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TikTok has proven its success at renewing widespread interest around old songs countless times over the past several years. 2022 was no exception, as the short-form video platform announced Swedish Sadboy rapper Yung Lean’s 2013 track “Ginseng Strip 2002” was its most popular track of the year thanks to a trend of users singing along for about 10 seconds and then kissing at the end.
The nearly decade-old track was used in almost 11 million videos across the app in 2022, and while TikTok royalties are notoriously low to music rights holders, the upside proposition has been established that a viral hit there will drive streaming elsewhere. With “Ginseng Strip 2002,” that was most certainly true.
Since the “Ginseng Strip 2002” TikTok trend started to take off around the turn of the new year, its impact is relatively easy to compare year-over-year. And it’s considerable. As of Dec. 1, the track had been streamed more than 71 million times on-demand in 2022 in the U.S. That’s a 780% increase from the full year prior, and up over 1,070% when compared to the same 48-week period (Jan. 1-Dec. 1). To date, the track has over 206 million global streams on Spotify.
The viral success has undoubtedly been a pleasant surprise payday for Lean as well as his label, Swedish indie YEAR0001, and publisher Sony Publishing. Based off U.S. streams alone, the different rights holders have earned about $350,000 so far in 2022. Split up, that’s about $260,000 for the master recording to the label and artist, and $62,900 to the publisher and co-writers Yung Lean and Yung Gud, based on Billboard‘s estimates.
This is actually the second time “Ginseng Strip 2002” has gone viral. The casually hedonistic track that came together by accident during a microphone sound check, according to producer Yung Gud, first took off on YouTube in 2013. That quick success on YouTube caused Yung Lean some anxiety, as he told Beats 1 Radio in 2017. “I was kinda scared at one point that it was just gonna be a couple million views and some viral hit, and there wasn’t going to be anything else,” he said. “I was just trying to figure out my place and everything. I didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder.”
Yung Lean and YEAR0001 had not responded to a request for comment for this story at the time of publishing.
Ginseng Strip 2002,” a casually hedonistic track by the Swedish rapper Yung Lean, initially went viral on YouTube in 2013. Nearly a decade later, lightning struck again on a different platform when the single became wildly popular on TikTok. This song — a series of druggy snapshots narrated in an uninterested monotone — was used more than any other on the app in 2022, according to the year-end report TikTok shared Tuesday (Dec. 6).
While “Ginseng Strip 2002” was used in nearly 11 million videos, the Mexican singer Kim Loaiza enjoyed the most viewed artist account with 70.5 million followers. She was one of five Spanish-language acts among the top 10 most-viewed artists, including superstars like Bad Bunny (29.7 million followers) and Rosalia (27.5 million).
The growing commercial importance of sped-up and slowed-down remixes of singles was also reflected in TikTok’s year-end report. Sped-up hits included new versions of Michael Buble‘s “Sway” and Cat Burns‘ “Go;” an uptempo rework of Demi Lovato‘s “Cool for the Summer” helped the track crack the top five on the platform. It trailed only Nicky Youre and dazy‘s “Sunroof,” Willow’s “Wait a Minute,” WZ Beat’s “Beat Automotivo Tan Tan Tan Viral,” and of course, “Ginseng Strip 2002.”
“Ginseng Strip 2002” came together almost by accident, according to the track’s producer Yung Gud. “‘Ginseng Strip 2002’ was just a sound check — he was just checking to see if the microphone was working,” the producer told The New Yorker in 2014.
The track’s initial success on YouTube caused Yung Lean some anxiety. “I was kinda scared at one point that it was just gonna be a couple million views and some viral hit, and there wasn’t going to be anything else,” he told Beats 1 Radio in 2017. “I was just trying to figure out my place and everything. I didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder.”
While “Ginseng Strip 2002” was the most-used track globally, it ranked third in the U.S. behind “Sunroof” and Luclover’s “L$d.”
Consider Lizzo the undisputed queen of TikTok. On Tuesday (Dec. 6), the social media platform revealed in its year-end report that the singer held the title for most video views of the year.
“Viral sensation,” Lizzo put it simply when retweeting a report of the news. The Grammy winner was followed in Nos. 2 through 5 by Bella Poarch, Bad Bunny, Charlie Puth and Doja Cat, while Selena Gomez, Nessa Barrett, Yung Gravy, Billie Eilish and Meghan Trainor rounded out the top 10.
Additionally, Lizzo’s choreography for “About Damn Time” ultimately landed at No. 7 on the list of TikTok’s most viral moments of the year.
The popular app also helped many a newcomer break through this year and released its countdown of the top 10 rising artists of the year and their hit songs, including Ice Spice (“Munch [Feelin’ U]”), JVKE (“Golden Hour”), GloRilla (“F.N.F.”) and Benson Boone (“Stars”). TikTok also played a major role in Steve Lacy earning his first No. 1 with “Bad Habit,” the initial explosion of Latto’s “Big Energy,” Omar Apollo landing his first-ever Hot 100 hit with “Evergreen,” and Muni Long bounding into the top 20 with “Hrs and Hrs.”
In other Lizzo-related news, the singer released her yuletide cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Someday at Christmas” exclusively on Amazon Music in recent weeks — which so far has cracked the Hot 100 at No. 94 (chart dated Dec. 10) — and opened up in a new interview about the racism she’s experienced within the pop music industry.
Read Lizzo’s reaction to her latest TikTok achievement below.
FBI Director Chris Wray is raising national security concerns about TikTok, warning Friday that control of the popular video sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government “that doesn’t share our values.”
Wray said the FBI was concerned that the Chinese had the ability to control the app’s recommendation algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations.” He also asserted that China could use the app to collect data on its users that could be used for traditional espionage operations.
“All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn’t share our values, and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States. That should concern us,” Wray told an audience at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
Those concerns are similar to ones he raised during congressional appearances last month when the issue came up. And they’re being voiced during ongoing dialogue in Washington about the app.
Concerned about China’s influence over TikTok, the Trump administration in 2020 threatened to ban the app within the U.S. and pressured ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company. U.S. officials and the company are now in talks over a possible agreement that would resolve American security concerns, a process that Wray said was taking place across U.S. government agencies.
“As Director Wray has previously said, the FBI’s input is being considered as part of our ongoing negotiations with the U.S. Government,” TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said in an emailed statement. “While we can’t comment on the specifics of those confidential discussions, we are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns and have already made significant strides toward implementing those solutions.”
TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. The TikTok statement Friday noted that ByteDance is a private company and that “TikTok Inc., which offers the TikTok service in the United States, is a U.S. company bound by U.S. laws.”
At a Senate hearing in September, TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas responded to questions from members of both parties by saying that the company protects all data from American users and that Chinese government officials have no access to it.
“We will never share data, period,” Pappas said.
TikTok is known for compulsively addictive short-form video, and for the past three years, much of the music industry has been hooked. By now, the platform is widely viewed as the most potent driver of streaming activity; marketing strategies often center on trying to harness the app’s users to touch off hits.
Lately, however, there’s been a noticeable shift in the way the music business talks about TikTok. One major-label executive with experience running campaigns on the platform recently mused to colleagues that he thought it was “dead” for breaking new songs. Another calls it “not workable.” “Does TikTok break hits now?” asks an A&R executive. “There’s a bunch of stuff going off there that’s not even a hit. We’re running on the inertia of what it was.”
“TikTok is eating itself,” declares Max Bernstein, who founded the marketing agency Muuser. “It still drives consumption if you get it right, but it’s much harder to maneuver now. Trends are siloed when they used to be community-wide, and influencer media is becoming prohibitively expensive.”
A number of A&Rs and marketers feel similarly, and they are trying to adjust strategies when it comes to signing artists and allocating marketing dollars. It’s the music business’ version of algorithmic anxiety: An industry accustomed to figuring out how to leverage promotional tools to favor its artists is learning that TikTok is increasingly tough to control.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Tyler Blatchley, co-founder of the label Black 17 Media, which has had success on TikTok, calls the idea that the platform is “not workable” “absurd.” The app’s users helped singles like Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy” soar on streaming services; at this point, it’s hard to think of a recent hit that wasn’t aided and abetted by TikTok. “The biggest game in town is TikTok,” says Chris Anokute, an A&R exec-turned-manager. “Everyone who wants to tell you otherwise is delusional, they don’t understand it, or they missed the boat.”
But even some of those who believe, as one rap label-head puts it, that TikTok “is the main platform to focus on for marketing,” still acknowledge that the industry’s attitude towards it has shifted. “People are frustrated because they can’t finesse the system so easily anymore,” the hip-hop executive says.
This frustration relates to larger anxieties in the music industry. Managers, A&R executives and marketers say it’s harder than ever to command listener attention, and they believe TikTok’s position as the preeminent music discovery platform is partially to blame. “If we’re asking, ‘how do people find new great artists that they’re going to fall in love with,’ hearing a nine-second snippet of a song is probably not the answer that any of us would give,” says Justin Lehmann, founder of Mischief Management (Aminé, Khai Dreams).
Still, TikTok is where people are spending their time — more than 90 minutes a day, according to the data analytics company Sensor Tower, nearly twice as much as they spend on Instagram. The music industry has no choice but to try to reach those potential listeners. It’s just getting harder and harder to do.
“There are a lot of songs that pop quickly [on TikTok], but it doesn’t have the same effect,” says Talya Elitzer, co-founder of the indie label and management company Godmode. “It’s not the golden era of TikTok by any means,” confirms another veteran digital marketer. “Things aren’t performing the way they used to.”
And executives say the impact of their marketing budgets is waning. According to a recent report by music consulting agency ContraBrand, based on analysis of TikTok’s top 200 from the first half of 2022, “paid-for tactics, such as influencers and ads, accounted for success in under 12% of the platform’s viral tracks.” “You can do your best to manufacture something on [TikTok], but I haven’t seen too many people be super successful,” says Cassie Petrey, CEO of the social media company and management firm Crowd Surf. “There’s an illusion of control people think they have over TikTok because we can pay influencers and push more video usage.”
As awareness of that illusion grows, “a lot of major companies, the savvy ones, are not spending as much on TikTok as they once were,” according to Elitzer. Another marketer says that he’s cut TikTok spending in many cases by more than 50%.
Labels may be shifting their signing strategies around TikTok as well. Whereas record companies have been signing acts off a single viral explosion, hoping for quick returns on their investment, a bevy of one-hit wonders has caused some to contemplate changing course. “I’ve heard a lot more A&Rs that I’ve been speaking with go back to signing artists based on musicality, which is exciting,” says Tim Collins, co-founder of Creed Media, an entertainment marketing agency.
“Too many people got caught with empty bags — labels overpaid for these deals, and the artist never delivered a better song or couldn’t rise to the occasion,” Anokute adds. “People were making multi-million dollar offers without even meeting the artist! The race to jump on everything moving on TikTok has slowed down.”
After a period where the app seemed to overshadow everything in music, executives seem more open to the idea that focusing all resources solely on TikTok may not be a viable long-term strategy. Petrey preaches a zen attitude about it all. “You’ll have moments on social media that are big, and you’ll have other times where you thought that song was the one and it didn’t go,” she says. “Continue to make good work.”
Welcome to Billboard Pro’s Trending Up newsletter, where we take a closer look at the songs, artists, curiosities and trends that have caught the music industry’s attention. Some have come out of nowhere, others have taken months to catch on, and all of them could become ubiquitous in the blink of a TikTok clip. This week: Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” goes viral anew, d4vd follows up his streaming breakthrough with another slow-growing hit, and an independent Texas band enjoys major gains after an appearance on one of the most-watched TV premieres of the decade.
TikTok Takes Another Lick at “Lollipop”
Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III smash “Lollipop” may have topped the Billboard Hot 100 back in 2008, but TikTok is taking to the song like it came out yesterday. The line “Okay, lil mama had a swag like mine / Even where her hair down her back like mine” is now the soundtrack to all sorts of random ephemera on the platform: One woman used it to soundtrack herself preparing for labor, a 92-year-old grandma used it to share that she had paid off her future funeral costs, and a pair of siblings used the song to poke fun at their dad.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why users are loving Tunechi’s old Cash Money track so much, but the strange TikTok buzz has surely paid off: “Lollipop” is up 47% in weekly on-demand U.S. streams to nearly 3.3 million for the week ending Nov. 21. – KRISTIN ROBINSON
‘Yellowstone’ Fever Boosts Shane Smith & The Saints Songs
If you were one of the nearly 16 million people who watched the season five premiere of the Paramount Network smash family drama Yellowstone, you heard three songs – two as performed by the band within the episode – by independent Texas outfit Shane Smith and the Saints, a previously established favorite of characters on the show. Not surprising, then, that the songs would experience a streaming bump as a result, particularly the ones the band played themselves: “Dance the Night Away,” from 2013’s Coast album, rose 164.7% in weekly official on-demand U.S. streams to 107,000 for the week ending Nov. 17, according to Luminate, while the recently released “Fire in the Ocean” saw a 81% gain to 177,000. – ANDREW UNTERBERGER
Sped-Up? Slowed-Down? Either Way, Listeners Love ‘Limbo’
“Limbo,” the bruising rap showcase from Ontario MC Freddie Dredd, has started to snowball into a hit after being featured on his Freddie’s Inferno project in August — and the song is doing so in a variety of different formats. A slowed-down version of the track is taking off on TikTok, and so is a sped-up version; “Limbo” is being synched up to dramatic sequences in Call of Duty, as well as God of War: Ragnarok. But even in its original version, Dredd’s hard-nosed rhyming is connecting with listeners: weekly U.S. on-demand streams for “Limbo” increased over 90 percent during the week ending Nov. 17, up to 3.54 million, according to Luminate.
Dredd, who is signed to RCA Records, is no stranger to TikTok virality: his 2019 single “Cha Cha,” which sampled Lisa Ono’s “Sway It, Hula Girl,” became a breakthrough for the rapper in the early days of the app’s industry influence. Yet “Limbo” is quickly becoming his signature hit, and Dredd is well-aware of its success. “Out of all the music i have made ive never had a single song do so well in a single day,” he posted on Twitter last week after a particularly strong day for “Limbo” on Spotify. “thank yall so much for streaming my s–t, thank yall for making my dreams come true.” – JASON LIPSHUTZ
d4vd Goes Two for Two With Viral Hits
Teen singer-songwriter d4vd is certainly a newcomer to the music biz, but he’s already racked up a second major TikTok hit this year. First, his single “Romantic Homicide” went so viral it hit the Billboard Hot 100’s top 40 and led to a seven-figure deal with Interscope/Darkroom. Now follow-up “Here With Me” is also picking up steam, with hundreds of thousands of creations already on the app.
Focusing on the lyrics “I don’t care how long it takes / as long as I am with you / I’ve got a smile on my face,” users are posting videos of heartwarming videos they found on the Internet, sometimes with them on greenscreen reacting to it. One video shows a woman feeding a stray dog, another shows a “tired teacher” putting on a “happy face” before walking into his classroom to greet students. Users’ emotional attachment to the song has transferred to real streaming wins for d4vd, as the song has climbed steadily in plays over the past month – rising 69% in official U.S. on-demand streams from 2.6 million the week ending Oct. 20 to nearly 4.5 million the week ending Nov. 17, according to Luminate. – KR
Q&A: Randy Hutson, CEO of Production Resource Group (PRG)’s Music and Live TV Divisions, on What’s Trending Up in His World
Looking back at 2022, what are some of the biggest wins for PRG, which provides resources and pushes technical innovation in the live sector?
PRG continued our work elevating production for some of the world’s biggest tours this year. Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour has been a big moment for us, especially in terms of sustainability. Coldplay made a pledge to reduce their carbon footprint while touring, so our mission was to stay more sustainably-minded while not losing any of the magic fans have come to expect at their shows. To minimize CO2 emissions, the engineers at PRG made one of the show’s standout features – four huge 3D spheres – inflatable so they would collapse and take up ¾ of one truck. With traditional construction techniques the four spheres would have needed six for transport. This complex engineering had never been done before.
This year we’ve also provided production solutions for legendary artists like Metallica, Post Malone, Jack Harlow, and Elton John’s Farewell Tour, among many others. Some of the Las Vegas residencies we’ve worked on this year include Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood, and Aerosmith. It was also incredibly meaningful to do lighting and video for the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Show at Wembley Stadium.
What do you expect innovation (visual or otherwise) in the touring sector to look like in the next year and beyond?
Tours are being pressured to fill every stadium or arena seat, so one of the areas that we’re focused on is fan engagement. For example, we’ll be building on the success we had with the Indochine tour in Europe, where we positioned the audio speakers BEHIND a new transparent LED video screen, providing fans with an unobstructed view of the screens.
Efficiency in gear is increasingly important. Now, both lighting fixtures and projectors are being designed with LED and laser sources to produce a multitude of green benefits, allowing us to do more with less carbon footprint. And lastly, for years we’ve done large tours requiring many buses and trucks for gear – whatever we needed to execute the show design. But going forward, production and tour managers are looking at reverse engineering tours, i.e., how many buses and trucks do we want to have? Artists and their productions are looking for ways to improve touring by using companies with global footprints to cut down on equipment and people movement around the world. Fewer trucks, buses and planes moving will increase profitability (and lead to sustainability) allowing us to continue to do the work we love every day.
PRG has provided technical and logistical support for the Super Bowl halftime show for years. How has the halftime show evolved, and how will it continue to evolve with new tech?
The Super Bowl halftime show is unquestionably one of the most epic moments in an artist’s career, so we listen closely to what they are envisioning for each performance. That means some years the stage is more simplistic while others feature higher levels of spectacle. Overall, our team’s job is to ensure the visual experience is equally incredible for people in the stands and the millions watching at home. As technology and creatives have become more sophisticated, new tech has been implemented to make the show more cinematic, despite limited camera positions on the field.
You can really see this with The Weeknd in 2021 and the Dr. Dre & Co. performance in 2022 which used our proprietary 35LIVE!® technology. 35LIVE! elevates televised events by giving them a big-screen look and feel, replacing the traditional multi-camera approach. A team of technical specialists work together to produce astounding imagery, 100% live.
Fill in the blank: more people in touring/events should be thinking about ______.
Sustainability. It’s never been more important to take care of the environment. In 2017 PRG developed PRG SpaceFrame®, a touring frame design with ultra-light carbon fiber construction and collapsibility that reduces truck space by approximately 35 percent. This means less trucks and a lower carbon footprint. We’re going to see more governments requiring tours, fabrication companies, and production services companies to measure and report carbon emissions and supply safety reports.
We can also anticipate seeing more regulation around power consumption. Resources like fuel are going to be more costly. Research into replacing steel with bamboo in some fabrication applications could be a game-changer. We are also using recyclable materials in place of the hard scenic elements that the industry was built on. It’s time for our entire industry to focus on doing what’s good for the planet. – JL
Season’s Gainings: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Thanksgiving
We all know about the annual Christmas bump that certain holiday perennials begin to enjoy on streaming as early as Nov. 1 – but do folks begin to anticipate Thanksgiving in the same way in the days leading up to the fourth Thursday in November? Well, the numbers aren’t as stratospheric, but slowly but surely, they’re creeping up there for some of the bigger titles. Matthew West’s “Gobble Gobble” is up 93% in daily on-demand U.S. streams from Nov. 15 to Nov 21 to 73,000, according to Luminate, while Ben Rector’s “The Thanksgiving Song” is up 64% over that same span to 45,000, and the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “Thanksgiving Theme” is up 38% to 75,000.
As for Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre,” the near-20-minute, Thanksgiving-set ‘60s story song traditionally played by classic rock and Triple A stations in full on Turkey Day, the numbers are still relatively small, just passing 15,000 daily streams on Nov. 21. But it’s also rising by 1,000-2,000 streams a day, and may be poised to explode (like so many post-dinner waist shirt buttons) this Nov. 24. – AU
In early October, Lil Yachty uploaded the 83-second track “Poland” to SoundCloud along with a grumpy message: “STOP LEAKING MY SHIT.” “Poland” consists of two keening hooks and some slack rhymes; a veteran publishing executive calls it “an idea, almost a tweet,” more than a song.
Either way, it’s a hit — it reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and it’s part of a larger trend: The average length of popular songs has been shrinking steadily for years. A 2018 study by San Francisco-based engineer Michael Tauberg concluded that songs on the Billboard Hot 100 shed around 40 seconds since 2000, falling from 4:10-ish to roughly 3:30. The average length of the top 50 tracks on Billboard‘s year-end Hot 100 in 2021 was even less, a mere 3:07. (Though this is a simple average, whereas Tauberg’s calculation was weighted by weeks spent on the chart.)
“Everyone’s aware of it — it’s a reaction to the culture of soundbites that we moved towards,” says Vincent “Tuff” Morgan, vp of A&R at the indie publisher peermusic. “I have producers in the studio this week just going through and making songs shorter.”
In this climate, writers are increasingly willing to ditch a third chorus and a pre-chorus — the musical alley-oop that sets up the hook’s slam dunk — according to the analytics company Hit Songs Deconstructed. And the portion of sub-three-minute top 10 hits ballooned from just 4% in 2016 to 38% so far in 2022. “Over the last two years, as I get demos back from artists, they’re consistently down to two minutes and 30 seconds or even two minutes,” says Caterina Nasr, senior manager of A&R at Elektra Entertainment. “Artists feel like they can express themselves quicker.”
Shorter songs aren’t exactly a new trend. Back in the early 1960s, little miracles of concision like The Chiffons “He’s So Fine” (1:52) topped the Hot 100 and The Beatles rose to international fame by releasing a series of snub-nosed pop missiles. More recently, Piko-Taro’s “PPAP (Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen)” made history as the shortest Hot 100 entry ever (45 seconds) in 2016. The following year, XXXTentacion‘s 17, which cycles through 11 songs in just 21 minutes, became a streaming sensation. In 2018, Travis Scott effectively mashed three 90-second songs into the massively successful “Sicko Mode.”
If the focus on brevity in the early 1960s was driven by the pace of AM radio, the streaming economy imposes its own pressures on song length. One theory holds that a concise track is more likely to spur multiple listens. “There’s charm to a short song because the person hits repeat — play it again, play it again,” according to Mitch Allan, a longtime writer-producer (Demi Lovato, Kelly Clarkson).
The other side of the same coin: “People are acutely aware of skip rates and how that relates to success on streaming services,” says Talya Elitzer, a former Capitol Records A&R who co-founded the indie label Godmode. Tracks with lower skip rates are prioritized by the platforms, and Elitzer believes that “a short song is less likely to be skipped.”
Most importantly, song snippets resonate with a generation of listeners used to short-form video apps. “To me this really started with the Vine era and Instagram,” says writer-producer David Harris (H.E.R., Snoh Aalegra). Brief clips have achieved a new level of commercial resonance in the music industry thanks to TikTok, where users repeatedly seize on fragments of unfinished singles and incorporate them into videos, making a mockery of the idea that a popular track must include a verse and a hook.
“Generally a song that pops off on the platform is based around a little moment,” says Elie Rizk, a writer, producer and multi-instrumentalist (Mazie, Remi Wolf). “Subconsciously you think about that: ‘Let’s pack a track with moments and try to hit the jackpot.’ I don’t feel the need to repeat a section three times — they’ve already heard that part; it doesn’t matter.”
What’s the difference between an explosive moment and a song? Since 2020, if not before, a heap of young acts have gone viral with the former and then scrambled to transform them into the latter — to build a full track around the snippet that captivated TikTok. Examples include Will Paquin’s flashy “Chandelier” (85 million), David Kushner’s woebegone “Miserable Man” (73 million), and Avenue Beat‘s goofy “F2020” (54 million).
As singles get shorter, though, the gap between a song and a hooky fragment begins to lose meaning. “To a lot of people, I think the snippet [they encounter on TikTok] is the song,” says Bart Schoudel, a longtime engineer and vocal producer (Pop Smoke, Selena Gomez).
Kuya Magik, a producer and DJ with more than 11 million TikTok followers, agrees. “If you go to a club and you watch people dance, they only dance to the 15 seconds of a song that’s famous on TikTok,” he says. “For the rest of it, they just sit there.”
For now, platforms like Spotify count 30 seconds of listening as a full play that triggers a royalty payout, so it makes sense to expand a musical idea to that length. But a generation native to TikTok may not require even 30 seconds to engage with the music. With that in mind, it’s easy to imagine that the length of singles will continue to shrink.
When a short verse goes viral on TikTok, “if that’s what the artist wrote and that’s what’s being used [on the platform], who’s to say that’s not the song?” asks Daniel Sander, chief commercial officer for the music-technology company Feature.FM. “The question is: How do you monetize that differently?”
Not many people can say pop star Lizzo gifted them a personal item from her wardrobe, but Aurielle Marie — writer of Gumbo Ya Ya, Georgia Author of the Year, Out 100 honoree and a major Lizzo fan — can.
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In an Oct. 27 TikTok posted to her account, Marie made a plea to Lizzo and asked to borrow her 2022 Emmys dress so she could have something wear to the Out 100 event, otherwise she would likely skip out on attending entirely.
“I know you know how it feels to be the biggest b—h in a room, and all of the scrutiny and hyper-visibility that comes along with that because I’ve watched you talk about it,” she said in the video, later adding, “I know you a girl for the girls, and I’m a girl and a girl, and I just need to know. I gotta ask. Can I please, please, please wear your dress from the 2022 Emmys?”
Though a few weeks went by without updates from Marie, a surprise showed up to her door on Tuesday (Nov. 15) — the author posted a video of her running downstairs to open a box from Lizzo. While the garment was not Lizzo’s 2022 Emmys dress, Marie promptly tried the gown from the box and burst into tears. (The dress Marie received was the stunning ruffled one Lizzo wore to the American Music Awards in 2019.)
“I might’ve gotten a few tears on your dress Lizzo, my bad babe. Words don’t suffice and thank you isn’t enough. But THANK YOU! I’m speechless,” Marie captioned the Nov. 15 video. “Ya’ll! A b—h is certified LIZZO-SIZED! And look at this gown! Out Magazine, here I come!”
Lizzo has yet to comment on Marie’s post, but she’s gearing up for an awards ceremony of her own — the singer was nominated for six awards at the 2023 Grammy Awards, including album of the year for Special and song and record of the year for “About Damn Time.”
Watch Marie’s TikTok videos below.
J-pop singer-songwriter Yuka recently livestreamed a compact set for fans as the featured artist of November on Billboard Japan and TikTok’s hybrid program NEXT FIRE.
NEXT FIRE is a show on TikTok Live that highlights the rising J-pop artists of the moment, based on Billboard Japan’s TikTok Weekly Top 20 chart. The collaborative project streams live performances and pre-recorded interviews by the featured act of the month to give fans an in-depth look at their artistry. Yuka’s showcase set included her breakout TikTok hit “Partner,” which has over 650 million views on the short movie platform.
Accompanied by guitarist Toshio Uchida and keyboardist Ken Edo for her compact studio concert, the 28-year-old singer-songwriter kicked off the set with “Marry me,” her mature yet cute vocals echoing over the soundscape created by an acoustic guitar and piano. “It’s only for a short time today, but we intend to enjoy this show together with you so feel free to clap your hands and sing along with us,” she said to viewers after the song, while Uchida played an airy melody behind her.
From there, the trio smoothly launched into “Hey girl!!!!,” a song with lyrics that speak to the listener, delivered through Yuka’s skillful blend of pop vocals and falsetto. She then sang the heartrending ballad “Ichirenboshi,” first accompanied only by piano and later joined by guitar, which added another layer to the arrangement. Her voice gradually grew stronger during the number and drew the audience into the gentle longing depicted in the lyrics.
“So many of you have used my songs in various videos on TikTok,” Yuka said before her next track. “I’d like to sing you the song that you all seemed to have enjoyed while using it to make memories with friends or delivering a loving message to the important people in your lives.” The three musicians then performed “Bestie,” the uplifting rhythm bouncing along as Yuka gestured for the viewers beyond the screen to clap their hands. Packed with phrases that make fans want to sing along delivered through a variety of vocal styles, the live rendition of the popular tune showcased Yuka’s appeal as a vocalist.
“The next song is one that I’m sure you all know,” she teased before her next-to-last track. “I’d be happy if you’d sing along with me.” The song was “Partner,” another viral hit on TikTok. The livestream’s comment section brimmed with excitement as fans hadn’t expected her to perform this number with a catchy melody and relatable lyrics.
After introducing her backing band, she closed her set with “Birthday Song.” This affirming, celebratory song set the tone for the grand finale. Yuka thanked the audience again during the outro of the tune and the set ended leaving a happy vibe.
A pre-recorded interview by Yuka will stream on Billboard Japan’s TikTok channel starting Nov. 11, and excerpts from the livestream can be seen on the singer-songwriter’s TikTok account.
Thundercat‘s “Them Changes” is steeped in funk history, with drums that nod to The Isley Brothers‘ “Footsteps in the Dark,” stutter-stepping at 82 beats per minute, and a wobbling bass line. On Sept. 22, the TikTok account Ezzsounds posted a simple remix of the track, pushing the tempo until the song catches the jitters. This new version was a world away from the slow-and-low original — at 114 beats per minute, it’s like a train threatening to jump the tracks. TikTokers loved it.
“By the next Monday, we had already seen the streams double,” says Will Slattery, vp of North American marketing operations for the independent label Ninja Tune. The company sent an official sped-up rendition of “Them Changes” to streaming services and worked with marketing companies to increase the new version’s exposure on TikTok. The single cracked Billboard‘s Hot R&B Songs chart in October, a first for Thundercat as a lead artist.
“Sped-up tracks feel like a thing, but I was not expecting it to happen to Thundercat,” says Josh Berman, who leads marketing efforts for the artist’s management company, Really Happening. “I’ve seen trends happen and they’re gone in 72 hours. We’re really blessed that this one’s still going.”
Sped-up versions of songs, especially older ones, have thrived on TikTok for years — Cafuné’s “Tek It,” Demi Lovato‘s “Cool for the Summer,” Ellie Goulding‘s “Lights,” Sam Smith‘s “I’m Not the Only One,” and Nelly Furtado‘s “Say It Right,” for example, all enjoyed streaming bumps thanks to the success of uptempo reworks. This style now appears to be on the verge of reaching a new level of mainstream exposure. “Sped up songs are becoming insanely popular,” says Tyler Blatchley, co-founder of the label Black 17 Media, which has producers working on pell-mell renditions of many major-label tracks.
“Back in the day, we used club remixes to diversify the visibility of a record,” explains Nima Nasseri, global head of A&R strategy for Universal Music Group’s music strategy and tactics team. “The purpose was to bring back visibility to the main version. Now people are discovering the main version from the sped-up or slowed one. Instead of spending $50,000 for a remix from a big-name DJ, you’re spending relatively minimal amounts [on a sped-up rendition] and getting much more return and reach.”
“These remixes have been a thing for a while,” adds 20-year-old Tristan Olsen (xxtristanxo on TikTok), who has amassed more than 3 million followers on the app with videos of him playing tempo-shifted edits, usually in a red-lit room, while sporting dark sunglasses. Happily for him, “the industry is catching up now.”
It’s easy to survey TikTok or scan streaming charts and conclude that songs which zip along at a breakneck pace are popular on the app. It’s much harder to explain why.
The genre known as nightcore, which also centers on music that’s sped up and pitched up, was popular long before the debut of TikTok. Nightcore eventually filtered into the PC Music scene, which spawned artists like SOPHIE and A.G. Cook, who went on to work with pop stars (Charli XCX, Madonna). But its hit-making power was negligible compared to TikTok’s sped-up song ecosystem.
Steven Pardo, digital marketing director at Secretly Group, believes that “in a video platform that prioritizes catching attention immediately, being able to get the impact of the lyrics across more quickly is advantageous.” On top of that, “dancers [on TikTok] love the chipmunk versions” of songs, according to Kuya Magik, a producer and DJ with more than 11 million TikTok followers.
Part of TikTok’s power also stems from the way it makes room for users to fiddle with songs and upload their versions of popular sounds, changing the stakes of fan engagement. “We’re seeing in consumer surveys how much Gen Z wants to actively participate in music,” notes Tatiana Cirisano, an analyst at MIDiA Research and former Billboard reporter. “They don’t just listen and consume passively; they make their own videos, remix the song.”
This ethos doesn’t only impact TikTok through sped-up tracks. The platform is awash in “sped-up versions, slowed-down versions, clap-track versions, versions that are super heavy on reverb, like turned-all-the-way-up-to-11 kind of sh–,” says Johnny Cloherty, co-founder of the digital marketing company Songfluencer. “Everyone’s experimenting with this stuff.” Jacob Byrnes, director of creator relations and content strategy for Universal Music Group’s music strategy and tactics team, recently had a meeting with a TikTok marketing company that informed him that 80% of the top 100 sounds on the app were tempo-altered; some sprint, while others crawl. (A rep for TikTok declined to comment.)
There are a number of popular TikTok pages that specialize in this material — not only KuyaMagik and xxtristanxo, but also Itsjovynn (9.7 million followers), Spxedupsongs (5 million followers), Speedysongs (2.7 million followers), and Bestspedup (2 million followers). Now artists and labels are paying some the creators in this niche to edit their tracks, seeking to harness their promotional firepower; these accounts seem to have captured some of the king-making abilities once reserved for top influencers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae.
While some of these pages post remixes along with eye-catching visual clips, others don’t do much more than post a new version of a track next to its lyrics. Ezzsounds, which helped launch Thundercat’s “Them Changes” onto the Hot R&B Songs chart, hails from the latter camp; the account is more than 700,000 followers strong. Pardo from Secretly Group has his eye on the page Ex7stence (4.4 million followers), which recently helped popularize sped-up versions of songs by Phoebe Bridgers and Bon Iver. “The velocity of sounds that come off that page in the past couple of weeks has been fascinating,” Pardo says.
Historically, the music industry has not been comfortable with unauthorized remixes. Nasseri and Byrnes even initially encountered some resistance from artists’ teams when they started pushing to release official tempo-altered versions of singles. “It was six months of explaining to people what this is and begging them to approve it,” Nasseri says.
“There was a long period of ‘trust us on this,’” Byrnes adds. His pitch: “This is the new remix. This is better than a remix.”
Suffice it to say that “long period” of doubt has come to an end. “I see artists dropping the sped-up version with the official one on release date to try to see if that catches on and points back to the original,” says Johnny Minardi, vp of A&R at Elektra Music Group. “It’s become one of those alternate looks to try to start the song or get a little bit more life out of it.” Two marketers say it’s routine for them to pay TikTok accounts to put out edits of songs they’re promoting; the cost is usually between $50 and $200.
Interscope just released an accelerated version of Summer Walker‘s entire Last Day of Summer project, billing it as the “first sped-up album.” UMG does “bulk agreements” with Xxtristanxo for remixes of its music, according to Byrnes. “He has 3 million monthly listeners [on Spotify] from these remixes — they generate so much money for us and for these artists,” the executive says.
The Spotify account Sped Up Nightcore, which only posts uptempo remixes of songs from Warner Music Group, is earning close to 2 million plays a day, according to the Spotify for Artists app — numbers many acts would hack off an arm for. (While none of Sped Up Nightcore’s releases on Spotify have any public credit information, Warner is claiming ownership of most of these songs on YouTube; a rep for Warner did not respond to a question about the label’s relationship with the account.)
Kuya Magik, who also does remixes for UMG, says messing with a track’s tempo and posting it on TikTok “doesn’t always work — but if that sound goes in front of the right person, you’ve got a gold mine in terms of a viral song.” Case in point: Cafuné’s “Tek It – Sped Up” has more than 95 million Spotify streams, almost as many as there are on the original, which surely makes it one of the most commercially successful singles in this style. (Minardi signed the band to Elektra.) The popularity of the jittery “Them Changes” on TikTok led weekly streams of the original to triple from mid-September to mid-October, according to Luminate. Slattery from Ninja Tune says streams of the rest of Thundercat’s catalog increased as well.
Most executives who have engaged with the sped-up ecosystem agree that it’s particularly effective for reviving songs that are more than 18 months old. “It’s a great avenue for promoting catalog tracks,” says Slattery. “People enjoy sped-up versions of songs that they already know” — like “Them Changes,” which already had more than 150 million Spotify streams before its recent surge. “When there’s familiarity with the song to begin with,” Slattery continues, “it helps it go farther and increases demand.”
That means there’s a potential opportunity for record companies. “If I was a label with a big catalog, I would start creating three to five versions of all my biggest hits with different tempos,” Cloherty says. “I would just have a producer on staff creating them nonstop all day every day.”
“What would ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ sound like sped up?” he wonders. “I don’t know. But that could be the next TikTok hit.”