Is TikTok killing or benefiting the music scene?
Is the only goal when you make music is to make a TikTok approved song? Has the industry got lazy with promotion? Is TikTok benefiting the scene or ruining music?
I posted an Instagram story the other day discussing something that has been on my mind a lot :
“So many artists are making snippet music. The only goal is for it to blow up on TikTok and when they drop it, it’s the snippet times two. Not making music because they’re passionate about it or have a story to tell but just hungry for those few seconds of fame on TikTok. That’s why I have such a mixed opinion about what TikTok has done for the music scene.” And a lot of people agreed with this, and it made me think about how different the music scene is now compared to 20 or even 10 years ago.
For example, the change in promotion, back in the day artists used to put in blood, sweat and tears into their promotion. A great example of this is Dizzee Rascals tape ‘Showtime’ which was released 20 years ago, just a look into the cd (I’ll drop some pics below) shows how much more effort artists used to put in into their physical CDs, promotion etc whereas nowadays, it’s all about posting snippets on TikTok so your sound can go viral and it is so rare to find artists that actually still put in effort into promoting their music.
An artist that I do still think is doing a lot of real life promotion, is Nines. With his upcoming release ‘Quit while you’re ahead’ he sent hundreds of drones into the sky above the O2 to promote his album and it definitely had people speaking, and this is not something new that nines are doing, Nines has BEEN doing cold and creative promotion throughout the years. For example, crop circle and the crop field, the blimp he sent over London, the crop circle movies and so on. One thing about Nina, is he will make sure to invest into promotion. Of course, this might be because he is old school and has been in the game from the days people were putting effort into physical promotion and he also has the money to be investing into promotion and the team to help him, but I also think that there are other ways to promote your music outside of social media without sending hundreds of drones into the sky above the O2 or carving your name into a crop field.
As an artist you have a sense of creativity and that isn’t only music related, you can get creative on a budget if you really put your mind to it. But I also don’t think the artists are completely to blame because there is so many great artists on TikTok that are going crazy with promotion online and in real life, but they don’t get the same recognition as the artists making snippet music, and then people have the audacity to say, “Uk MuSic Is DyiNG” No, you’re just limiting your music taste to viral TikTok sounds and not exploring what is out there.
I have a whole playlist dedicated to musicians that I think all make very beautiful music over on my Spotify, the playlist is called ‘take them in’ and my Spotify is @missbeaaaa. Let me add that I don’t think TikTok is all bad, there is so many great artist I have discovered from TikTok and I have also learnt so much about music from there and nothing good can always be completely good, I think that if you want to listen to good music you will make sure to find that good music and those good artists while brushing past all the snippet music that people make when they’re hungry for their 15 seconds of fame, Lastly I want to say bring back old school beats please, music has not been the same since we stopped sampling artists like the weeknd.