TikTok Is Turning New Artists Into Viral Sensations. But Who Actually Benefits?, by Andrew Chow
the field:
social media, music streaming, law.
the angle:
Investigative journalism approach– qualitative
interviews and statistics.
the position:
Most musicians are "estatic" about Tiktok's
ability for self-promotion of music. The author takes into
account potential concerns, but provides well thought-out counterarguements.
the method:
Chow conducted interviews with musicians
who made it big on Tiktok, legal experts, and Tiktok
representatives. Additionally, he gave case examples for all arguments and counter-arguments.
The debate here centers around whether or not music promotion through Tiktok is "worth it", meaning that the promotion of music outweighs the lack of royalties or low royalties. Corroborating with Mitchel-Hart's article, he explains that each music distributor and label has a separate deal with Tiktok, and they claim the royalty on artists' behalf. However, he claims the royalty is "very small", and it's worth noting that often creators can illegally download and upload "original" audio. On average, royalties were $0.0067 per view in 2018, and $0.030 per view in June 2019
, Andrew Chow explores the relationship between music artists and Tiktok users. Through statistics and interviews with musicians and Tiktoks, he argues that the balance between consumer and producer is relatively balanced– musicians benefit from exposure and popularity while Tiktok consumers use audio tracks for free. Chow inteviewed Supa Dupa Humble– an arist who gained popularity after making it big on Tiktok, song and TikTok trend embedded above– and simultaneously gave examples of formerly-famous musicians that went viral as well.
As technological advances have seen an uptick in two-market business models that connect consumers to producers, such as Uber, Etsy, and the App Store, the question of anti-trust laws and the role of the intermediary companies has arisen. TikTok provides a unique example of this, where the creators are involved in the intermediary process between musicians and consumers (those watching creators’ videos). This unique aspect is explored somewhat in Chow’s article, and ultimately, our goal is to understand how Tiktok creators perceive themselves and their role– and what exactly their role is– since they are unique intermediaries.
How do TikTok creators percieve their roles in the music industry and what is their actual role?
We suspect that Tiktok creators qualitatively underestimate their role in the music streaming industry. However, we suspect that teir actual role is significant, and their influence on music streaming is quantitatively significant.
In order to explore the role of TikTok in our music choices, we have created a step-by-step plan for our research:
1. Identify the most influential and relevant creators (2-4)
2. Identify a set of songs (roughly 8-10) which are popular on TikTok.
3. Collect data from TikTok. We will pull the dates and likes from each time our relevant creators posted a TikTok using the selected songs.
4. We will also use information available on data collection websites, such as Soundcharts.com, to map out the streaming songs.
5. By comparing this data, we will better understand the relevance of TikTok vis-a-vis music choices more broadly.
6. To understand their own perceptions of their role, we will corroborate this data with interviews with serveral prominent TikTok creators.
Chow, Andrew. “TikTok Is Turning New Artists Into Viral Sensations. But Who Actually Benefits?” Time. May 2019.
Mitchel-Hardt, Alex. “Tiktok Streaming Royalties for Artists: Everything You Need to Know.” PlaylistPush.