THE TIKTOK ‘CRISIS’ IS NOTHING NEW
Forget high-profile syncs, catalog sales and NFTs. If there’s one thing that has occupied the day-to-day attention of record labels in recent years, it has been the rise of TikTok as the biggest driver of listener attention (if not revenue). Having a trending song on the platform is the new viral hit. The 2022 equivalent of the buzz bin. The latest thing to replace radio play in the ever-changing 21st-century music minefield.
Two articles this week emphasized TikTok’s dominance and addressed the music industry’s struggle to bend the algorithm to its will. The first is a Billboard article titled “Is the Music Industry’s Love Affair With TikTok ‘Dead’?” that admits the trouble that major label marketers are having in harnessing the power of the platform to promote the artists assigned to them.
The second is an op-ed from YouTube’s Global Head of Music, Lyor Cohen, who frets that the industry could be facing “one of our biggest crises to date” caused by the failure of TikTok to translate trending songs into revenue-generating streams should short form video become the primary mode of music consumption. This would lead to the industry “losing a generation of consumers,” according to Cohen who, unsurprisingly, sees the solution as YouTube’s own shorts product, which offers a more coherent funnel from fans finding a song they like and listening to it on a more monetizable streaming platform like YouTube Music.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the music biz seems to face this sort of sea change of consumer behavior about once a decade. The good news here is that there is plenty of precedents for the industry coming out on top.
As long as there’s been pop music, musicians and their minders (artists managers, label PR peeps, etc.) have had to find ways to make the radio-friendly units shift. Pure payola worked at first, until the US Congressional Payola Investigations of the late 50s and early 60s pushed back on the practice. By the mid-60s, musicians had found ways to use other platforms to promote their core product. What was A Hard Day’s Night other than a feature-length ad for the album of the same name, complete with carefully-scripted quips from the Fab Four that today would mean memes.
In the early 1970s, Pete Townshend wrote a series of blogs columns for Melody Maker, a clout-chasing move repeated by Morrisey in the letters section of NME and Soundsin the early 80s. Of course, by the time the Smiths hit in 1983, the surest way to sell records was a new outlet called MTV. So powerful was the moon man for the next two decades that labels spent millions producing videos that they gladly provided for free to the channel. All that free content turned MTV's parent company Viacom into a media empire while also leading the recording industry to record-breaking revenue as it sold $18 CDs on the strength of one song on regular MTV rotation. It all worked great until it didn’t.
In the ‘00s, labels lost their ability to make money off of record sales thanks to MP3s flying freely over broadband ISPs. At the same time, MTV was replaced by websites like YouTube that also simply took the content whether the rightsholders liked it or not. It was during this era when the labels, strapped for cash, offloaded most of the marketing responsibility onto the musicians themselves, demoting a generation of musicians from “artists” to “creators.”
Of course, the labels recovered once streaming made music a big-money business again. Freed from line items like marketing costs that the artist now bore while only obligated to pay performers pennies, the labels grew into multi-billion dollar IP institutions that could push their catalogs into global playlists on DSPs they partially owned with far more cost-efficiency than could ever have been imagined in the heyday of payola.
TikTok now threatens that paradigm. A solution could come in the upcoming license renegotiations that will undoubtedly make each musical play on the platform pay more. But now would also be a good time for the labels to reinvest some of the record revenue they’ve been making on finding new ways to support creators artists in the endless quest to be heard.
