The debate of whether or not TikTok has had a negative impact on the way artists make music has become widespread, following TikTok’s surge in popularity in recent years. With many devoted music fans claiming it has, ensues a multitude of others arguing otherwise.
First and foremost, the undeniable truth is that there is a serious attention-span issue across many TikTok users today. This is thought to be consequent to audiences being regularly conditioned to short, entertaining videos. But how does this correlate to the music industry?
A possible reason for music critics and fans alike claiming that TikTok is ruining music, is the way the app pushes short-form content, encouraging artists to develop a new incentive towards designing songs, and their hooks, based around this structure. It's often felt that artists have started to focus on creating a specific portion of their song that will send them and their career viral, rather than making music for themselves, or for any other traditional creative motives that has inspired music artists in the past.
It's often felt that artists have started to focus on creating a specific portion of their song that will send them and their career viral
However, an argument often made against this is that artists have always made songs with the charts in mind, and therefore TikTok hasn’t instigated anything new within music production. As well as this, it is typically artists who are already known in the mainstream music scene that tend to ‘blow up’ on TikTok, and have the kind of sound that readily appeals to the masses. But going viral as a lesser-known artist has always been pretty difficult, and TikTok hasn’t made that any easier. Yet some artists such as d4vd, who went from making Fortnite videos on TikTok to now being known for his song 'Romantic Homicide', seem to have made it work.
Another way in which users debate over TikTok ruining the music industry is once songs have become ‘overplayed’ they’re now dubbed ‘TikTokified’, the term generally being used in a negative manner. While this exposure can propel songs to new heights of success, it often comes at the cost of exhausting long-lasting listeners, who find their favourite songs losing their appeal. Fans argue that this over-saturation diminishes the artistic value of a musician's discography, reducing it to one singular song, or section of a song. This has been witnessed through artists such as Steve Lacy, where some audiences at his concerts only knew the chorus of his hit song 'Bad Habit', as that was the trending sound on TikTok at the time.
Despite this frustration, I think it is fair to say that TikTok has definitely had some kind of impact on the music industry, but I don’t think it is necessarily all bad. TikTok has made it much more accessible for people to explore new, evolving genres, and help expand music tastes. It’s also brought on the major resurgence of some incredible artists such as Deftones, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, and many others, and for that we can be thankful.