A TikTok Takeover now barely reads as a hyperbole. Spreading its neon-colored fingers across every aspect of popular culture, TikTok, with its unwaveringly loyal user base accumulated through meticulously curated algorithms, continues to exert its brash impact. Music is the one faction that has perhaps taken the heaviest brunt of TikTok’s avariciously garnered influence. TikTok virality is all but a guarantee of commercial success and a top seat on the Billboard chart. Doesn’t matter if people are dancing, lip-syncing, or cheerily spilling their most disturbing secrets as your music plays in the background — the sweet virality, however transient, is one worth throwing your entire weight behind! From K-pop idols to bedroom singer-songwriters, Billboard superstars to wannabe dancers, artists with incredibly diverse backgrounds and ambitions are simultaneously diving headfirst into the misty abyss of the TikTok algorithm, hoping for their very own gold rush.

When compared to previous musical trends, TikTok’s biggest differentiating factor is that it is upheld solely based on user-generated content (UGC). Music has been traditionally understood as a one-way form of art, where the artist delivers their iterated tracks on music services to be listened to by the audience. TikTok’s presence in the industry, however, has foundationally shaken the set paradigm to its core. A song can be shifted beyond what the artist ever intended when it is set loose within the algorithm, as multitudes of people make dances to it, remix it, use it as background music in edits of their favorite celebrities, or whatever their individual creativity might wish. By endlessly encouraging the generation of UGC, the app questions music’s presence as a passive source of entertainment and instead hoists it up to be a playground of individualistic creativity.

The Anti-Superstar

TikTok was not always an issuer of platinum-status stickers. Upon its original foundation, the application was treated as the golden hub for aspiring artists. Prior to social media, ways artists could build fame were limited to garnering extensive television coverage or radio success, both of which require a perquisite amount of fame and marketing capital. Consequentially, TikTok’s seemingly arbitrary algorithm and its freewheeling, laid-back atmosphere enabled unknowns to realistically aspire for extended exposure.

Lil Nas X’s 2019 mega-hit “Old Town Road” is a prime example of a tech-savvy aspiring artist with little to no capital behind his name building up an astonishing career with TikTok. Unlike the conventional model of musical marketing that strategically releases a single along with promoted views, music videos, and further tools to grasp more airplay, Lil Nas X did not initially release an official version of the song. Instead, the then 19-year-old chose to post a snippet of the track on TikTok and provoked the viral “Yeehaw Challenge.” The challenge, mostly consisting of users dressed in exaggerated cowboy costumes enthusiastically singing along to “Old Town Road,” received enough traction to catapult the track into the Billboard Hot 100 chart — marking the eccentrically fiery commencement of the rapper’s career.

Lost in Translation

Under the marketing prowess of TikTok, however, the priority of music colossally shifts towards the goal of achieving virality, not artistic creativity. As many artists attempt to follow a genre of music that is catchy, easy to copy and has a symbolic choreography — characteristics of a TikTokkable song — one may argue that the homogenization of music is an exigent concern.

The over-saturation of artists on TikTok, moreover, takes away its quality as a hub for the artistic discovery of indie artists but sets it as yet another exploitable market for high-profile producing companies. “[TikTok] is a line item on [labels’] budget when it comes to how they spend their marketing money,” Jesse Callahan, a music marketing agent at Montford Agency in an interview with TIME, “You’re starting to see actual salaried positions at these labels in charge of managing and running that aspect.” As the TikTok algorithm favors those who post routinely, big-name artists who can dedicate money, time, and disposable employees to marketing hold an inevitable incentive in TikTok virality.

Additionally, TikTok’s place as a primary musical platform on the market levies added pressure on artists, as they now must constantly present themselves as marketable when attempting to “build it big” on TikTok. One can easily conjure a nightmarish scenario in which artists are too burnt out from constant media exposure that they cannot express themselves in unique forms of musical quirks, but instead reach for (or are induced to do so by their recording labels) quick commercial success in the forms of homogenous, bland, and catchy TikTok-esque music.

No Need to Delete Your Account

Not all the app offers, however, points towards a future quite so dreadful. It is easy to be caustically critical of current trends while comparing them to the “good old days”. The current phenomenon of music may be simply viewed as what they are — the encapsulation of society’s social platforms, trends, and music styles that are in vogue. It is not necessary to lament the trend of artists pursuing more TikTokkable music, as it is simply what bubblegum pop was to the 90s and EDM was to the early 2000s; a social trend, that society would perhaps fondly revisit decades later as an amalgamation of contemporary styles.

Moreover, it is undeniable that the rise of video platforms, particularly short form, has facilitated the process of aspiring artists experimenting with their sound when compared to the times when they did not have methods of publicly broadcasted self-expression. Even though they might be outcompeted in the charts when compared to industry big names, the normalization of expression through music makes it much easier for people to pursue their artistic talent in whatever form they find comfortable. So what if their unofficially posted songs sound like a rip-off of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License,” or if their account is entirely comprised of Stranger Things-inspired fan chants? Creativity in whatever shape is what keeps art alive.

Even when TikTok unavoidably fades out of influence in the coming years, the trend of UGC and short-form media set forth by the app would have resonant effects that will mark the defining musical trends of this generation. The next time you find yourself scrolling further and further down on TikTok than you honestly should, take it to be as you wish: is the application to blame for the death of authentic music, or should it be lauded as the fulcrum of vibrantly diverse creative expression?