.jmseabrook explores how TikTok is transforming the music industry.
In December, 2020, after spending nine months of the pandemic at home with her family, Katherine Li began posting her music on TikTok. “There was nothing else for me to do,” Li, who is a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Toronto, told me when I visited her in Oakville, a leafy Toronto suburb, where she had holed up during the lockdown with her father, Chengwu, her mother, Xiaohong , and her brother, Vincent, who is five years younger.
Her mother had imagined Katherine’s future differently. The Lis, who speak Mandarin at home, left Beijing for Canada in October, 2001, “in search of a better life,” as Chengwu Li, a mechanical engineer, put it. Their middle daughter was an outstanding student. “The best in everything,” Maggie told me, with fierce pride. She thought that Katherine would attend medical school and become a pediatrician. Alice was the performer in the family.
At first, Li was only a viewer, rather than a “creator,” as TikTok flatteringly refers to anyone who uploads videos. To soundtrack their videos, TikTok creators can choose from a vast library of licensed sounds, which are mostly parts of songs, and which vary in length from a few seconds to a minute.
After lean years early in the new millennium, when the industry saw CD sales crater while its technophobic leaders dithered over converting to file-sharing, the major labels figured out how to turn streaming to their advantage.
In March, 2019, “Old Town Road,” a little known song by Lil Nas X, went viral on TikTok, thanks in part to a video by a twenty-one-year-old Boston-based creator named Michael Pelchat. In the video, Pelchat did a dance featuring a quick-cut costume change into a cowboy outfit , which was synched to the lyric “I got the horses in the back.” An explosion of videos by other creators using the song and the same gimmick followed in the next few months.
But how does the algorithm launch viral trends on TikTok? Machine learning is a form of A.I. that identifies patterns in data and makes predictions and recommendations based on them. Because of the complexity of their calculations and the sheer volume of data they ingest, the exact workings of powerful A.I.s like TikTok’s are difficult to comprehend. Still, there are theories about TikTok’s algorithm.
Likewise, record executives have scouted talent online since the early years of YouTube, which launched in 2005 and was purchased by Google in 2006. But before the pandemic few would have signed an act without first hearing the artist perform live. Caren recalled going to a basement club in London in 2010 to see an unknown artist named Ed Sheeran. “I had already seen data which led me to go,” Caren said. “He opened for a rapper and there was a hip-hop d.j. on before him.
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