How TikTok Brought Meghan Trainor Back
TikTok does pay out some money to record labels, which makes its way to artists when their songs go viral. But the bigger money comes when songs are streamed hundreds of thousands of times as people want to hear more than just the snippet from the TikTok sound of the moment. That, Mr. Bruce said, can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties, which are then split among the rights holders of the songs — for Ms. Trainor, that could include her label and other songwriters.
“Those are things we literally had nothing to do with it,” Mr. Bruce said. “It just happened, people used the song and it created the moment.” And then, he added, because Ms. Trainor was already an avid user of the platform, it was easy for her to lean into TikTok’s culture, responding to fans and reposting videos with her side-by-side reactions. Fans ate it up.
For music industry executives who crave the kind of success Ms. Trainor has had on TikTok — and who have had to put extra effort into convincing established artists from Halsey to Ed Sheeran that it’s worth posting there — that sort of serendipitous virality is hard to manufacture.
“For the preponderance of folks under the age of 30, TikTok is basically the new FM radio,” said Bill Werde, director of the Bandier music business program at Syracuse University and the author of a popular music industry newsletter. “But instead of being controlled by major labels paying major radio programmers to sort of shove certain priority songs down the throats of fans, it’s much more chaotic and disaggregated than that.”
The attention was intoxicating for Ms. Trainor after her pandemic album, so much so that when it came to writing her latest record, she thought deeply about TikTok.
“I remember thinking about how significant that was, how ‘Title’ popped off, and it made me think, ‘Oh, the people on TikTok are really loving that old school sound that I did on my first album ever,’” she said. “I thought, what if I studied ‘All About That Bass’ and studied these older songs and figured out why they were so catchy and timeless — why they work seven years later, and try to write some of those? And I think that helped a lot.”
Ms. Trainor emphasized that she didn’t write last year’s album “Takin’ It Back” solely for the platform. The new material incorporated her experience of motherhood among other life experiences. But her consideration was in line with how everyone, from aspiring musicians to major record labels, is viewing TikTok in 2023, for better or for worse.
Source: The New York Times
