The anatomy of a hit: Video makes the streaming star

After six decades as the gatekeeper for music discovery, radio has been deposed by TikTok as the platform to launch unknown artists into the pop culture stratosphere. And video creators and music fans have wrested the power to anoint the Next Big Thing from the record labels. Global rap sensation Masked Wolf, breakout pop singer songwriter Peach PRC, Tasmania “trap metal” artist Kim Dracula and buskers turned live streamers Ula and Inoxia are among the Australian artists whose followers and trending moments converted to millions of streams in the last 18 months. Masked Wolf’s ascent followed a similar trajectory of fan-led discovery to global popularity as the explosion of American pop phenomena Lil Nas X and Lizzo. The rapper known as Harry Michael on his passport released his hook-heavy Astronaut In The Ocean in June 2019, but it didn’t lift off until late 2020 when TikTok creators began using its dramatic opening 30 seconds to soundtrack videos about welding, four-wheel drives and feats of superhuman athleticism. JLo gave it an extra bump when she posted a video of her dancing poolside to its infectious beat.But it became the No. 1 song on the video-sharing platform last year because fans connected with its lyrics, and used parts of the track as the music bed for videos about their own mental health battles during lockdowns. Those videos sent fans to streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music to play the whole song, not just the 30 seconds on the 17 million videos watched hundreds of millions of times on TikTok. TikTok’s director of music Ollie Wards said the song’s explosion into the music ecosystem was “mind-blowing.”“It was completely mind-blowing to watch this rapper from Maroubra in Sydney go from being completely unknown to having a song in the top 10 of the US Billboard chart and a billion streams purely because of TikTok trends, and now he’s a bona fide touring and recording artist,” Wards said. Wards said Gen Z video creators were now acting as “mini music supervisors” who trawl the internet looking for meaningful lyrics and catchy hooks to match the mood or narrative of their visuals. They may seek out an established artist’s work – hello Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams and that skateboarding, cranberry juice-chugging viral video – or champion an obscure track from an undiscovered artist. As the song kicks off as a TikTok trend, it organically spreads to Spotify and Apple Music, where the algorithms and human curators start to plant it into influential playlists. Views become streams which then propel the song onto the mainstream pop charts and, occasionally, radio stations.Spotify’s head of music Alicia Sbrugnera said Tones and I’s Dance Monkey was an example of a track which “took a moment” to wind its way around the world on the platform and then achieve radio broadcast, but has enjoyed a long shelf-life in pop terms and is still adding to its almost 2.5 billion streams. Shazam also feeds into the viral ecosystem, as fans seek to identify the song they hear on a film or television show, a video game, in the shops or on a radio station without having to wait for the credits or a host to announce the details.Sbrugnera said Spotify actively promotes discovery of songs by seeding them into popular playlists such as Hot Hits, New Music Friday or leading genre and mood compilations. “We are always trying to find the places on the platform where the audience is going to connect with the song because the appetite for discovery is huge. And we’ll keep trying to navigate it through different playlists so that it will stick,” she said. She said their data reflected anecdotal evidence that younger listeners were increasingly deep-diving into the whole of an artist’s catalogue and not just the current popular song, as demonstrated by the indefatigable popularity of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album which was the most streamed “throwback” record of 2021. Artists and their labels have to be creative, and careful, navigating the new world order of the hit machine because fans prize “authenticity” and have a well-honed radar for marketing spin. Warner Music Australia’s Simon Cahill and Paul Harris have witnessed the evolution of music discovery from MTV through MySpace to YouTube and, in this moment of the 2020s, to TikTok. “The biggest change we have seen in the last couple of years is user generated content and the audience has the ultimate control. They won’t take music being fed to them,” Cahill said. Watching all that music-related content are record label talent scouts, looking to add an emerging TikTok artist to their rosters as their followers count and songs blow up online. Harris said the new artists emerging via video often build their followings with funny or emotional content rather than their new music. Playing works in progress or a new take on old hit rates highly on the authenticity scale and is proving to be an easy entry point to video platforms for established artists whose careers kicked off in that prehistoric musical era when radio play and downloads ruled the charts. “There’s so many intricacies around the dos and don’ts and some things work for one artist but not all artists. I work with a few artists who it’s a no go to actually perform their music on TikTok; their videos are more about the personality and the concept of what the artist stands for,” Harris said. Emerging artists including Daine, Mia Rodriguez and Sarah St James are among those finding new audiences via their video posts and poised for breakthrough success in 2022.