Short music – Newspaper Kommersant No. 233 (7434) of 12/15/2022

In recent years, short video creation service TikTok has grown into a whole metaverse, a significant part of which is occupied by music videos. But even more significant is that TikTok has become the main driver of the growth in the popularity of artists. Video creators are now more important than songwriters, and TikTok trends are more important than radio stations and digital music charts. Everywhere except Russia, where TikTok, which left in March 2022, has not yet been replaced.

While most professionals and entire businesses have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform for posting and sharing short amateur videos TikTok, invented in China in 2016, has experienced a breakthrough to commercial peaks during the global lockdown. In mid-2021, TikTok hit one billion monthly users.

“Despite the fact that concert tours have fully returned to the everyday life of music lovers in 2022, the TikTok algorithm has remained the sun around which the music industry revolves, the main arbiter of what is now “hot”,” writer John Seabrook defines TikTok’s place in the world in the world. a recent article in The New Yorker magazine “So you want to be a TikTok star.” Seabrook is one of the most respected and thoughtful researchers in the music business (see interview with him in “Kommersant” dated June 23, 2017), suffice it to recall the book “The Song Machine”, in which he described the transformation of popular music from the author’s craft into a brigade creative process.

One of Seabrook’s main observations is that it’s hard to find a song in the top 10 radio and streaming hits that hasn’t been trending on TikTok before. During the pandemic, major record labels started signing artists based solely on their social media reach, ignoring concert attendance like they used to—there were no concerts back then.

The usual notion of a “hit” has been transformed in the TikTok era. A viral hit can be made not by a hit chorus or a catchy melody, but by some insignificant element of the arrangement, which the creator of video content will nevertheless insert into his mini-video. Journalists writing about TikTok agree that the “creator” is now no less important than the musician.

For example, one of the first mega hits made popular by TikTok, Lil Naz X’s “Old Town Road,” owes its success to a user named Michael Pelchat. He used a video effect of changing outfit – transition – under a very short fragment of the song, but this particular piece decided everything.

The balance of power between the copyright holder and the creator-influencer has also changed in favor of the latter. Now, an equally impressive industry is forming around the figure of the content creator for TikTok, as around the musician. A successful creator needs his own acting agencies, choreographers, video makers, lawyers, and so on. And in this orbit there were “initiators”, which start the process of promoting the track, and “accelerators”, which add fuel to the fire. And they also make money on TikTok – the fees vary depending on the number of their followers.

The Russian music industry for the time being developed according to the same model. However, after the start of the military operation on the territory of Ukraine, TikTok banned Russian users from uploading videos, broadcasting live, and viewing ads, videos, and user accounts from other countries (including Belarus) in the app. Teenagers who idolized the inhabitants of TikTok-“houses” (see “Kommersant” dated December 30, 2020), have lost legal access to their accounts, and the heroes of the domestic TikTok themselves have ceased to be the rulers of thoughts. Lucky are those who still managed to convert their popularity into success on the stage – their careers are now being pursued by production centers with good positions on TV. And at the same time, the correct civic position is required from the former heroes of the domestic TikTok. Not the same as until recently the most sought-after Russian character of the platform – Dani Milokhin, who left the country and released a mocking “diss” on Channel One and the music establishment as a whole.

What can replace TikTok for Russian users? The CEO of Invisible Promo, an artist promotion company, Asya Zorina, believes that Instagram and its Reels option, which gives artists viral coverage, can only partially play its role, taking into account the status of the “banned in Russia” network. Even less hope for a similar and still legal YouTube Shorts service. Well, projects like the domestic application for vertical videos Yappy are still far from being in demand by a large audience, despite the huge amounts invested in advertising.

Dmitry Konnov, executive director of the Zvonko Digital major, believes that VK video services are primarily competing for the place of TikTok. However, in the past year, the VK functionality, which can help the artist reach out to the audience, was still being set up, so it’s too early to talk about a replacement. The winners were those artists who mastered the tools of VKontakte at a time when others preferred to gather an audience on TikTok and only then bring it to VK.

In this sense, you will not envy those musicians who are now at the start of their careers. In fact, no one offers a creator with a small number of subscribers an understandable, effective tool like TikTok was. There is a large-scale regrouping of companies and assets on the market, and no one seems to care about a newcomer. At the same time, places were vacated for those who did not want to play by the new rules either in the music industry or in the new life. If you control yourself, do not make loud statements, or, even better, actively integrate into the new ideological realities, proposals will not be long in coming. In the end, the good old television remains, and its role in communicating with the audience, as we could see in 2022, is more important than ever.

Boris Barabanov