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Music
Thu Nov 10, 2022 19:00 GMT
A few months ago, there were a number of musicians who publicly complained about being pressured by record labels to try to make their new songs trend on TikTok. As Halsey tearfully explained: “Basically, I have a song that I love and I want to release it as soon as possible, but my record label won’t let me. I’ve been in this industry for eight years, I’ve sold over 165 million records, and my record company says I can’t release it unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok.”
TikTok is a shortcut to mass publicity and the youth culture need to be “in” is a great way to ensure that a song finds its way into mainstream society. The problem is that it’s not that good for art. However, when it comes to things purely from a business standpoint, the tendency is to look only at the empirical evidence, and on the surface, a viral trend can be hugely profitable for record labels.
The seed for this was first sown in the early days of the internet. The first viral track dates back to the pre-internet days of 1987. Rick Astley had a huge hit with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, then disappeared. Like many things from the 1980s, he was hijacked as an outdated piece of culture that would become a complicated pub quiz answer for years to come.
Then a message board service called 4Chan emerged in 2006. One of the site’s moderators thought it would be fun to replace all uses of the word ‘egg’ on the site with ‘duck’. Before becoming a troublesome breeding ground for unwanted political speech, the site was known for its irreverent humor, occupied mostly by young men liberating themselves in the liberating anonymity of an unmonitored online realm.
A thread on the site was about ‘eggrolls’, therefore this particular talk page became a ‘duckroll’ thread. When people pondered what a rolled duck could be, an anonymous user created an image of a duck on wheels. The image then caught on, creating a niche in which memes still thrive: get the joke? Ultimately, if you knew the source of the confusing image, you got the joke and you were in the club, so to speak. For frequent 4Chan users, there was something satisfying about this: there was almost a sense of belonging to be found.
It also had the elitist edge of being used to prank those outside the loop. In fact, it was the pranks that caused the rickroll. In March 2007, Grand Theft Auto IV was so highly anticipated that the site crashed. Therefore, a 4Chan user thought of a way to prank desperate fans by posting a link to the video. However, this link actually redirected you to the Rick Astley smash hit from back in the day. This created a rage in the comic community.
Communities are a great thing to target. ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ is a prime example of this. Now, 1.2 billion people have seen the video. The old hit was dead now it is one of the most viewed on the internet and millions have been made. This was simply due to a catchy tune and a community that created a madness of inside jokes. All other viral videos since then have followed a similar trend.
When Rebecca Black emerged in 2011 with “Friday,” initial radio play was minimal. The physical formats were not even available in stores. However, online, the irreverence of the catchy song caught on. It soon went from some dark corner of YouTube to the home page. This alone ensured that it garnered millions of views and took it out of nowhere, without any real promotion, to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A year later, ‘Gangnam Style’ became the next trend transition. This was less of a silly inside joke and more of a cultural sensation thanks to a quirk, an invisible horse dance, and a catchy beat. Soon, it became the first YouTube video to reach the billion mark. It now has 4.5 billion views – there are only 7.8 billion people in the world!
Therefore, comedy and dance essentially formed the crux of the early hits, but soon old classics like ‘The Sound of Silence’ would also find their niche. The general term was that the culture was “memizing.” If a song can fit that bill, then there’s a good chance it will become ubiquitous and money can be made from it.
While this may not be good for art, there are some musicians who have used it to their advantage. Lil Nas X purposely promoted his track ‘Old Town Road’ like this. He turned it into countless tweets, created dance accompaniments, etc. The TikTok community took hold of him and he suddenly became inescapable online. This exposure meant that it became the longest chart in Billboard history. Now, he has set up a promotional revolution in which a viral craze is almost the target of the mainstream media. For better or worse (and most likely for worse), we’ve come a long way since rickrolling.
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