tech industries–to use 30-second clips of songs.
But negotiations to reach more permanent agreements had been fraught, with the music industry pushing for greater incentives for rights holders and TikTok exploring what music was really worth on its platform.
Kyncl’s WMG being the first to announce it struck an agreement with TikTok comes after he signaled a friendlier tone during comments he made at a banking conference in March. Kyncl expressed empathy for executives at TikTok at the Morgan Stanley conference, who he said are at “a company that’s kind of embattled today with lots of different institutions around the world.”
“That’s all I look for, fair setup on both sides and to grow a business together,” Kyncl said in March.
TikTok has announced the launch of ‘Elevate,’ its program to uplift emerging artists both through in-app promotion and the sponsorship of in-person events. The inaugural class for Elevate includes artists CHINCHILLA, Sam Barber, Omar Courtz, Isabel LaRosa, Kaliiii, and Lu Kala.
In an exclusive interview with Billboard, TikTok’s North America artist partnerships lead, Rachel Dunham, says the program is designed to “represent artists across diverse genres and backgrounds, signed and unsigned,” she says. “The main intention of this program is really to help artists create sustained careers.”
To do this, the Elevate program will provide its talent with promotion on the @musicontiktok social handles and will host concerts in each of them in their hometowns until the end of the program in October. This year’s class is from is from a range of places, including Canada, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Puerto Rico, and the U.K. and TikTok’s artist team will “amplify” their local, in-person activations with Elevate artists “so that the rest of the world can be introduced to them through the lens of their hometowns and their roots,” says Dunham.
The news comes as the social media app continues to expand its reach into the music business. Earlier this month, TikTok launched a “social media streaming service” called TikTok Music in Brazil and Indonesia, replacing previous TikTok-founded streaming service Resso, which was launched in March 2020 in India, Indonesia and later Brazil. The new TikTok Music will be a subscription based service that allows users to synch their existing TikTok accounts in order to listen to, share, and download the tracks they discover on the social media app.
The company is also continuing to build its roster with SoundOn, its music distribution service that is aimed at helping independent emerging artists get music onto all streaming services. The tool was originally launched in Brazil and Indonesia in early 2022 and then in the U.S. and the U.K. shortly after. It was expanded to Australia in February 2023.
According to Dunham, Elevate is “separate from those efforts, but as those efforts continue to build we will absolutely leverage them when possible.”
TikTok joins the likes of YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud and others in forming a program geared towards amplifying young talent through on-platform promotion, but Dunham highlights a key difference in TikTok’s Elevate: “The level of discoverability that TikTok provides I think is truly unparalleled. That’s a huge credit to our recommendation system as well,” she says. “I think it’s also pretty incredible that unlike other platforms where artists just share content to their fans, on TikTok, the fans are sharing content back and using the artists’ music to soundtrack their lives too. It creates this incredible feedback loop.”
According to the company, more details will be revealed about Elevate as the program continues into the fall.
Diego Gonzalez started making his own music in 2020, inspired in part by some of the tracks he loved from The Kid LAROI’s first album. “I was using GarageBand on my phone at the time,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what else to use.”
While killing time on TikTok, he came across posts from other artists praising BandLab, another free app that aims to make it easy for aspiring creators to create instrumental tracks and record vocals with a mobile phone. Gonzalez took to it quickly, especially the presets that add clarity and heft to a vocal. “You don’t need 1,000 buttons on there to make something sound good,” he says. With BandLab, he recorded his breakout hit, a mournful 6/8 ballad titled “You & I” that has more than 50 million Spotify streams.
For now, many of BandLab’s most successful users look outside the platform for beats. thekid.ACE, Luh Tyler and Gonzalez say they usually start by finding premade instrumentals on YouTube. “I’ll look up ‘indie-pop type beat’ or ‘R&B Daniel Caesar type beat,’ ” Gonzalez says. Then it’s a matter of seconds to download the right instrumental, open it in BandLab and “start thinking of random melodies,” explains thekid.ACE. He has made a pair of viral songs with BandLab, “Imperfect Girl” (7.3 million Spotify streams) and “Fun and Forget” (8.6 million).
Pop stars pay good money to vocal producers to adjust their pitch and stitch together the best parts of multiple takes. But BandLab lets users replicate a similar process with a few clicks, adding echo, toning down the “s” sounds and upping distortion. Built-in vocal preset options run from very specific — “Punchy Rap,” “Hype Vox” — to “let’s see what this does”: “70s Ballad,” “Sky Sound.” On top of that, “it’s insanely simple to make your own presets and adjust the reverb or the compressor,” thekid.ACE says. “Auto-Tune is super easy to do.”
SSJ Twiin, who has also enjoyed some viral success with BandLab tracks, recently started experimenting with a new panning feature that automatically throws his vocal from left to right. He’s also a fan of the harmony function that “takes your original vocal and layers it with that exact same vocal plus two semitones, another one plus four, another plus six and so on,” he says.
BandLab’s interface looks like a more cheery, streamlined version of a program like Pro Tools — each vocal or instrument track separated into a bright, clickable sound wave. “People will say BandLab is not a real [digital audio workstation],” SSJ Twiin notes. “But it’s getting to the point where there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do.”
Jacob Byrnes, director of creator relations and content strategy for the music strategy and tactics team at Universal Music Group, spends a good chunk of his day scrolling through TikTok. Last fall, he noticed a marked shift in the type of videos appearing on his For You page: “It all turned into screen captures of people playing productions they made on BandLab,” he says.
BandLab provides its 60 million-plus registered users, 40% of whom are women, with music-making software that includes an arsenal of virtual instruments, as well as the ability to automatically generate multipart vocal harmonies, record, sample and manipulate sound in myriad ways. It’s a toolbox that allows them to create professional-sounding recordings on their phones with surprising ease, transforming every civilian into a potential hit-maker. BandLab can also distribute music to streaming services, and it incorporates components of a social network: Musicians can create individual profiles, chat with one another, comment on their peers’ releases, solicit advice or break up a song into its component pieces and share those to crowdsource remixes.
The free app launched in 2016, but it has become almost inescapable over the last 12 months: 200 million videos tagged with #bandlab appeared on TikTok in April. The music industry has taken note of the ease with which users can make songs — “Labels love BandLab because it allows artists to create music for very cheap,” says one music attorney — and the velocity that some songs have picked up on streaming platforms. “There are random kids on there generating streams like crazy,” says Nima Nasseri, vp of A&R strategy at UMG. “Their monthly listeners are going from zero into the millions, and they’re doing it all from the palm of their hand.”
“It’s like other segments of the [music] internet that explode — one artist [broke] and now you’re seeing a ton of them go,” adds Jordan Weller, head of artist and investor relations at indify, a platform that helps independent acts find investors. “That’s what makes it attractive for the community. Now all of these other kids recognize that they can build careers off of BandLab — that it’s a potential pathway.”
The artists wielding BandLab are not stuck in one mode — Diego Gonzalez and d4vd enjoyed success with lovelorn ballads; Luh Tyler makes slippery, bass-heavy hip-hop; thekid.ACE favors breezy guitars; ThxSoMch trafficks in shades of post-punk. Several have landed record deals — Gonzalez with Island, d4vd with Darkroom/Interscope, Tyler with Motion Music/Atlantic, ThxSoMch with Elektra and thekid.ACE with APG — while d4vd and ThxSoMch have also landed on Billboard’s charts. (All are teenagers except ThxSoMch, an elder statesman of sorts at 21.) Other acts like SSJ Twiin and kurffew have picked up more than 15 million Spotify plays apiece while remaining independent.
Even BandLab’s CEO is surprised by this wave of breakthroughs. Meng Ru Kuok says he always hoped to have an artist chart with a song made on his platform, but “the fact that it already happened last year with d4vd” — whose “Romantic Homicide” peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 — “was ahead of schedule.”
When Meng co-founded BandLab, he wanted to capitalize on the technological shift “from a desktop ecosystem to a mobile one”; phones represented “a musical instrument in everybody’s pocket.” He also aimed to open up audio tools to the large swath of the global population that couldn’t afford iPhones, which came with another digital audio workstation, GarageBand. BandLab makes money by taking a cut for artist services like distribution and promotion.
Artists who favor BandLab say it is remarkably frictionless to cut a vocal and smear it with effects or whip up a loop. It also has an artificial intelligence-powered SongStarter function that can automatically generate musical ideas based on a few inputs, though none of the artists who spoke for this story use it. BandLab “is easier than GarageBand; everything is in front of your face,” says keltiey, whose racing, helium-addled “Need” has over 14 million streams on Spotify.
“The more convenient you make something, the more it is going to be adapted,” says Mike Caren, founder of the publisher and independent label APG and a producer. “I used to buy full recording studios for people — Pro Tools, interfaces, [$20,000] packages of equipment.” In contrast, BandLab is free and portable. “I encourage my artists to use the platform as a way to get down spontaneous vocal ideas,” Caren says. He thinks most artists still don’t fully understand how many different tools are available within BandLab’s suite of tech; Meng says that over 40% of users work with more than two “core creation features,” but he hopes to boost that number to 99%.
When he’s not playing Fortnite with more than a dozen fellow BandLab users, thekid.ACE generally records on his bed. The same goes for Tyler, who says the ability to cut vocals in solitude was part of BandLab’s initial attraction: “I used to be nervous to rap in front of people; I just wanted to be by myself.” ThxSoMch recorded the vocals for “Spit in My Face!” in his bathroom, according to a video he posted on TikTok, while keltiey prefers to use the closet. “Her clothes would be all around,” says Velencia Wallace, keltiey’s mother and manager. “She almost had a fort.”
Young artists who get used to working quickly on BandLab in the comfort of their homes may find it hard to kick the habit, even once they have access to professional recording studios. “As the artists become more prominent, the labels want to wean them off BandLab — they want them to actually go into the studio and work with legitimate producers,” the music attorney says. “But the kids don’t want to; they want to stick to BandLab. I’ve seen situations where kids turn down big session opportunities with prominent writers and producers in favor of just doing their thing on BandLab.”
Tyler uses a studio, but says that “if I haven’t been there in a minute, I’ll just record a song on BandLab. I don’t like writing, so I’ll just do it on there and rerecord it.”
Not everyone in the music industry is sold on BandLab. One senior executive, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, was impressed with the tech. “Kids have never sounded this good at home,” he says. But so far, he continues, artists using BandLab haven’t become recognizable stars. While some of the songs stream, he notes, the acts behind them remain “faceless.” (This criticism is common in the streaming era.) In addition, the executive points out that posting BandLab sessions on TikTok has become so common that it might reach a point of oversaturation and lose steam, like previous trends before it.
Meng acknowledges there are doubters who think “this a fad.” But he’s quick to offer a rebuttal. “There are billions of people around the world who don’t have access to music-making on their mobile devices,” he says, warming to his theme. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface. There’s a lot more to come.”
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Lady Gaga defeats a lawsuit claiming she owes a $500,000 reward to a woman convicted over the 2021 gunpoint robbery of the star’s French bulldogs; Kanye West faces another lawsuit about allegations of unsafe conditions at his Donda Academy; Diddy makes new racism accusations in an unsealed version of his tequila lawsuit; and much more.
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THE BIG STORY: Lady Gaga Doesn’t Have To Pay Her Dog-Napper
When Jennifer McBride sued Lady Gaga in February, demanding that the star pay out on a $500,000 reward she’d offered for the return of her stolen French bulldogs, McBride left out one very small detail: that she herself had been convicted of a crime over the violent 2021 robbery.
McBride was one of five people charged in connection with the Feb. 2021 gunpoint dog-napping, in which Gaga’s dog walker, Ryan Fischer, was shot and nearly killed. Though she returned the dogs days after the incident and claimed she’d found them tied to a pole, police later connected McBride to the thieves and she eventually pleaded out to one count of receiving stolen property.
But in a chutzpah-laden civil lawsuit, McBride claimed that Gaga made a binding “unilateral” offer to pay the reward in return for the safe return of the dogs, citing media reports that the offer would be paid with “no questions asked.” McBride said that regardless of her role in the crime, she had simply held up her end of a valid contract.
Gaga’s attorneys begged to differ, arguing last month that it would be absurd to allow McBride to “profit from her participation in a crime” even if she had eventually returned the dogs: “The law does not allow a person to commit a crime and then profit from it,” Gaga’s lawyers wrote.
In a ruling on Monday (July 10), Judge Holly J. Fujie agreed with those arguments, dismissing the case. To find out why, go read our entire story, which contains a link to the judge’s full written ruling.
Other top stories this week…
MORE DONDA ACADEMY ACCUSATIONS – Kanye West was hit with another lawsuit about allegedly unsafe conditions at his Donda Academy, including the bizarre accusation that the school lacked windows because the embattled rapper “did not like glass.” The case came months after a separate case that claimed the rapper fed students only sushi and that he was “afraid of stairs.”
NEW CLAIMS IN DIDDY TEQUILA CASE – An unredacted version of Diddy’s lawsuit against Diageo revealed new details about his allegations that the spirits giant unfairly treated his DeLeon Tequila as a “Black brand.” Among the new accusations was a claim that Diageo developed a watermelon flavor despite Diddy’s protests about the racist history and negative connotations with watermelon in brands aimed at Black consumers.
DABABY DROPPED FROM ‘LEVITATING’ CASE – The rapper was voluntarily dismissed from a copyright lawsuit accusing him and Dua Lipa of ripping off their smash hit “Levitating” from a 1979 song called “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and a 1980 song called “Don Diablo.” The rapper had been named because he was featured on a popular remix of Lipa’s smash hit, which spent more than a year on the Hot 100.
CHALLENGE TO TIKTOK BAN – TikTok and a group of five users asked a federal judge to block Montana from enforcing its first-in-the-nation law banning the video-sharing app from the state, warning that the law is unconstitutional and could cause irreparable harm if allowed to go into effect in January.
ARETHA FRANKLIN ESTATE BATTLE – A jury in Michigan decided that a handwritten document created by singer Aretha Franklin in 2014 and found in her couch after her 2018 death was a valid will, overriding a 2010 will that was discovered around the same time in a locked cabinet.
TikTok and a group of five content creators who are suing the state of Montana over its first-in-the-nation law to ban the video sharing app are now asking a federal judge to block implementation of the law while the case moves through the courts and before it takes effect in January.
The separate requests for preliminary injunctions were filed Wednesday in federal court in Missoula. The cases challenging the law were filed in May and have since been consolidated by U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen had the bill drafted over concerns — shared by the FBI and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken — that the app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could be used to allow the Chinese government to access information on U.S. citizens or push pro-Beijing misinformation that could influence the public. TikTok has said none of this has ever happened.
The motions for injunctions make the same arguments as the cases against the state — that the ban is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights and that the state has no authority to regulate foreign affairs.
Attorneys on both sides have agreed to a schedule that calls for the state to respond to the motions by mid-August and for the plaintiffs to file their replies by mid-September, court records state.
The company and the Montana content creators argue a preliminary injunction should be granted because the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their challenges to the law and if the ban took effect it would cause irreparable harm by depriving them of the ability to express themselves and communicate with others.
TikTok has safeguards to moderate content and protect minors, and would not share information with China, the company has argued. But critics have pointed to China’s 2017 national intelligence law that compels companies to cooperate with the country’s governments for state intelligence work.
“TikTok users don’t use the app – the app uses them and turns them into a spying apparatus for the Chinese Communist Party,” Emily Flower, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office, said in a statement that also noted recent reporting that TikTok is paying for the lawsuit filed by the content creators. “TikTok’s ‘support’ is bought and paid for – Montanans recognize the threat that the app poses to their privacy and national security.”
More than half of U.S. states, including Montana, and the federal government have banned TikTok from government-owned devices.
Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law in May, saying Montana was taking “the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.”
As of June 1, Gianforte also prohibited the use of any social media apps tied to foreign adversaries on state equipment and for state businesses. Among the apps he listed are WeChat, whose parent company is headquartered in China; and Telegram Messenger, which was founded in Russia.
TikTok is launching a new “social music streaming service” in Indonesia and Brazil, the company announced Thursday (July 6).
TikTok Music is a premium-only service that users will be able to synch with their existing TikTok accounts in order to listen to, share and download the tracks they discover on TikTok. The service is available starting now in both countries; all new TikTok Music users will be offered a one-month free trial.
TikTok Music will launch with a “full catalogue of music from thousands of labels and artists,” according to a press release. That includes Sony Music, whose catalog hasn’t been available on TikTok’s existing streaming service, Resso, since September. The release adds that Sony’s catalog will become available on Resso again beginning Thursday.
Following Thursday’s launch, Resso — which launched in March 2020 in India and Indonesia before later being made available in Brazil — will cease operating in both Indonesia and Brazil on Sept. 5. Existing Resso users will be invited to transfer their accounts to TikTok Music “with the click of a button,” the release states.
TikTok’s pivot to a subscription-based streamer began in May, when its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, announced that Resso would become a premium-only service.
Among other features, TikTok Music subscribers will have the ability to swipe up and down on the app to explore personalized music recommendations; connect with “like-minded” music fans; sing along to real-time lyrics; co-create collaborative playlists with friends; import their music libraries from external playlists; and search for lyrics to discover songs, according to the press release. The service will include uninterrupted ad-free listening and a download function allowing users to listen to music offline.
“We are pleased to introduce TikTok Music, a new kind of service that combines the power of music discovery on TikTok with a best-in-class streaming service. TikTok Music will make it easy for people in Indonesia and Brazil to save, download and share their favourite viral tracks from TikTok,” said Ole Obermann, global head of music business development at TikTok, in a statement. “We are excited about the opportunities TikTok Music presents for both music fans and artists, and the great potential it has for driving significant value to the music industry.”
For more than a year, ByteDance has been signaling its intention to launch a music streaming service that would compete with Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube. In spring 2022, the company registered the handles @TikTokMusic on both Twitter and Instagram; that May, it also filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a service under the same name. In October, Billboard confirmed that ByteDance was in conversations with all major music rights holders to launch its music streaming service in additional countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
The launch of TikTok Music is a potential game-changer for the music industry, as rights holders have pressured the company to embrace a subscription model over an ad-supported one. Streaming subscriptions are a primary driver of music industry revenue, with paid subscription streaming revenue surpassing $10 billion in the United States for the first time last year, according to the RIAA. It accounts for 77% of all streaming revenue and nearly two-thirds of total revenue.
TikTok is helping bring Tomorrowland 2023 to the world.
On Wednesday (July 5), the dance mega-festival announced the video-sharing platform as its official content partner for the event, which is taking place over two weekends in Boom, Belgium: July 21-23 and July 28-30.
The partnership will include TikTok LIVE broadcasts of headline performances from the festival’s main stage, along with behind-the-scenes footage and video-on-demand content from artists and other creators. TikTok will stream Tomorrowland content 24 hours a day across both weekends.
Additionally, the partnership encompasses in-app playlists, a search hub and activations designed to make it easier for TikTok users to find content from the festival.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with Tomorrowland, one of the world’s biggest and most iconic festivals,” TikTok business development lead of global music content and partnerships Michael Kümmerle said in a statement. “With its legendary line-up and global audience, Tomorrowland is the perfect festival partner for our flourishing community of #ElectronicMusic lovers who congregate on TikTok. As our relationship with the genre deepens, we’re incredibly excited to help grow the festival further by giving our community 24 live streams and a 360-degree experience of Tomorrowland on TikTok.”
Tomorrowland 2023 is set to host more than 600 artists across 14 stages. Performers include Afrojack, Alesso, Armin van Buuren, Black Coffee, the Chainsmokers, Claptone, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, Dom Dolla, Don Diablo, Eric Prydz, Hardwell, John Newman, Martin Garrix, Netsky, Nicky Romero, Oliver Heldens, Paul Kalkbrenner, Purple Disco Machine, Robin Schulz, Sebastian Ingrosso, Shaquille O’Neal as DJ Diesel, Steve Angello, Steve Aoki, Tiësto, Timmy Trumpet, Topic and W&W.
The festival is once again set to host 400,000 fans each weekend.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance launched its own music creation tool called Ripple on Friday (June 30th) for a small group of beta testers in the U.S.
Ripple offers audio recording and editing capabilities as well as a “melody to song” function, which allows users to hum a melody and spits out an instrumental version of it in an assortment of genres. TikTokers could use it to create sounds for their videos.
The beta launch of Ripple makes sense at a time when the music industry is increasingly cognizant of the fact that young listeners are no longer content to sit back and just listen to someone else’s song — they want to add their own twist, or even make one themselves. Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music, told a conference earlier this year that listeners “want to put their fingerprints on the song.”
This is becoming a common sentiment: Surveys show “how much Gen Z wants to actively participate in music,” Tatiana Cirisano, music industry analyst and consultant at Midia Research, told Billboard last year. In March, John Fleckenstein, COO of RCA Records, told Billboard that “Gen Z has an expectation, because they’ve grown up as digital natives, that if you do something, they can iterate or comment on it. That doesn’t end in the comments section of a social media post: It’s now bleeding into the art itself.”
One of the companies that has had a lot of success by making it easy for the masses to make music music is BandLab, a free app which had more than 60 million registered creators pumping out more than 16 million songs a month at the start of the year. Meng Ru Kuok, the company’s CEO, is fond of saying “we think everyone is a creator, including fans.”
Right now, millions of aspiring creators use BandLab or GarageBand or another program to make or manipulate audio, which they might then upload to TikTok as an original sound. But if Ripple becomes popular, TikTok’s massive user-base could produce soundtracks for their videos without ever leaving a ByteDance app.
And ByteDance has already launched another popular app that meshes well with TikTok: CapCut. CapCut “makes it a lot easier for your everyday user to be able to create more polished videos,” Jen Darmafall, director of marketing at ATG Group, told Billboard earlier this year. “You don’t have to have a particular skill set when it comes to editing — there are templates on the platform for you to go and plug in what you want, whether it’s photos or videos or text overlays or transitions. That’s helped it skyrocket.”
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Briana Brown makes her living as a licensed aesthetician and MUA, which is evident in her stunning looks. The Tennessee native also enjoys a robust social media following via her growing presence on TikTok and Instagram, and we’re honored to feature her in our latest Baes & Baddies feature.
Briana Brown hasn’t revealed much about herself online, but she has managed to amass over 45,000 followers on TikTok and over 27,000 followers on Instagram. One thing we truly enjoy about Ms. Brown is that she has tons of personality, which shows in her dances and looks. She’s also known to shout out fashion brands like Fashion Nova.
Brown is also someone coming into her own and embracing her curves, something she recently spoke about on Facebook. As is the case for many women of her physical stature, growing into accepting what nature gave her is a journey, and she is inspiring others out there to own their beauty on terms that fit them.
From Facebook:
I use to be extremely self-conscious of my body, especially as a young girl. Picked on in elementary & middle school bc I was the only girl that was developing quickly. Older men hitting on me, etc. It has taken awhile for me to gain the confidence to walk in this body & I’m finally at a point where I’m starting to love all of me & wear what I think is beautiful despite what others may think. There are struggles at times, but I’m currently in my “eff it” era so if you don’t like it…keep it pushing bc I love me some me!
To stay connected with Briana Brown, we suggest following her TikTok page here. We’ll share images from Instagram in the gallery below.
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Photo: @briana.aileen_b / Instagram