“So many artists are making snippet music. The only goal is for it to blow up on TikTok and when they drop the song, 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.” I saw someone on my Instagram post this on their story.
The biggest change the music industry has faced in the last twenty years is the rapid growth of technology and social media. Everything is at our fingertips now; we leave the house and turn on a music streaming platform of our choice and listen to our music on our phones. It is so accessible now. Whereas, twenty years ago this was not the case. People would buy physical CDs and play them either on their cd players or their Sony Walkman.
This impacted the music industry significantly, especially in the promotional aspect. 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 shows how much more effort artists used to put in into their physical CDs. Posters in the CDs, the photoshoots that went into promotion (Images below of the cd I am talking about will simply show the effort) whereas nowadays, it’s all about posting snippets on TikTok so your sound can go viral.
This leads to the financial aspect of rapid growing technology. Artists get paid so much less than they used to. A big reason for this is the fact people are not buying albums anymore. People used to buy physical CDs, and now once an album drops you hop on your favourite music streaming platform and listen to the album. Yes, streams pay the artists but to get paid a good amount you must be generating a lot of streams, you also must pay money to be able to release your music on platforms like Spotify and Apple music.
“After the golden age of the CD, which propelled worldwide music revenues to unprecedented highs through the 1990s, the advent of MP3 and filesharing hit the music industry like an earthquake. Between 2001 and 2010, physical music sales declined by more than 60 percent, wiping out $14 billion in annual revenue. During the same period, digital music sales grew from zero to $4 billion, which wasn’t even remotely enough to offset the drop in CD sales.”
$14 Billion is a crazy amount of money to be losing, so are there here any benefits of the ever-growing media world when it comes to music? Yes! Platforms like TikTok have made it extremely easy for artists to promote their art. It has never been so easy to create a viral sound that someone will make a TikTok dance to and then your song blows up. Stay on the good side of TikTok and make sure you are consistent, and you can be a superstar in no time.
A perfect example of this could be Doja Cat. Doja Cat originally gained a bit of attraction with her song ‘MOO!’ where she sings about being a cow, but she really gained a lot of her popularity when she released her song ‘Say so’ and a girl called @yodellinghaley made a TikTok sound to the song and this changed Doja Cats life. The song currently is on 1.2 billion streams.
However, an artist that I do still think is doing a lot of real-life promotion, is Uk rapper 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 had people speaking, and this is not something new that nines is doing, Nines has always been very creative with his promotion throughout the years. For example, for crop circle he cut out ‘crop circle’ in a large field and that was his album cover and prior to the release of this album he had drone shots of him standing in the field and the drone zooming out onto the field with his name in it.
For ‘crabs in a bucket’ he sent a blimp over London that had ‘Nines’ written on it. Nines also has 4 short films that he directed; each one being dropped with each album release. One thing about Nines, is he will make sure to invest into promotion.
discover so many great artists through TikTok and I am glad I did but I also sometimes sit there and listen to something that comes up on my for you page and it really makes me miss the old school rap days where artists did not care about if their song was going to go viral on TikTok or not.
