The app’s hits appear to develop organically, but artists such as Megan Thee Stallion’s success shows a heavily-managed healing procedure. As Megan Thee Stallion pulled off her bright orange mask and stormed on stage on 14 March to embrace her Grammy, she held back tears and praised God, her mom, and her management for making her become in two decades the first female rapper to win the prize for the best new artist. But the rapper, whose real name is Megan Pete, didn’t mention another entity that helped transform her song ‘Savage’ into a number 1 hit: the TikTok mobile app.
TikTok, a social network where people post short videos, mostly placed on songs, has been the success machine of this decade. As several sensations of TikTok, Savage unexpectedly seemed to burst from the excitement of its users, who choreographed their song dances and presented them to the other fans who viewed these videos tens of millions of times. This enigmatic recipe for TikTok’s success has transformed the app into the newest social networking site in years, putting it at the heart of a global geopolitical struggle.
But still, Savage’s popularity hasn’t come from anywhere. It emerged from an intelligent marketing strategy. The management of TikTok studied customer data and informed Pete’s label on how she could be promoted and finally ended up being the best tool for infection. Social media is often less spontaneous than it appears, but TikTok was much more regulated from the start than competing apps. Executives at the company help determine which videos become popular, which clips appear in custom reviews, and which trends spread to the rest of the world via the application.
TikTok’s attachment to American culture started with Alex Zhu, who started Musical.ly, the lip-syncing app which became what we now call TikTok. Zhu grew up in China and attended Zhejiang University to study Civil Engineering. He then went to work with the multinational tech firm SAP SE in San Francisco. On a train journey through Silicon Valley in 2014, Zhu was inspired by American adolescents who heard music and filmed videos on their mobile.
While technology firms have often battled with record labels, Zhu’s strategy has often been to collaborate rather than disturb the music industry. Zhu, 36 at the time, monitored the user’s actions obsessively, even recording false identities to communicate with primary and middle school children. He courted the emerging stars himself by calling them and their parents and bringing their families to dinner. Zhu refused to respond through a company spokesperson.
ByteDance Ltd., a Chinese firm, purchased Musical.ly in 2017. A year later, after transforming it into TikTok, ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming built the site with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies and a marketing budget of approximately USD 100 billion used by hundreds of millions of people. For the TikTok rebranding, staff spent hours contacting developers to persuade them to remain with the app. They clarified that the software, purchased by a Chinese firm with deep pockets, will be a huge business for the developers, says TikTok project manager Michael Buzinover.
TikTok wanted to ensure that creators, artists, and marketers have made money by carrying downloads. CEOs in Los Angeles and Beijing, where ByteDance was created, left nothing to chance. TikTok has given thousands of stars to individual managers to assist with everything, be it technical support or college classes, which inspires a sense of loyalty among developers. TikTok frequently informs prominent developers on hashtags and features relevant to the app and its marketers, who also have the minimum number of views promised per campaign. TikTok often links creators with labels and artists, which leads to paying collaborations daily.
Gabby Murray, a 19-year-old TikTok founder from Florida, with 8.5 million followers who make over $20,000 per month on TikTok, says that top consumers get weekly emails with instructions on the videos to make to improve their popularity. “I actually tested it out,” she said of a mirror filter her boss instructed her to promote that enables people to clone their faces. “The videos have been great. I usually wouldn’t share it, but I just wanted to try it out because she said so. “Because she said so.” (A spokesman for TikTok claims trends already occur organically on the app.)
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This was in stark contrast to the early days of Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., where certain topics just become popular after a large number of people wrote on the same subject. According to Karyn Spencer, who ran creator creation for Twitter’s video site Vine until it was shut down due to a consumer migration, American tech giants viewed themselves as sites, not service producers. They didn’t wheedle users to share on those topics. As the companies have evolved, their ideologies have shifted slightly, especially on Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and Facebook’s Instagram, which are progressively paying creators for their work.
Most downloaded apps globally 2020
Pete’s record company, 300 Entertainment, collaborated with TikTok to advertise her album Suga in the months leading up to the Covid outbreak. The label originally chose Captain Hook as the focal point of its initiative. However, TikTok advised the label to upload five songs to the website to monitor different indicators before committing to a single album. TikTok users quickly moved on to another track, Savage.
According to Isabel Quinteros Annous, TikTok’s head of music collaborations, the pace at which users were saving samples of the song to their private “sounds” directories for potential usage was “growing exponentially.” TikTok then let the song “simmer” on the platform for a few days, she claims, before adding it to the all-important playlists and banner advertising at the top of its search page and sound collection, where users choose music for videos. She explains, “We kept promo triggers and only let the sound mature to the point that, as we pushed all we had against it, it only launched it to No. 1.”
During the early days of the quarantine, TikTok hosted Pete for a live show, which helped popularize the #SavageChallenge named after a dance routine developed by Keara Wilson 20-year-old TikTok consumer from Texas. Wilson, who has produced dances for T-Pain and other celebrities, said she was not paying to make the Savage move. However, Pete’s label, 300, ran an influencer marketing effort. TikTok megastars Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, Hailey Baldwin, and Justin Bieber shared videos of the #SavageChallenge to their over 200 million fans. Pete then did the task in a TikTok video while wearing Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty lingerie collection, which helped Pete’s brand partner drive revenue.
Though Savage dominated the rankings, TikTok and its Chinese parent company were dealing with a diplomatic problem resulting from weakening US-China ties. Privacy, the existence of TikTok’s algorithm, and the possibility that the software might be used as a Trojan horse for Chinese spying have all been raised by American politicians. President Donald Trump conducted a poorly attended campaign rally in June of 2020, and some speculated that the low attendance was due to a sabotage campaign by thousands of TikTok users. In August, Trump signed two executive orders, citing national security risks and requiring ByteDance to sell a portion of its business to an American company or risk a US embargo.
ByteDance’s CEO, Zhang, considered making agreements with many US software behemoths but instead opted to sit out the situation, expecting less animosity after the presidential election. Meanwhile, a coalition of American social media influencers has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that the restriction violates their fundamental right to free expression. It seemed to be a grassroots movement, spearheaded by a fashion designer, an actor, and a rapper, who had approximately 8 million TikTok fans. On TikTok, 21-year-old fashion designer Cosette Rinab said, “TikTok is all about using your speech to meet a global audience, and this is what the First Amendment is all about.” “The president’s executive order infringes on our constitutional rights.”
According to an individual familiar with the case who was not allowed to comment publicly, the complaint was organized by TikTok and ByteDance. According to this individual, the organization hired the founders, linked them with a well-known First Amendment lawyer, and assisted in the legal strategy creation. When Trump left office, the Biden administration placed an official hold on the former president’s ban, and ByteDance was given a reprieve. According to App Annie, TikTok surpassed Facebook as the most downloaded app in 2020.
According to Brett Bruen, a former Obama administration diplomat, it was the kind of soft power that Zhang had tried for years to dominate the US economy. “It’s not Trump vs. TikTok or Washington vs. Beijing. He said, “It’s this army of influencers.” TikTok was pleased to see it look as though the ones voting on the agenda were its customers themselves, much as it was with picking the next hit single. —In collaboration with Sarah Frier
