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Lizzo thinks it’s about d–n time for TikTok to stop excluding her videos from its algorithm. In a recent video, the hitmaker told her followers that she thinks the platform has shadow banned her after noticing that her posts have been performing suspiciously better on Instagram than on TikTok in terms of view counts. Explore […]
ByteDance is closing the free tier of its music streaming service Resso, the company announced on Wednesday (May 3). The move to premium-only streaming takes place on May 11, according to a statement from ByteDance, and current users on the ad-supported tier will be offered a 30-day free trial of the premium service.
“Resso premium is already a best-in-class music service with ad-free listening and a host of personalized and social features,” Ole Obermann, ByteDance’s global head of music, said in a statement. “Resso’s move to a premium-only service will allow the development of a better user experience for music fans, while increasing opportunities for rightsholders and artists. We are committed to building the world’s leading social music streaming platform and ensuring artists and music creators can rightly benefit from its growing success.”
ByteDance initially launched Resso in March 2020; it is currently available only in India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Last year, ByteDance entered into conversations with major music rights holders about moving its music streaming service into additional countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
Those conversations are complicated by the fact that the music industry is hoping for better payouts from another ByteDance company, the massively successful app TikTok.
“No one right now wants to help ByteDance expand into significant material marketplaces without them fixing the TikTok situation,” an executive told Billboard last year. And Sony Music’s contract with Resso expired in September, meaning its catalog, including the music of stars like Beyoncé and Doja Cat, is not available on the service.
Streaming subscriptions are a key driver of music industry revenue. Paid subscription streaming revenue cracked $10 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2022, according to the RIAA, accounting for 77% of all streaming revenue and nearly two thirds of total revenue. This means it’s likely that the music industry will be heartened by Resso’s focus on growing its premium subscriber numbers.
“Their plans in subscription are something we definitely want to encourage,” a major label executive told Billboard last year. “We love to see that huge funnel of a billion consumers connected to a value-creative experience.”
Lizzo stripped down to nothing but swimwear to dance it out ahead of her show in St. Louis on Tuesday.
In the clip posted to TikTok, the singer wears a blue-and-white tie-dyed bikini, pink swim cap and oversize black shades as she gets down to “Shake Ya Tailfeather,” Nelly, P. Diddy and Murphy Lee’s 2004 single from the Bad Boys II soundtrack. In the background from her rooftop view, the famous St. Louis arch is clearly visible as sirens blare and the song starts with the rappers chanting, “We do it for fun/ We just do it for fun/ We Derrty ENT/ We do it for fun/ Bad Boy/ Nelly, Diddy, Murphy Lee!”
Lizzo is currently back on the road for another leg of her ongoing Special Tour, which has recently kicked off again with stops in Knoxville, Tenn. — where she trotted out drag queens Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, Kandy Muse, Aquaria and Asia O’Hara to protest the state’s discriminatory anti-drag and anti-LGBTQ+ laws — and Lexington, Ky. Next, she’s headed to Canada for a show at Montreal’s Bell Centre on May 4 before continuing on to Hartford, Conn.; Baltimore; Raleigh, N.C.; and beyond.
The pop star’s carefree dance moves prove she continues to remain determinedly unbothered by the recent onslaught of fat-phobic insults and other body-shaming commentary sparked by conservative commentator Candace Owens and perpetuated by swarms of online trolls.
Over the weekend, Lizzo emerged as the big winner at the 2023 Detroit Music Awards by taking home four awards and sweeping the night.
Watch Lizzo’s bikini-clad dance to “Shake Ya Tailfeather” below.
In timing that was surely coincidental, iconic OG jam band the Grateful Dead unrolled their first post on TikTok on Thursday (April 20). The ultimate toker’s band celebrated the universally beloved smoker holiday with a compilation video of archival footage set to a live, remastered take of “St. Stephen” recorded at the legendary Fillmore West in San Francisco in 1969.
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The @gratefuldead account was launched in conjunction withe Rhino Entertainment and a release promises that it will “serve as an outlet to celebrate the decades of music, generations of community, and endless array of creativity that has woven the band and its fans into every new era of the world’s counterculture and consciousness.”
The first 30-second clip pulls together archival concert footage, candid scenes from “Shakedown Street,” handmade fan artwork and snippets of Deadheads spinning and showing off their customized vans. A release promises “much more exclusive content” in the offing on a near-daily basis in the future a month after the debut of the band’s music on TikTok in March, which allowed users to used the group’s recordings in their videos for the first time.
The Dead are just the latest heritage act to make their way to the TikTok universe, following on the heels of fellow old schoolers Pink Floyd, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, who’ve all joined since 2021. The GD spin-off band, Dead & Company, will play their final shows this summer, with the last gigs slated to take place at San Francisco’s Oracle Park on July 14-16.
Check out the first GD TikTok video here.
Bebe Rexha is calling out TikTok for highlighting a suggested search questioning her weight.
“Seeing that search bar is so upsetting,” the pop star tweeted above a screenshot from the social app showing “bebe rexha weight” written into the related search history. “I’m not mad cause it’s true. I did gain weight. But it just sucks. Thank you to all the people who love me no matter what.”
The 2023 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards performer had already gotten support from fans in the very screenshot she posted, with one writing, “I [love] her for being so unique and real, she loves herself inside and outside and we can see it” with a heart-hands emoji. Another simply added, “Beautiful she is” to the hundreds of comments on TikTok.
Other Twitter users called out TikTok’s interface for suggesting the search terms in the first place. “Someone at @tiktokus’s policies team need change what comes up on the related search bar, right now! This is toxic and terrible!” wrote popular YouTuber Kandee Johnson. “@TikTokSupport you need to do better. Care about the people on your platform and not making it toxic like this.”
Meanwhile, Rexha’s self-titled third album BEBE is due April 28 via Warner Records, preceded by the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 David Guetta collab “I’m Good (Blue)” and the follow-ups “Heart Wants What It Wants” and “Call on Me.”
Check out Rexha’s tweet about TikTok below.
Seeing that search bar is so upsetting. I’m not mad cause it’s true. I did gain weight. But it just sucks. Thank you to all the people who love me no matter what. pic.twitter.com/EGkGybhcRY— Bebe Rexha (@BebeRexha) April 16, 2023
“New Home” is a pensive, wordless piano ballad — not the type of song that’s typically thought of as viral trend material on TikTok. But last month, Austin Farwell, who wrote and performed the track, noticed it appearing in a wave of videos. Many of these featured the actor Pedro Pascal munching peacefully on a sandwich — a snippet from the YouTube series Snack Wars — next to a block of text, something along the lines of “when you catch up with your friends and they’re all complaining about their trash men but you can’t relate cos your man is perfect and treats you like a princess every day.”
“I didn’t understand,” Farwell says. “I don’t know Pedro Pascal; I didn’t know why he was eating a sandwich. But if that’s the trend that people want to promote my music with, great.”
The Pascal videos were created using the program CapCut, which is owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. CapCut, which marketers joke is the new version of Apple’s Final Cut Pro, makes more advanced video editing techniques accessible to the masses, allowing clips like those with Pascal to be easily replicated and adjusted effectively with the click of a button. Chopping his calm chewing footage out of one video and into another is beyond many users’ technical ability. With CapCut, “you’re really not even editing, you’re choosing a template, adding something of your own, and the program is just generating this video for you,” says Abbey Fickley, a TikTok creator.
“They give you these slow motion effects, or make it go from blurry to super clear, or these glitchy cuts, which make the videos more dramatic,” Fickley continues. “That in turn makes the viewer more inclined to stay and watch it. It spices up your content — those editing features really do attract the viewer, instead of them just scrolling past it.”
Songs can be hitched to CapCut templates, so as they have proliferated on TikTok, they have become an important new area of focus for music marketers. “If you can match one of those [templates] to a sound that amplifies the video, or makes it more dynamic, then you suddenly have something that can act as a vessel for the sound to go viral,” explains Sanu Hariharan, co-head of music partnerships at Creed Media, a marketing company focused on Gen Z. “It’s been a really strong facilitator of user-generated content,” which is typically the metric that artist teams use to evaluate the success of marketing campaigns, especially on Tiktok but also on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
A major label executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity went further: “If you want to break a song on TikTok right now” — and everybody with commercial aspirations does — “you have to attach it to something from CapCut.” In recent months, these trends have helped drive listeners to “New Home,” Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (currently No. 32 on the Billboard Hot 100), a mash-up of Ice Spice’s “In Ha Mood” (peaked at No. 58 on the chart dated March 22), Deftones’ “Change (In the House of Flies),” Hollywood Undead’s “Everywhere I Go,” and more.
CapCut launched globally in 2020, and it topped the app charts as early as 2021. Much in the same way that new music production tools like BandLab’s SongStarter have made it simple for those with minimal experience to create credible-sounding tracks, CapCut “makes it a lot easier for your everyday user to be able to create more polished videos,” says Jen Darmafall, director of marketing at ATG Group. “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.”
In October, ByteDance made it even easier to jump between TikTok and CapCut: When users encountered a video on the former made with the latter, a new button allowed them to quickly start playing with the template on their own. Partly as a result of that change, “over the last six months or so,” clips made with CapCut are “in your face every day, non-stop, no matter what side of TikTok you’re on,” Darmafall says. CapCut clips are also peppering Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, further amplifying ByteDance’s influence in the social media market at a time when the company is facing intense scrutiny from the U.S. government.
Jess Keifer, director of digital strategy for Sony Music Nashville, noticed a CapCut trend set to “Fast Car” — a blurry scene, often accompanied by heart-warming text, that snaps into focus just as the singer up-shifts into the chorus — gain traction during the last week of March, leading to an “explosion” of similar TikTok clips. “It’s an easy source of inspiration for fans,” she says. Fickley hopped on the Combs trend and amassed a million views within two hours. “I’ve never had a video go viral that fast,” she says.
Much of TikTok’s appeal from the start has been that anyone can go viral, no matter how many followers you have or how long you’ve been using the platform. But to replicate the dance trends that were popular in the app’s early days, for example, a user either had to be good at dancing or comfortable with embarrassment. Neither are required to adjust a CapCut video template that riffs on Stranger Things‘ Finn Wolfhard or the cartoon Tom and Jerry.
“As you hop on the trending templates, you’re gonna get more views and visibility, which is what we all want,” explains Tim Gerst, CEO of digital marketing agency Thinkswell. “And so it becomes about, how can you find ways to take your own music or the things that you’re working on and implement it into templates that are trending?”
CapCut templates are especially useful for music marketers because they often come with songs attached to them. “Some people are having these templates created specifically for their sound or for the artist’s song that they are promoting,” Darmafall says. “And some of them are scouring TikTok for CapCuts every single day, finding the most popular templates, and putting their song to it” — seeing if they can sway a trend in their direction. “It’s so easy to unlink a sound and link a new sound to it,” Darmafall notes.
A common critique of TikTok is that it elevates songs but not artists: Millions of users might get obsessed with a snippet of a track but not bother to even figure out what the singer looks like. One advantage of CapCut templates is that artists can quickly jump on a trend that might otherwise take off without them. “It’s great for artists because it saves them time,” says Cassie Petrey, founder of the digital marketing company Crowd Surf. “We try to encourage our artists to use them as it makes sense for their brand,” Keifer adds.
Hariharan points to a recent video from Rag’n’Bone Man, where the gravel-voiced balladeer posted his own version of a CapCut template that was both set to his track “Human” and also included footage of the singer spinning in place. The Rag’n’Bone Man video earned more than 12 million views, easily outstripping any of his other recent clips. “This is a way that artists themselves can get in on the action,” Hariharan says. “It allows them to kind of unlock another layer, feed themselves in, increase their overall recognizability.”
“This is just going to become more and more important for us to pay attention to,” Keifer adds.
As the music industry becomes increasingly conscious of — and vocal about — the challenges of the streaming model, fraudulent streams have become a source of growing frustration. “Every penny that goes to a fraudulent stream is a penny that doesn’t go to a legitimate stream,” says Richard Burgess, president and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music. “Fraudulently increased stream counts can affect recording budgets, licensing deals, catalog valuations and can result in the misallocation of marketing budgets.”
The French government, which recently published the results of a months-long, country-wide investigation into streaming fraud, portrayed understanding the impacts of this activity as an imperative. “The stakes are high in our country as well as in the rest of the world: the development of music services, which can be free and financed by advertising, or paid through subscriptions, as individual or family plans, constitutes a tremendous opportunity for the music sector, after years of a long crisis,” the report asserted. “…Such growth whets the appetites and stimulates the creativity of those who seek to abuse the system.”
“The multiplication of fake streams, that is to say the processes allowing [bad actors] to artificially boost play counts or views to generate an income, is nothing short of theft,” the report continued.
The French study, conducted without data from YouTube, Apple Music, or Amazon Music, found that 1% to 3% of plays were fraudulent, while also noting somberly that “the reality of fake streams goes beyond what is detected.” BeatDapp, a Vancouver-based company that creates fraud detection software for labels, publishers, distributors and streaming services, believes the global level of fraud is higher. “In 2020, estimates were 3 to 10% of all streaming activity was fraud,” the company wrote in 2022. “Today, we confidently say it’s at least 10%, and more in some regions. That equals ~$2B in potentially misallocated streaming revenues this year, and will be ~$7.5B by 2030 if left unchecked.”
So what forms does streaming fraud take? According to Burgess, the practice “covers a multitude of techniques used to increase stream counts or impressions by other than legitimate means.”
Here are three of the most common:
Bots
Discussion of streaming fraud often turns quickly to bots, which Burgess defines as “automated software that can be used to generate views, streams or interactions.” To detect bot activity and prevent it from affecting royalty payouts, companies build models that trawl streaming data and look for listening patterns that appear anomalous: BeatDapp likes to discuss an example of finding tens of thousands of accounts all streaming the same 63 songs.
“If I’m trying to push numbers up, I’m going to do it across streaming services in a subtle fashion this way,” BeatDapp co-CEO Andrew Batey says. “Spread it across a lot of accounts and multiple platforms, and you can drive a significant number of plays with no one looking.”
Click Farms
Streaming services are looking for suspicious play patterns that don’t reflect human behavior. Fraudsters are aware of this, so they try to camouflage their activity in ways that appear human. One method is to get actual humans to press Play through what are known as “click farms.”
Eric Drott, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who has written about streaming fraud, describes these as “enterprises concentrating low-paid, precarious workers who are engaged to perform the sort of rote, repetitive tasks that keep the flows of digital capitalism moving: creating social media accounts, moderating content for platforms, clicking online ads, liking or rating items and, of course, generating plays on streaming services.” Accounts that stream music 24 hours a day or stem from a smartphone that never moves or dips below 100% power could be evidence of click-farm activity.
Imposters
A third prominent form of fraud identified by Burgess involves impersonating creators by uploading a version of their song to streaming services and illegally collecting creators’ legitimate royalties. This is a common problem faced by artists who are having a moment on TikTok, for example: Imposters post a version of the TikTok hit on streaming services under a slightly different name, aiming to divert some streams (and hopefully royalties) their way.
“It happens to every single viral artist,” says one manager who shepherded a viral act to a major-label deal last year. There are many distribution companies out there, and managers say that some of them have lax oversight of what’s being uploaded to the DSPs through their platforms. This means artists and their teams have to keep close watch on streaming platforms and issue takedowns when they find imposter versions.
The first life of Justine Skye‘s “Collide” was that of a minor radio hit: It peaked at No. 38 on Billboard‘s R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart. The single was rediscovered last fall, when hordes of TikTok users started to upload videos incorporating an altered version of the track — a sped-up remix that transformed the chilly, brooding single into something giddy and urgent.
TikTok trends were once believed to ensure streaming success; as the platform has expanded rapidly and splintered into niche communities, that is no longer the case. “More often than not, these records on TikTok tend to be insulated,” says Drew De Leon, president and partner at MPR Global, a marketing and distribution company. “One of the goals is always to take it off platform.” Part of De Leon’s mission was to push “Collide” on YouTube Shorts, the video streamer’s own short-form destination.
Skye’s other social media platforms were “more curated — her Instagram is more about her personality,” De Leon explains. “So our strategy approaching Shorts was to highlight all the fan content.” Starting in December, De Leon’s team uploaded seven clips a day to shorts, repurposing fan dance videos and iced beverage how-to’s. The deluge paid off: Skye had accumulated 263,000 YouTube subscribers between starting her channel in 2010 and December of 2022. In the next four months, her subscriber count nearly doubled, rising to 515,000. All the interest on various short-form video platforms helped drive streams to “Collide,” which earned a Gold certification in March, close to nine years after its release.
YouTube launched Shorts globally in the summer of 2021; music marketers have been trying to determine its value for pushing music ever since. As TikTok has become increasingly saturated with all kinds of promotion — not just from music labels but from deep-pocketed brands and Hollywood studios — it has become harder for artists and their songs to get attention, making it more important for marketers to identify viable alternatives.
On top of that, it usually pays to be an early adopter because there is less competition and YouTube is heavily invested in marketing the platform. “There’s this level of organic reach that you’re going to have for a limited amount of time,” says Brendan Kennedy, a digital marketer for Cinematic Music Group. The thinking is, “Let’s really ramp up, pump out content with a good strategy, and take advantage of this opportunity.”
YouTube unveiled a blizzard of statistics on Thursday (March 30) pointing to Shorts’ effectiveness as a marketing tool. Shorts are racking up more than 50 billion views a day (as of December); clips made by fans increased the average artist’s unique viewer total by more than 80% (in January); and artists who post Shorts weekly or more saw those posts drive more than 50% of their new subscriptions (also in January).
“We’re really seeing Shorts vastly increase the reach of an artist on the platform,” says Vivien Lewit, YouTube’s global head of artist partnerships. “We’re seeing it as an integral driver of audience growth.” YouTube also announced that it updated its “Analytics for Artists” tools to incorporate Shorts uploaded by fans in addition to clips uploaded by artists themselves.
Marketers are testing an assortment of strategies on the platform. While De Leon focused on highlighting user content — “fans wanted to see themselves participating,” in a trend, he says, and have that participation acknowledged by the artist whose music soundtracks that trend — Cinematic has also experimented with “repurposing the artist’s long form videos.”
“If an artist is putting out a music video, we’ll chop down the best parts of that, use them as Shorts, and stagger those uploads after the actual music video comes out,” explains Michael Epstein, another member of Cinematic’s digital marketing team. “We do the same with interviews. Just keep bringing people back. We’ve definitely seen that Shorts are one of the biggest drivers of actual artist channel growth,” spurring listeners to subscribe. (“A subscriber becomes a stickier fan,” Lewit notes.)
Cinematic is also “trying to build relationships with the emerging YouTube channels that are focusing on Shorts content,” Epstein continues. YouTube channels’ role in bringing new ears to music has never gotten the same level of attention as Spotify editorial playlisting or TikTok mega-influencers. But Epstein says “we’ve seen direct correlations with streaming consumption and growth just based on those uploads.”
Shorts doesn’t yet have the slam-dunk breakout artist story. But now that TikTok faces an uncertain future, with a bipartisan government coalition pushing for a ban or a sale, understanding the nuances of Shorts has taken on a new urgency. “Needless to say, we’re pushing all of our artists to start playing with it now just in case,” says one label executive. “If the TikTok ban happens, you’re really only going to have YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and potentially Snapchat as the places that have that high level of short-form content to discover,” Kennedy adds.
In a blog post on Thursday, global head of music Lyor Cohen highlighted the platform’s role in helping two massive hits — Rema and Selena Gomez’s “Calm Down” and Oliver Tree and Robin Schulz’s “Miss You” — spread around the globe. In addition to Skye’s Shorts-boosted subscriber growth, Cinematic has seen Shorts drive listeners to rapper That Mexican OT.
“It has the potential to become a powerful feature,” Epstein says.
With national security concerns over TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, leading to U.S. officials debating a national ban of the service — with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy saying this week that lawmakers would be “moving forward with legislation” — the music industry is left contemplating a landscape without the generationally popular and influential app. The implications of such a ban would be widespread across the business: upending countless marketing and promotion plans, if not entire label departments, and affecting the reach of nearly every major artist, whether long-established or up-and-coming.
The impact on the Billboard charts would also be massive. While TikTok plays are not included in Billboard chart calculations, the exposure granted by viral success on the app has helped launch scores of chart hits over the past half-decade, while also allowing next-gen artists like Lil Nas X and Doja Cat a platform to help establish their personalities and images and cultivate their fanbases, cementing their stardom in the process. In terms of chart repercussions, a ban on TikTok in 2023 would be something like a ban on MTV in 1985 — its removal might not directly affect any metrics, but the lingering reverberations would still be seismic.
Here are five ways the loss of TikTok might most acutely be felt on the Billboard charts — assuming it would take some time for a potential rival app to replace its position of influence and importance within the industry — with particular focus on our flagship songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100.
1. Fewer older songs becoming new hits. One of the most consequential trends in 2020s chart pop has been the preponderance of catalog entries infusing all levels of the Hot 100 — whether in extreme examples like Kate Bush‘s Stranger Things-re-launched 1985 single “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” reaching the top five in 2022, or subtler cases like Chris Brown‘s 2019 Indigo Deluxe Edition cut “Under the Influence” becoming a 2023 top 20 hit. One thing nearly all these revived hits have in common is TikTok: Whether its newfound popularity was initially reignited there (as with “Influence”), or whether gasoline was poured on the already-existing flame (as with “Hill”), these hits would never have reached the velocity needed to break out as they did without the app.
If TikTok disappeared, it’s possible we’d still see some of these new-old hits — particularly ones like “Hill,” which have the benefit of a major pop culture phenomenon to rally their revival — but we’d almost certainly see far fewer of the “Influence” sort, without a platform for them to unexpectedly catch fire and organically grow into contemporary favorites. And while radio has also started to embrace some of these second-time-around singles, without TikTok to first drum up newfound interest in them (and demonstrate proof of concept of them as modern-day hits), it’s unlikely they’d be willing to take chances on songs like “Influence” as early adopters.
2. Fewer one-offs. Back in 2020, Billboard wrote about a number of artists TikTok had helped launch into the pop mainstream for one song, and asked if the app would be able to help sustain extended careers for them as hitmakers. Based on the great majority of the artists mentioned in the story — Arizona Zervas, Tones and I, Powfu, SAINt JHN, Surfaces, Trevor Daniel, StaySolidRocky, 24kGoldn, Surf Mesa — the answer would appear to be “no”; after their initial TikTok-boosted chart success, none of those artists have yet charted a second top 40 Hot 100 hit, and most have yet to even scrape the chart a second time.
There have been exceptions, of course — particularly the aforementioned Doja Cat and Lil Nas X, two of the biggest stars of the new decade, who were able to launch numerous hits with TikTok’s help and ultimately establish continuous stardom well beyond the app. But the speed with which TikTok generates breakout hits and the relatively anonymous relationship they often establish between listener and song — often divorced from any larger connection with the artist behind them — has been a recipe for creating single successes that prove a foot in the door to the larger mainstream for their artists, but nowhere near a guarantee of additional future hits.
In truth, without TikTok, we’d likely not only see fewer one-off hits, but fewer breakout hits from new artists in general. With the influence of both labels and tastemakers being diminished in the streaming era, and radio positioning itself more as a late-adopter of established hits than a breaker of new ones (a strategy that could reverse, or at least lessen, post-TikTok), TiKTok has been the rare platform over which previously unestablished artists have been able to reach mass audiences — if not necessarily reliably, or repeatedly.
3. Bigger and longer-lasting album bombs. Without the natural rise-and-fall of TikTok virality to help generate prominent movement up and down the Hot 100, stasis will be even more unavoidable on the chart. While that will be felt in every tier of the chart, it will perhaps be most noticeable in the chart’s middle and lower regions — which, without TikTok-driven hits, will become even more the province of the biggest albums of recent weeks.
While highly anticipated albums charting the majority or entirety of their tracklists on the Hot 100 upon their chart debuts is certainly nothing new, in the last couple years some of those albums — like Bad Bunny‘s Un Verano Sin Ti and SZA‘s SOS — have not only overtaken the chart in their first weeks, but had as many as a dozen songs continue to linger on it well after. Big artists and big releases are more omnipresent on the charts than ever, and if TikTok isn’t around to help generate new hits to siphon off momentum from (and ultimately displace) them, those album cuts will continue to play the part of hit singles in the thick of the Hot 100.
4. Less alt/indie and regional Mexican. One way TikTok’s imprint has been felt on the Hot 100 has been the rise in crossovers from the indie and alternative worlds. Hits from bands like Glass Animals, The Walters and Måneskin and singer-songwriters like d4vd, Lizzy McAlpine and Mac DeMarco all have found their way to the chart after gaining popularity on the app — where five years ago they likely would have had no real pathway to that kind of crossover success on streaming or radio, with any kind guitar-based rock music an increasingly rare presence in the pop mainstream.
Would they disappear on the Hot 100 without TikTok around to boost them? Maybe not entirely — especially after a pop-punk revival (and guitar-oriented hits from pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Juice WRLD and Billie Eilish) helped once again normalize guitar in the top 40 of the early 2020s — but it would certainly be a major additional challenge for newer alt and indie artists to get the kind of streaming exposure they need to cross over.
The same could be said of regional Mexican acts like Grupo Firme, Yahritza y Su Esencia and Peso Pluma — all of whom have suddenly made a genre that had literally zero history on the Hot 100 prior to 2021 into a major factor on the chart, with each act scoring top 40 hits in the last year, boosted enormously by their TikTok presences. Those artists have still yet to achieve even the relatively modest level of stateside mainstream pop exposure or acceptance that most of the aforementioned alt/indie acts have, so losing TikTok would likely be an enormous blow to their chart fortunes.
5. Longer chart runs — but fewer truly historic ones. As already mentioned, TikTok success is one of the primary accelerants on the Hot 100 these days — the force that gets songs zooming up and plummeting down the chart with disruptive speed — and without it, a lot of songs are going to stay in place for a very long time. The slowing pace of radio and streaming in the 2020s has already resulted in seemingly endless, borderline-historic stays for hits like Dua Lipa‘s “Levitating,” The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber‘s “Stay” and Harry Styles‘ “As It Was” in the chart’s top regions, and certainly without TikTok, there will be even fewer impediments to those songs staying in place for as long as the mainstream will have them.
However, the loss of TikTok could also impact these hits’ endurance in the other direction — preventing them from ever reaching the truly unprecedented territory tread by hits like The Weeknd‘s “Blinding Lights” and Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves.” Those songs’ journeys were marked by late-cresting waves of TikTok popularity, which helped them recapture momentum at key moments in their chart treks, reinvigorating their streaming and radio presences in the process. Without those unpredictable second and/or third lives for the two singles, their respective chart runs would likely never have stretched out as they did — and without the ordered chaos of TikTok, they’re not the kind that anyone could ever meaningfully reproduce inorganically.
It’s an uneasy time in the music industry. During a Jan. 31 call with analysts, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek emphasized the positive side of the streaming revolution — “there [are] a lot more artists that are mattering now than ever before” — while still acknowledging the anxiety that’s percolating through the business. “The big counter to that would be: Does it mean that you can sustain yourself, or does it mean we have more one-hit wonders?” Ek asked. “You’re seeing a little bit of both happening in the music industry at the present moment.”
Especially in an era when TikTok appears to run the music industry — trends on the app can send songs bounding up the charts, impacting signing decisions and marketing campaigns — it’s common to hear executives fretting about one-hit wonder overload and the lack of “artist development.” On any given day, a handful of songs flare on the app, soundtracking heaps of videos and leading to jumps in streaming. As a result, “more people are investing in songs that might not have the artist proposition attached to them,” one manager recently lamented to Billboard. “By default, if more of the people responsible for breaking acts are focused on songs, that’s how you have a landscape where there are a trillion one-hit wonders.”
Spotify returned to this theme during its recent Stream On event. Gustav Soderstrom, the platform’s co-president, took the stage to tout the power of features like Release Radar for driving streams and long-term engagement. “That’s why discoveries on Spotify, unlike many other platforms, give creators so much more than just a fleeting moment of viral fame,” he said. He didn’t name TikTok, but it was pretty clear who he was aiming at.
In a statement to Billboard, Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music, hit back against the idea that the popular app prioritizes brief eruptions over long and healthy careers. “In the few years that our music teams at TikTok have been working closely with the musical creator and label community, our commitment to backing artists across the board has helped propel emerging talent and legacy acts to new points of success,” Obermann said. “Artists who broke out from TikTok such as Ice Spice, Lil Nas X, and Coi Leray have sustained multiple Billboard hits. We also see artists such as Tai Verdes, jxdn and Sara Kays who have grown substantial fan bases on TikTok and are building their music careers broadly rather than based on an individual hit song.”
Many in the music industry believe one-hit wonders are newly abundant. But do they show up on the Billboard charts?
Defining a one-hit wonder as an artist that cracks the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and never makes it back to that position, the annual percentage of acts fitting this criterion remained relatively constant from 2002 to 2019, according to Billboard‘s analysis. On average, 54% of the acts who made it into the top 40 during this period failed to return with at least a second entry. Though the fraction got as high as 61% and sank as low as 39% during this time period, there was no pronounced increasing trend visible over time.
In 2020 — the most recent full year it seems fair to judge — the portion of artists who made it into the top 40 but didn’t land a second entry was higher: 70%. Of course, this number may fall in the coming years, because these artists haven’t had much time to score a second hit. Changing the definition of a one-hit wonder to match the available data for 2020 — redefining it as an artist that cracks the top 40 and doesn’t make it back in the next two years — causes the portion of one-hit wonders to jump by more than 7% each year, on average. This means it’s likely that 2020’s one-hit wonder count will end up more in line with previous years.
The opposite of a one-hit wonder is an act who enjoys a steady stream of popular singles. Say a “career artist” appears at least 10 times in the top 40 as a lead or featured collaborator: Around 10% of all acts who reached the top 40 once between 2002 and 2020 went on to achieve this goal. The frequency of career artists hasn’t changed much over the years either — roughly the same number emerged from the first half of the time period examined as from the second half.
There is one other noticeable trend in top 40 data: The number of new artists appearing on the upper reaches of the chart is gently declining over time. The fall is gradual, approximately one less new artist every two years. This mirrors a decline in new artists getting top 10 hits, but the trend is less pronounced in the top 40. That’s presumably because it’s easier to reach the top 40 than the top 10, and because there are fewer top 10s annually.
Taken together, this indicates that it is somewhat harder to get a top 40 hit than it was two decades ago, but once artists get that breakout hit, they have roughly the same odds of eventually building a catalog of big tracks. The first development is cause for concern. But the second should be reassuring — the more things change, the more they stay the same.