‘A lot of chaos, quickly’: panic grips US music industry as ‘kingmaker’ TikTok faces ban

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A decision is coming, and her clients are anxious. “The main focus of every single call is: 'What are we going to do?'” Shalhoup said. “Saying that TikTok is crucial to artist promotions right now is a serious understatement. Nobody is immune to this.”

"real-time global market information," which in turn helps high-up officials make informed decisions.

“Most label strategies are now focusing heavily on TikTok,” says Ray Uscata, North and South America managing director for music marketing agency Round. "It's not just an entertainment platform, it’s a place where users can discover new content. Unlike Instagram, where people mainly check to see what their friends are doing, and YouTube, where they follow their favorite creators, users go to TikTok to explore something new."

TikTok's success can be attributed to its feed of algorithmically recommended content, which often appears to have a keen understanding of users' preferences, presenting them with a carefully curated stream of content that sometimes seems almost eerily familiar with the latest fads and music that users are intensely enthusiastic about.

This could lead the app to no longer be available in the US.

Music’s new kingmaker

Some marketers are stuck in a state of uncertainty. “I think a lot of people are in a state of denial,” says Meredith Gardner, co-founder of Tenth Floor and a former senior vice-president of digital marketing at Capitol Records. She says that one major label client was just 10 days ago focusing mainly on TikTok. “I think a lot of people are still hoping against hope that some kind of miracle will happen,” Gardner says.

Makers of music and record labels consider TikTok the closest thing the fragmented music industry has to a major influence, making it hard to envision a future without it. “If you look at the global top 50 [chart] on Spotify, compared to the charts for the most popular songs trending online, most of these songs are popular or gaining traction on TikTok currently,” says Uscata. “None of these are really coming from any other platform.”

There is no text to paraphrase.

The impact also affects people globally. Patrick Clifton, a UK-based consultant who specializes in music and technology, notes that TikTok's network effect extends to the vast US market, influencing music consumption on Spotify – users can easily access a song on Spotify directly from a TikTok post – worldwide.

"TikTok is a huge driver of music trends in the US. And because of its large user base in the US, it's also a driving force behind music trends on other platforms around the world, like Spotify globally," says Clifton. It may also be possible that a US ban on TikTok would change the music listeners are served on Spotify in places where TikTok remains available, such as in the UK.

It's going to cause a lot of chaos right away," says Geoff Halliday, vice-president of marketing at Downtown Artist & Label Services. "It's like going through all the stages of grief. Initially, there was a lot of denial. A lot of people were like, 'That's not going to happen.' Then, they started bargaining, thinking, 'There has to be a way around it.'

In the face of uncertainty, marketing experts are advising their artistic clients to diversify their efforts. Gardner recommends that the artists she works with tap into a pre-streaming strategy and build an online contact list of fans. She recently helped a singer-songwriter client figure out how to share a large archive of demos and home recordings with their audience. In the past, such a valuable collection would have been well-suited for TikTok, but Gardner suggests a different approach: “We’re advising them to launch a Substack.”

Are there other options to TikTok?

US citizens are flocking to the Chinese app Red after it launched as a TikTok alternative: “We have the same struggles”

A China-based app with 300 million monthly users, including American celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez, is currentlynumber 1 in the US app store. However, its limited music library, featuring amorphous, emotive tracks created by AI, falls short in comparison to the vast music selection available on TikTok.

This song was heavily used in many Australian users' videos, which led to a widely criticized test. In early 204, Universal Music Group removed its entire catalog from TikTok for three months during a dispute with ByteDance over artist royalties and AI. When Uscata was brought in to help promote UMG artist Chappell Roan's song Good Luck, Babe!, he and his team shifted to YouTube Shorts and partnered with LGBTQ+ influencers to create funny skits based on the song's lyrics.

Experts have long warned against putting approximately 80-90% of a typical marketing budget into an app that could easily end up like the once-popular but now-defunct Vine. "We've seen this movie before" is what Johnny Cloherty, the founder of marketing agency Genni, says, referencing the UMG dispute.

Others viewed a TikTok-free future with a philosophical perspective. "Presumably, artists and labels have been emphasizing direct-to-fan communication," said Jonathan Janis, a music marketing executive in New York. "Take the algorithm out of the equation."

A beacon of hope in an otherwise dismal situation: a resurgence of creative endeavors.

Meanwhile, some music industry professionals who are behind a certain trend welcome the shift, believing it has led to an industry-wide overemphasis on data. Spending a lot of time tracking TikTok metrics starts to feel like a clinical approach, as if artists' success is solely dependent on the value they bring to record label investors. "We're not the kind of label that signs artists based on their virality," says Robby Morris, a marketing executive at the independent label group Secretly. Morris works with artists who don't use TikTok, even though label signees like Mitski and Faye Webster became more popular thanks to it. "I can't downplay the fact that the platform helped boost those [careers]," he says. "But we also don't rely solely on that. So this change doesn't feel like a make-or-break moment."

Being the dominant force in the modern market, TikTok might actually allow true creatives to have more freedom in their work.