How TikTok, the new "hit machine", chooses which songs go most viral
When Megan Thee Stallion took off her bright orange mask and
walked onstage to accept her Grammy on March 14, she fought back tears and
thanked God, her mother, and her managers for helping her become the first
female rapper to win the award for best new artist in two decades. But the
rapper, whose real name is Megan Pete, made no mention of another entity that
helped turn her song Savage into a No. 1 hit: the mobile app TikTok.
TikTok, a social network where people post short videos, often set
to music, has become this generation's hit machine. Like many TikTok sensations,
Savage appeared to bubble up spontaneously from the enthusiasm of its users,
who choreographed their own dances for the song, introducing it to other fans
who watched those videos tens of millions of times. That mysterious formula for
success on TikTok has
turned the app into the most important new social media platform
in years-which in turn thrust it into the center of a major geopolitical
dispute.
But the success of Savage didn't come out of nowhere. It resulted
from a savvy marketing campaign, where TikTok's management analyzed user data
and advised Pete's label on how to promote her, eventually landing on the
infectious hit as the best vehicle to do so. Social media has
always been less spontaneous than it appears, but from its inception, TikTok
has been even more controlled than competing apps. Company executives help
determine which videos go viral, which clips appear on the pages of
personalized recommendations, and which trends spill out from the app to flood
the rest of the world.
TikTok's hold on American culture began with Alex Zhu, who started
Musical.ly, the lip-syncing app that turned into what we now know as TikTok.
Zhu grew up in China and studied civil engineering at Zhejiang University. He
went to San Francisco to work at global software company SAP SE. On a train
ride through Silicon Valley in 2014, Zhu was fascinated by the American
teenagers listening to music and shooting video on their phones and decided to
create an app that joined the two.
Although tech companies have often clashed with record labels,
Zhu's plan was always to work with the music industry rather than disrupt it.
Zhu, 36 at the time, obsessively tracked user behavior, even registering fake
accounts to interact with elementary and middle school kids. He personally
courted rising stars by calling them and their parents at home and taking their
families out to dinner. Zhu, through a company spokesperson, declined to
comment.
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