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Move over Cindy Lou, there’s a new Who in town! Selena Gomez proved she’s not quite ready to put the Christmas decorations away on Tuesday (Jan. 10) with a lip sync from How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
On TikTok, the star and a couple of pals channeled a young Taylor Momsen by lip syncing to “Where Are You Christmas” from the 2000 live-action holiday classic, complete with their noses taped up to look like the Whos in the film. “Where are you Christmas?/ Do you remember?” the trio mouth along to the then-seven-year-old’s warbled vocals.
Gomez’s fans couldn’t get enough of the funny video, with one commenting, “She’s so real for this.” Another chimed in, “Healing our inner child today i see” while a third wrote, “Selena in her active era. We Love to see it.”
The singer’s Christmasy clip comes just as “Calm Down,” her recent collaboration with Rema ascends to the top spot on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart (dated Jan. 14). The triumph marks her first No. 1 on the worldwide tally while Rema becomes the very first African artist to reach the chart’s peak.
Last month, Gomez nabbed her very first Golden Globe nomination for her role as Mabel Mora in the hit Hulu comedy series Only Murders in the Building opposite Steve Martin and Martin Short. Sharing a throwback video of an old interview to celebrate, the Wizards of Waverly Place alum showed that she had, indeed, manifested the nomination, claiming she was “more of a Golden Globe or Oscar girl” than having her heart set on winning a Grammy.
Watch Selena and her friends do their best Cindy Lou Who impersonations below.
Lizzo is feeling “the way of the water” — so much so, that she whipped out her very best Avatar cosplay for a new TikTok video.
The “About Damn Time” singer — who is currently away on vacation — shared a video to TikTok on Monday (Jan. 9) of her wading through picturesque blue water in an all-black bikini mimicking one of Avatar: The Way of Water‘s new characters, Tsireya of the Metkayina clan. The pop star did a duet video with herself, mimicking Tsireya’s movements side by side, flicking her hair in unison with the character.
“Yes I saved this video.. uploaded it private…then duetted myself,” the Grammy winner hilariously captioned the post, along with a smiling emoji. Fans in the comments section loved her cosplay moment and wrote in her comments section, “QUEEEN LIZZO THEY SHOULDVE CASTED YOU.” Another excited fan wrote that Lizzo “SERVED AND GOBBLED IT UP.”
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Lizzo’s new beachy video comes on the heels of her calling out people who insist on making comments on other people’s bodies. In a Jan. 6 TikTok, the singer vented, “I’ve seen comments go from, ‘Oh my gosh, I liked you when you were thick. Why did you lose weight?’ ‘Oh my gosh, why did you get a BBL? I liked your body before.’ ‘Oh my gosh, you’re so big. You need to lose weight but for your health’ to ‘Oh my gosh, you’re so little. You need to get a– or titties or something.’ ‘Oh my gosh, why did she get all that work done? It’s too much work.’”
She continued, “Are we OK? Do you see the delusion? Do you realize that artists are not here to fit into your beauty standards? Artists are here to make art. And this body is art. I’mma do whatever I want with this body. I wish that comments costed y’all money so we could see how much time we are f—ing wasting on the wrong thing. Can we leave that sh– back there please?”
Watch Lizzo’s new TikTok video below.
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The son of heralded actress Angela Bassett, Slater Vance, landed in hot water, issuing an apology after pulling a video prank involving faking the death of Michael B. Jordan on TikTok.
On New Year’s Eve, Slater Vance filmed a video that he shared on the social media platform apologizing for the stunt where he claimed that her fellow Black Panther actor Jordan had died to the actress and his father, actor Courtney B. Vance. “I apologize to Michael B. Jordan’s entire family, his extended family, and him directly as he is an idol of mine,” he said in a video posted to his Instagram account which was deleted shortly after. “Taking part in a trend like this is completely disrespectful. I don’t wish any bad ramifications upon his family nor my parents as they deserve none of the backlash.”
In the original 27-second video which was posted earlier in the day, he’s observed asking his mother and his father if they had heard that Michael B. Jordan had died. Bassett is seen placing her hand over her heart in disbelief and walking overcome with emotion toward her son to ascertain where he had read the news. The video ends abruptly, but not before Courtney can be heard off-camera telling his son, “Stop it. You’re playing.”
“I own this mistake,” the 16-year-old continued in his apology, appearing remorseful and holding back tears. “I hope this can be a teaching lesson to anyone who uses social media as a tool and a source of entertainment to truly understand that your actions can have consequences that extend beyond you.”
The video prank was part of a growing trend on TikTok featuring teens telling their parents a favorite celebrity of theirs had died and recording their reaction. The hashtag “celebritydeathprank” had over 174 million views on the app as of Sunday (Jan. 1). Many have observed that Slater Vance’s prank went entirely too far given that Jordan and Bassett were cast mates in both of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther films, but also given the abrupt death of lead actor Chadwick Boseman in August 2020 from colon cancer, which shocked the cast and crew.
Kamila Valieva took the 2023 Russian Figure Staking Championships by storm last week by performing a routine to The Cramps‘ “Goo Goo Muck” dressed as Wednesday Addams.
Starting outside the edge of the rink, the 16-year-old sensation nailed her recreation of the herky-jerky dance on the Jenna Ortega-led Netflix series — all the way down to the hand motions, gothic party dress and long black pigtails.
“When the sun goes down and the moon comes up/ I turn into a teenage goo goo muck/ Yeah, I cruise through the city and I roam the streets/ Looking for something that is nice to eat,” Lux Interior’s voice sang as Valieva executed the choreography flawlessly and the audience in the stands clapped along to the beat.
Then, halfway through the program, Valieva went full TikTok as the music abruptly changed to the sped-up version of Lady Gaga‘s Born This Way album cut “Bloody Mary” and she ended the routine with a flourish.
Ultimately, Valieva took home the silver in the women’s senior championship division just behind 15-year-old Sofia Akateva. Between her short program and free skate, Valieva earned a total of 247.32 points from the judges, with her free skate even coming in at the top of the pack.
In early December, Gaga even got in on the viral fun by performing the dance challenge on her official TikTok page while Dino, Mingyu and Joshua of SEVENTEEN ran through the moves while attending LA3C with Billboard‘s own Tetris Kelly.
Watch Valieva’s Wednesday Addams-inspired routine below.
Finneas is not letting anyone talk down his sister’s relationship online. In the comments of a Monday (Dec. 26) TikTok video, the singer-songwriter defended Billie Eilish from an attack on her relationship with The Neighborhood‘s Jesse Rutherford.
A TikTok user made a snappy video in response to one of Finneas’ recent videos and replied in a stitch video, “Oh yeah? Well, your sister’s dating a 31 year old man and your music is s–tty.” Finneas found the response video and commented, “I want my sister to be happy and safe and she is a 21 year old adult perfectly entitled to make her own life decisions.”
The Grammy-winning producer expressed a similar sentiment regarding Eilish’s relationship with The Neighborhood singer in November, telling E! News, “Listen, as long as she’s happy, I’m happy.”
As for the “Happier Than Ever” singer, she opened up about her relationship with Rutherford in her annual Vanity Fair video interview, published on Nov. 28. “It’s really cool, and I’m really excited and I’m really happy about it,” she said of her romance with the rock star. “I managed to get my life to a point where I not only was known by a person that I thought was the hottest f–king f–ker alive, but pulled his ass! Are you kidding me? Can we just [get a] round of applause for me … thank you, Jesse Rutherford, everyone! I pulled his a–. All me. I did that s–t.”
See the video that Finneas responded to on TikTok below.
More shots fired! JoJo Siwa made quite the accusation about her recent breakup with Avery Cyrus in a new TikTok on Tuesday.
Using a viral sound taken from the “My Brother My Brother and Me” YouTube channel, the former Dance Moms star revealed what she was really trying to say onscreen. “But I love you Why are you breaking up with me??!!!” she wrote before offering up two different options: “There’s someone else” and, uh, “You told one of my best friends that you were excited to be dating me bc you’re ‘growing your career and wanna get to the top’…”
By the end of the lip-synced clip, Siwa makes it clear that the reason for her split was, well, not a third party. She also added some dramatic context in the video’s caption, writing, “And when I said I just wanted to be friends so I didn’t lead you on after an unplanned hookup you wanted nothing to do with me because there was nothing to gain anymore.”
The TikTok comes just one day after the Nickelodeon star vented about the breakup in an Instagram Story posted by her mother, Jessalynn Siwa, in which she claimed she “got used…For views and for clout” by the TikToker during their three-month relationship. “I got tricked into being told I was loved and I got f—ing played,” she added.
Though she has yet to offer an opinion on the latest TikTok, Cyrus responded to Siwa’s Instagram accusations, saying she was “saddened and confused by the situation” in a statement to E! News.
Watch Siwa’s latest TikTok below.
Proud Mother Perms 3-Year-Old Daughter’s Hair And Shares Video On TikTok, Leaving Users Divided Three days ago, a TikTok was posted of a mother perming her three-year-old daughter’s hair in a beauty salon. The video was shared by user @flambingo, who listed her identity as a 23-year-old mother-of-one in her account’s bio. The video was […]
In 2019 and 2020, promoting music on TikTok often meant paying prominent influencers to use a song in their videos. The concept was straightforward — cash for exposure — and on a good day, the results were easy to notice: Streams shot up. “All you needed was those [popular] people to post and a song flew,” one digital marketer reminisced earlier this year.
If this strategy once helped a track fly, it is now more likely to flop. “Bigger influencers actually don’t move the needle on music consumption” anymore, another digital marketer told Billboard in April. Lately worry has been spreading in the music industry that the link between song usage on TikTok more generally and consumption on streaming platforms appears to be losing potency. “For a while it was like, ‘All you gotta do is get a song going on TikTok, and it’s outta here!’” one major label executive says. “It’s not a guarantee anymore” that a song will become a hit.
This sentiment was reflected in a year-end report that TikTok published last week outlining the most popular songs and artists on the app. The top 10 TikTok tracks in the U.S. were streamed far less in 2022 than they were in 2021, according to data from Luminate. And the winners in 2021 were streamed far less than they were in 2020.
This indicates that the correlation between TikTok usage and U.S. streams is weakening. And it offers supports for a growing chorus of marketers who whisper that TikTok video usage isn’t “translating” as well to streams as it did in years past.
In 2020, being a top TikTok track in the U.S. practically ensured streaming success: Luminate data shows that nearly every song in TikTok’s top 10 earned more than 250 million on-demand plays Stateside. Just two years later, that no longer appears to be the case: See Luclover’s “L$d” (20.4 million, No. 2 on TikTok in the U.S.), Yung Lean’s “Ginseng Strip 2002” (71.1 million, No. 3), and Duke & Jones and Louis Theroux’s “Jiggle Jiggle” (82.5 million streams, No. 8). Now “There’s a bunch of stuff going off [on TikTok] that’s not even a hit,” says one A&R.
The overall streaming totals for TikTok’s biggest songs show a sharp decline year over year. Back in 2020, the top 10 singles on TikTok in the U.S. — from Doja Cat’s “Say So” to Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” — collectively amassed more than 4.9 billion Stateside streams. The top 10 songs on TikTok in the U.S. in 2021 — think back to Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More” and Cardi B’s “Up” — garnered only a little more than 3 billion streams between them in America. And the top 10 TikTok songs in the U.S. in 2022, ranging from Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” amassed just 1.9 billion Stateside streams combined. That’s a drop of roughly 3 billion streams, or 61%, in two years.
A representative for TikTok declined to comment for this story. In the platform’s year-end report, Ole Obermann, Global Head of Music, said that “13 out of 14 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1’s were supported by viral trends on TikTok.” “Our platform continues to unlock real-world opportunities for artists and labels,” Obermann added, “helping talent to secure record deals, brand collaborations, chart success, or be re-discovered decades later.”
But TikTok has changed markedly in the last few years, making it harder to turn success on the app into those opportunities — at least in the world of streaming. The first challenge for the music industry is saturation. “There’s so much noise; it’s harder to cut through,” says one manager whose acts have been at the center of multiple bidding wars following viral moments. “Once upon a time there wasn’t a lot of money pouring into TikTok. Now the music business, Hollywood, fashion, retail, beverage, everybody is trying to use TikTok to drive their product.” Music is competing for attention not only with other music, the huge amount of new songs and user-generated remixes that pop up each day, but with Marvel movies and canned cocktails.
And as TikTok’s user-base has swelled, it’s splintered into smaller communities that share the same interests, meaning that capturing everyone’s eyeballs — and ears — is increasingly difficult. “More users means TikTok’s ‘For You’ page algorithm has more content to offer, and it also means more data that allows it to be more targeted with its content recommendations,” one digital marketer told Billboard earlier this year. “People are less likely to see the same thing, like Charli D’Amelio dancing, and are more likely to see content from niches the algorithm recommends specifically for them.” As a result, “trends are siloed when they used to be community-wide,” a digital marketing company owner explained recently.
In addition, a handful of executives posit that TikTok is addictive enough that some users, especially younger ones, are starting to “use it as their music service,” according to one indie label-head, rather than leaving the app to go stream music elsewhere. Obermann hit back against this idea in November: “Our community comes to TikTok to watch videos,” he told Billboard, “not to listen to full-length tracks.”
It’s not clear that everyone wants to listen to full-length tracks these days. What is clear is that the interactivity that users find so compelling on TikTok threatens to undermine the traditional streaming experience. When music encountered on the app in a goofy or galvanizing video “is listened to [later] on streaming, it is stripped of all that creative and cultural context,” Mark Mulligan, managing director for music consultancy MIDiA Research, wrote recently. “It is like only listening to the soundtrack of a movie.” Some users may prefer to hear the music along with the video clips, even if it comes in short bursts.
The music industry views TikTok as a means to an end, and the equation has always been simple: More videos on the app using our music = more streams for our music. If the connection between the two weakens, it will have notable implications for A&R and marketing strategy. “There’s very little predictability now,” says one A&R. “You just can’t know how long something will sustain anymore.”
Jaylin Hawkins was working as a court reporter in Washington, D.C. when the pandemic hit. “Suddenly all my work froze,” they say. So the then-25-year-old did what many young adults did at the time: moved back in with their parents. Cooped up in West Palm Beach, Florida, Hawkins recalls friends urging them to get on TikTok. “At the time I thought TikTok was just for kids doing dance moves,” Hawkins admits. But without much else to do, they gave it a try by uploading videos that offered new music suggestions and entertainment news recaps.
Meanwhile in San Luis Obisbo, California, then-college senior Max Motely was also starting to share self-taped videos, highlighting his favorite emerging artists on TikTok. He says he had spent the whole spring relentlessly applying for music business jobs, hoping his summer internship at Paradigm would at least help him land a mail room gig, but with live music shuttered and increased competition for remaining music jobs, Motely found himself 20 applications deep and with no offer letter in sight.
After researching how other people found their first gigs in music, Motely became inspired by the do-it-yourself nature of starting a blog like Jacob Moore’s Pigeons and Planes or a YouTube channel like Anthony Fantano’s The Needle Drop. He thought, since no one was hiring anyway, he might as well spend his quarantine building a TikTok account to recommend music instead, giving the blog and YouTube critic a Gen-Z twist. “I thought this would make sense as the next format for a music blog,” he says, noting the app’s fast-paced nature and its already solid usership of young people.
For many of TikTok’s most successful music curators, the pandemic acted as a catalyst for getting on the app to share recommendations of new songs, and now, about two years later, these videos made in their childhood bedrooms are responsible for launching successful careers in the music business. Plenty of headlines have espoused the merits of using TikTok to promote new artists and songs, but less has been said about the new class of music business executives beginning to break on the app too, circumventing the notoriously exclusive path into the industry usually required.
On TikTok, there seems to be a place for anyone with passion to find an audience, due to algorithms that can quickly connect niche creators with niche audiences. Instead of the traditional model of social media, dependent on following friends to build out news feeds, TikTok serves up content based on shared interests. Because of this, if TikTok thinks a user is a fan of bedroom pop, often that user will be shown Motely’s latest video about the subgenre, even if they don’t follow him.
This constant creator discovery allows fledgling music curators to build a quick, loyal audience on TikTok, perhaps easier than any other app. That’s what happened for Motely’s account “Mostley Music” which swelled to 231K followers for recommending “everything from indie pop to hip-hop,” as he says in his characteristic tagline. Hawkins’ account, called “Pablo the Don,” also quickly amassed a following. Now at 222.5K followers, Hawkins’ is known for telling it to you straight, whether that’s offering their opinion on music news or sharing songs from overlooked artists, often from marginalized communities.
Other curators who started building their accounts at the same time as Motely and Hawkins have come to own other niches as music curators. Jesea Lee, for example, gained a presence sharing his favorite rock, alt, and metal picks to the millennial and older Gen Z set, Carla Turi of “Carla’s Infinite Playlist” built her following by sharing her thoughtful playlists of indie rock, folk and acoustic songs to an audience of mostly women and LGBTQ+ viewers. Ari Elkins went for the everyman by suggesting tracks to fit relatable situations, rather than genres – like driving in the car with the windows down.
“It’s crazy how you can build something yourself and leapfrog these [early steps] in the music business,” Elkins says of building his TikTok account. “Now you don’t have to wait on anyone.” When he started out, he was a student at University of Michigan, working part time as a college rep for Warner. After focusing on widening his TikTok presence during quarantine, he’s now perhaps the biggest music curator on the app with 1.9 million followers and counting and has leveraged that following into a successful hosting career, including Spotify Live’s Soundtrack Your Day, Simon Cowell and TikTok’s Stem Drop, and various Live Nation events. Long term, he says he wants to be thought of as Gen Z’s Zane Lowe.
To William Gruger, global music programs for TikTok, these kinds of music curators are already this generation’s “new media personalities,” pointing out the similarities in cultural taste making between these creators on TikTok and VJs at the height of MTV’s reign.
Within a year of posting as Mostley Music, Motely found himself suddenly able to break into the industry which felt impenetrable to him just months earlier. Atlantic and Interscope/ Darkroom offered him A&R consultant gigs and Spotify tapped him as co-host of their Spotify Live show Lorem Life. And just a few months ago, Motely co-founded a label of his own. Called Music Soup, the record label provides expertise in digital marketing and was the first to use TikTok Sound On as a distributor. Motely says if it hadn’t been for building out Mostley Music during quarantine, he’d probably be working his way up slowly in the ranks from the assistant level of a record label – not founding his own at age 24.
Hawkins is still focusing on building their numbers on TikTok with the long term goal of being a major personality rather than an executive, but in 2021, their account led them to a full time gig on the social media team at United Masters which allows them better access to the industry and the ability to earn a steady wage from content creation.
Turi says curating Carla’s Infinite Playlist proved to be “absolutely instrumental” in landing her “dream” job as folk and acoustic curator at Spotify. “It gave me the credibility to have the position I’m in,” she says. Lee, who is now a DJ for SiriusXM Octane and works with events like Lollapalooza and When We Were Young, goes further to call building his TikTok music curation account “life changing.”
Some curators have slowed their use of the app – like Turi and Motely – after earning the highly-coveted industry roles, but others still make posting on TikTok to be a major priority. For those curators interested in more public-facing roles in music, maintaining their account can be instrumental to landing brand partnerships and paid hosting gigs off-platform.
No matter what they are doing with the app now, their ability to use TikTok as a career launchpad has proven that the app has further democratized not only which artists can succeed but also who can become an industry tastemaker.
“I wasn’t born into this business,” Hawkins says. “So I had to find my own way in. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but now I have even bigger goals for the future.”