Tik Tok will take over the charts

It’s almost impossible unless you’re an avid scroller to recognise if a song is famous from Tik Tok or if a Tik Tok trend was born from a famous song.

It’s become a modern day version of the old dilemma which came first, the chicken or the egg.

With over 800 million active users worldwide, Tik Tok has become the lockdown sensation.

What used to be an embarrassing statement, downloading the app soon became a ritual for most, as one by one we all gave in to the app store gods.

Tik Tok’s algorithm holds an enormous amount of power to catapult certain trends right to the top, with the most common of these success stories being songs.

However are songs from the popular platform taking over the charts, and both platforms therefore becoming synonymous with one another?

At the time of writing this over 50% of the UK Top 20 charts are songs that I’d say are mostly known for Tik Tok, whether that be by way of a dance or another type of trend.

Did the single stem from the app like ‘Say So’ - Doja Cat or ‘This City’ - Sam Fischer or are dances being made to it because of their artists pre-existing fame such as ‘Rain on Me’ - Ariana Grande & Lady Gaga and ‘Rain’ - Aitch and AJ Tracey.

Though all these songs vary completely in tone and aspiration, one thing is clear, what helped them reach the top.

Tailoring

Alternatively, there’s also something to be said for songs that are tailored towards gaining traction on Tik Tok. They strive to gain that extra boost from the app, perhaps by making it easily moulded into a trend, as seen in hits like Drake’s new song ‘Toosie Slide’?

Evidently Drake needs no gimmicks to produce a hit, but there's no denying his publicist knew what they were doing when the steps for a dance were laid out in the lyrics of the song. Drake is not the only culprit of this nor will he be the last, because it is too tempting for artists to try to use the algorithm to their advantage, just like they would any other social media.

It can’t be denied that this is a smart marketing scheme by producers, but at what point will people get bored, or will both just provide a shoulder for the other for the foreseeable future?

Tik Tok has a unique mix of audio and visual, with the ability for numerous videos to be made to one audio, but rarely the other way round.

It gives a platform to rising artists but at what point will the charts be saturated with rudimentary lyrics in the hope that a 16 year old will choreograph a dance to it.

Tik Tok is undeniably the biggest influence an app has had on the music industry in a long time, perhaps even outweighing the large impact Youtube once had. The fact that YouTube is now only marginally used for the streaming of songs, not the marketing nor rising of them anymore (throw it back to Justin Baeiber and ‘Baby’ and you’ll know what I mean).

Since the first Official UK Singles chart was aired in November 1952, the charts have become a pretty uniform way for artists to measure a song's success. I now however think that it is becoming a place to not just measure how popular a song (or artist) is, but rather how well it does in the social media ‘sphere’.

Whatever happens I think it’ll be interesting to see at what point the charts and Tik Tok become inseparable.

As always, head on over to my Instagram @libbysparksonline to have your say

I’ll be writing a piece based on Tik Tok’s algorithm soon so stay tuned for that.