This is Jake Hi. I’m Jake. In February 2020 he posted his first video
to TikTok. Alright, mom, what are you doing today? I’m going to make a beat! I had my mom make a beat that I had already
pre-made. And I recorded, I'm like, okay, press these
buttons. And we'll make it look like you just made
it in two minutes. I need a producer tag Okay, what do you want it to be? Ayo mama on the beat. Within hours the video was racking up millions
of views. So, Jake made a few more videos featuring
his mom, but with one small tweak. My brother had the idea, he was like, yo, what if we like put a TikTok like in front
of the phone and we filmed it... Hey mom. Have you ever heard this song before? The format was simple but clever: Jake would mashup songs on TikTok that were
already going viral. [overlapping] Hey mom. Have you ever heard this song before? It worked. With each post, he was racking up millions
more views. But he didn’t stop there. And we were like, we need to put my vocals
on the end of it. And if the song goes viral, then like we can
drop it ourselves and become an artist. Hood baby part 2, featuring yours truly. Up down right down... We're just going to name myself, JVKE
and we're going to go at it. Ayo mommas gonna make this a bop. “Up down right down looking for your love
right now.” It just so happens that the first one that
I put my vocals on went absolutely bananas viral. Jake’s 15 second snippet of a song was taking
over TikTok. Once it was at 1 million videos,
Charli D’Amelio used it. That means that this is about to be insane. Like it's not ending at a million. It's starting at a million. At the time, Jake didn’t even have a manager. But he knew he needed one fast. We have these fifteen seconds,
we have labels calling us... What do we do? That was actually when I got on the phone
with my now manager and he was like “Call me, right now!” He was like, "Hey, can you finish this song
in 24 hours?" Clearing the “Hoody Baby” sample ended
up taking a few days. By the time we got it out, it was at 5 million
videos. It ended up going to 15 million. If you compound all the views
of all the 15 million videos, it's like over 9 Billion views. This is just the beginning of Jake’s story. But what makes it so interesting isn't how
dramatic it is, but how often stories just like his occurred
in 2020. Over the last few months I’ve been working
with The Pudding to put experiences like Jake’s into perspective. We dug into the data and stories behind dozens
of emerging artists’ TikTok hits. To figure out what internet fame actually
means for new music artists. It turns out, this is way more than a story
about algorithms or going viral. It’s a story about the longstanding
tug-of-war between artists, platforms, and music industry giants. You might be surprised who’s winning. If I were to review this project, I'd probably
never do it again. That is Matt Daniels, a journalist
at The Pudding where he digs into culture stories
through data. In the Fall of 2021, we started a project that
turned into what Matt describes as... One of the hardest data projects I've ever
worked on. It seemed simple on paper: create a data set of Indie and DIY artist
that went viral on TikTok in 2020 and determine if that virality was enough
to change the outlook of their career. Because it really was their first
major, major exposure to a huge fan base on the internet. But, there were a few big problems
right from the start. The biggest was there wasn’t
a useful data set of the most popular songs on TikTok from 2020. We banged our head against the wall trying to figure out “how do we reconstruct
charts from TikTok?". It turns out, there’s a lot of playlists
on Spotify that compile viral TikTok hits. And there’s also this tool called Chartmetric. Which among other things captures historical
data of those playlists and tracks what songs have been added and
subtracted to them and when. So, we got to work. And pulled all of the songs from as many playlists
as we could find that were added between January
and December 2020. Then we ranked the songs by their popularity
on TikTok, filtering out any that got fewer than
100,000 posts. Which brought us down to about 1500 songs
that went viral in 2020. The biggest challenge I would say is once
we had our arms wrapped around these 1500 songs making the decision of, is this an established
artist that had a TikTok hit or is this the artist's big break? And a big break is a very subjective decision. A lot of the artists in this list were obviously
very established. Cardi B going viral on TikTok is not particularly
impressive versus somebody who has never released a song
before. So we went back to Chartmetric to dig into
more data points behind these songs and the artists that made
them. Including their Spotify monthly listeners,
the number of times they've been playlisted, the number of tracks they've released. Which made it a lot easier to decide: did this
artist have a career beforehand? Eventually, after filtering out all of the
established artists we narrowed our list to a sample of 125 artists
we felt hit all the marks. They all went viral on TikTok in 2020 and as far as we can determine,
it was their big break. Can I also say something really quickly... Yeah yeah. It doesn't actually matter how many artists
we examined. There's probably thousands of new artists
that went viral on TikTok. So what we wanted to do was just wrap our
arms around a cohort of artists that are experiencing this phenomenon and, and then say what, what
happened to them afterwards? What happened to these artists' after they
went viral was eye-opening. And nearly everyone of those stories starts
with Spotify. The speed and the intensity with which TikTok
sends things viral. It's crazy. That’s Elias Leight: he’s a music journalist and his reporting on TikTok and the music
industry is extensive. The virality itself is not necessarily new but TikTok is basically just like
a machine gun shooting out viral songs like even more than daily, honestly. The two big differences are how many viral
moments it creates and then how directly that virality correlates
with streaming increase which is why the labels are so
obsessed with it. You can see how that played out in real time
by looking at this chart which captures the explosive virality of JVKE’s
track “Upside Down” on TikTok. But what it doesn’t show is that while Jake’s
track was going viral people were flocking to Spotify
to stream it. This is the TikTok-to-Spotify pipeline. I remember when we first released the song it was just like a bottle rocket,
up to like 500,000 streams a day. I was like, what is happening? I didn’t even know really what that meant
at the time. What is meant is that the track was going
to get playlisted. In fact within a month of “Upside Down’s”
official release it was on 98 editorial playlists: including
"New Music Friday" which has almost 4 million followers. It landed on the "Global Viral 50" Spotify
Charts. And as a result, JVKE went from zero monthly
listeners on August 18th to 3.4 million by October. As I’m editing this piece, he has
over 8 million. This pipeline from TikTok to Spotify wasn’t
unique to JVKE. It happened to nearly every one of the 125
artists on our list. So, I feel like TikTok is one of the main
platforms where people actually leave the app to go
and add music to their library. That’s L.Dre - who’s song Steven Universe
has been used in more than 10 million video posts. Whenever one of my videos went viral most of the comments were people begging me
to release it. That's kind of the culture on TikTok. When they hear something, they really wanna
go listen to it. I pretty much went from having just like a
few thousand monthly listeners to just a rapid incline for like a year or
two straight where it was just steady going up. And what was more exciting to see was that almost all of the artists, including
L.Dre had some of their other tracks get editorially
playlisted. That's really important because it means that once you're on a playlist that Spotify curates, it's getting a huge audience it's a huge signal that the music you're releasing
is going to get streams. To get a better sense of how the TikTok-to-Spotify
pipeline worked Matt and I analyzed another chart:
The Spotify 200. It’s a global chart that shows the top 200
songs on the app every day. These songs are stream kings. So, in a new spreadsheet, we pulled all the
artists whose songs made the U.S. Spotify 200 after January 2020 and filtered out all of the artists who had
well established careers or had already charted before then. This left us with a new data set to analyze. These 332 emerging artists who landed on the
chart for the first time. Out of this group, a quarter of them
have TikTok to thank for their big break. This is incredibly eye-opening in terms of
TikTok’s influence on the charts. In terms of what is getting listened to in
music culture. But let’s backtrack a second. Because it’s not just about racking up millions
of streams. It’s about how fast
you’re able to do it. And it’s not just about how virality influences
music culture. It’s about how it influences music business. Spotify basically pays out labels according
to their share of the total streams in a given
time period. If you get a really big hit that, you know, does a billion streams over six months or
something that can add a few points to your market share which then increases your payout of the Spotify
pool. It's really like a ruthless competition for
this market share number that no listener cares about at all but the record labels watch obsessively. Despite this obsession, look what’s happened
over the past 4 years. Major labels have slowly conceded their total
Spotify market share to independent and self-released artists. To get back a bigger piece of the pie, labels
developed a strategy: Monitor TikTok like a hawk and aggressively
try to sign artists that are rising to the top. In a way, TikTok is great for the labels. They basically sit on top of it, watch everything
come up and if they get it at the right time they can probably make their money back on
pretty much one track. The intensity of these bidding wars
around viral songs... It's pretty wild. It's just like a flat-out sprint to grab the
next viral thing. Here's a headline I've seen everywhere. And for legal reasons, I made
a generic version of it. “Artist with viral TikTok song inks million
dollar record deal with major label.” Let's break it down. So you're an artist, you have a song and it’s
doing really, really well and all these record labels
are hitting you up. They're like, I want to sign you. How can we be a part of this conversation? So then they will entice you with money, which
is an advance. So this million dollars, right here? That’s the advance. The more virality you have the more zeros
you’ll see. This is Mary Rahmani. She’s a former TikTok music exec who now runs her own label
with Republic records called Moon Projects. When I worked at major labels, but under an
imprint that was a little more indie I would go in between like 50 to a hundred
thousand dollars for an advance. And yeah, the major labels are a double triple
that sometimes. The label signs you, they give you a fat advance
of about a hundred thousand dollars or something like that, in exchange for full ownership
of all of your masters all of your recorded music. So, for that million dollars the label now owns the rights to your
viral TikTok song forever and... They would keep around 85% of the royalties
that came in. You only got your 15% if you recouped the
cost of your advance. By the way, that’s Ari Herstand. I'm the author of "How To Make it in the New
Music Business" and I'm an independent musician. So right after you ink your million dollar
deal you see a nice $50,000 check from Spotify because your song is still riding
that viral wave. $42,500 of that check would go to the label,
only $7,500 would go to you… but it wouldn’t stay with you for long because
you have to use that check to start paying back your million dollar advance. In essence, an advance is a loan. And if you’re only making 15% of the revenue
generated by your song it might take a very long time to pay it back. So you just have to hope you’re very smart
about the way you use your advance or you're extremely successful and your album
generates millions and millions of dollars. And then you start earning royalties on the
back end. The whole approach is basically like initially
you're going to be, you know, 500K, a million, 1.5 million in the hole, and you just have
to dig yourself out of it. This is what a standard major label record
deal has looked like for decades. But recently, this part of the headline has
started changing the equation. If you have a viral hit, and have proven you
can build a following all on your own. Congratulations, you have leverage. I mean, if you have a viral hit, probably
you’re getting a lot of offers simultaneously because labels scrutinize TikTok so closely and they want to be part of these viral things so badly Because of that... There's been a bigger shift in the last couple
of years than there has been in the last 50 years in the types of deals that labels are starting to offer
the artists in the artists favor. Where the label comes to the artist and says,
I know, historically we would take 85%, but we're not going to do that for you because
you're so valuable. And you've obviously proven that you can create
a career all on your own. So, how about 50/50 we're partners now? And you know, we're not going to own your
stuff. We're just going to do a licensing deal. Meaning give us the rights to your record
for the next 12 to 15 years. You can still do whatever you want with it,
we'll do whatever we can to make more money on this. And we'll split it 50/50. That has never really happened before with
self-released DIY independent artists. So, how many record deals are actually happening? Matt and I decided to tackle this question
from two angles. First by compiling a list of
around 367 emerging artists who landed their first major label
deal after January 2020. And then from there, we went row by row, artist
by artist, trying to determine, did this person have a viral moment on TikTok? And if so, was that cited as one of the reasons
for them getting signed? It turns out, roughly a third of these deals
happened because an artist's song went viral on TikTok. And when Matt and I went back and looked at
our original group of 125 artists, we figured out that 46% of them went from unsigned to landing a major record label deal. Because when these artists do have leverage,
signing to a major has its benefits. For one, they have direct relationships with
streaming services like Spotify which helps them get more placements on editorial playlists. They are also massive international conglomerates,
so they will tell you that they can push you in Sweden and France and Germany and Japan
at the same time as they push you in America. At the end of the day, the biggest difference
is that they're massive banks and they can write huge checks. But TikTok, has increased the chances for
DIY artists to go viral one day and wake up the next morning with a million streams on
Spotify without spending millions of dollars to record an album, and needing a global team
to promote it. This is honestly the subject of a lot of debate
right now. If you're able to build a lot of leverage
on your own, like how much benefit does a big label offer you and what should
you give up? When I looked at the data, I wasn’t that
surprised to all of these of these artists signing deals with major labels. What I found more compelling was the group
who were likely offered deals and decided to continue on their own,
at least for now. It's like, I can promote my music. I don't have to rely on you to
make stuff happen for me. The leverage is kind of slowly being
put back into the hands of the artists and it’s a beautiful thing to see. When I was browsing our list of
125 viral artists one name happened to grab my attention: Edith Whiskers. It turns out that name is a pseudonym for
the prolific singer songwriter Tom Rosenthal. I write fairly boring singer songwriting music
that has gone a bit viral on TikTok. Tom’s first viral song was his cover of
“Home” by Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeroes. It’s been used in 1.6 million TikTok videos. So after the initial TikTok waves hit me,
I thought, okay, I'm going to release it, but then it
suddenly dawned on me that if I released it via my own name, I thought this cover will be on the top
of my lists forever. I couldn’t bear the idea of writing all
these original songs and then having one cover just sitting there at the top. So he did the only sensible thing. I came up with four names, put all those names
on Twitter, did a Twitter poll and Edith Whiskers was
the favorite. So he released the track on Spotify under
the name Edith Whiskers And it shot straight up to
the Spotify Viral 50. Basically, If you can name a record label
they reached out. The thing is, Tom is staunchly independent. And has some pretty strong feelings about
major labels. I'm their worst nightmare, really, because
I'm older than, you know, 19. When record labels said to me “Oh, come
and sign with us because you know, these things can drop off and we help it grow and flourish
in its own special way.” Well, I go, “Hang on, I've literally got
the data from the first one over a year now, showing that it basically does roughly the
same thing every single day of his life.” I just basically said, this is around the kind
of money that it would take to get me interested, because I know this is the money that I will
make from these songs. That knowledge is really important, especially
if you're independent. In 2021, just a few months after going viral,
Tom started his own record label. I thought, let's try it. Let's try and create a fair system. Let’s actually have a completely
big rethink about how I approach it compared to
traditional record labels. The first thing he nixed was the long tradition
of advance and recoupment. Obviously not go crazy and invest lots of
money, but actually invest, you know, one or 2000 pounds or dollars in someone and say,
look, let's make a few songs, but I'm not looking for that money back. So that's the key difference, I think, is
you’re just investing in people, rather than it being this odd loan system. I want every artist of mine, on my record
label, to understand money. And the only way they do that is by seeing
money come in straight away and understanding how that works. It has never been a better time to be a DIY
artist, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I’m at the whims of these almighty algorithms
at all times. Like they pretty much decide, you know, whether
I'm gonna eat dinner or whatever. A few years ago I started following L.Dre
on Instagram way before TikTok was even on my radar and it seemed like he always had content at
the ready. I just need to make that I’m posting stuff,
pretty consistently on any platform I can. The fact of the matter is, if you wanna make
it today, you either have to have money to hire people, or you just need to also become
a video editor. Also become a graphic designer. You definitely have to wear a lot of hats
for sure. Pretty much everyone I talked to said, if
you want exposure, you have to be on TikTok, and not only that, you have post post post. We recommended posting three to five times
a week and now it's three to five times a day, Because theres people out there who are willing
to put in the extra work, and you’re competing with them now. Even if you’re an influencer full time,
it’s a lot of work. But it's just because there's so much content
coming in and music is one vertical of many. If you’re looking to break as a new artist,
that is kind of the requirement. The more you post, the more you'll get discovered. Out of all of the big existential questions
this project hit me with, the one that I can’t stop thinking about
is this: Is music just content now? Are musicians just content creators? I don't know what the actual meaning
of this was but like the video killed the radio star thing. There's more to the equation than just your
voice on radio. And I think that's kind of what you're getting
at here is that there's just so much around your ability to create content. On one hand, if you're signed to a label,
they can help you with that. But on the other hand, you're signed to a
label because you're good at that already. Matt and I spent months poking at prodding
at the digital footprint of these 125 artists. Examining whether or not they would be deemed
successful based on how quickly their TikTok and Instagram followers increased, or whether they gained youtube subscribers,
and spotify monthly listeners. But one metric that’s just as valuable is
touring. People love you on TikTok. That's great. Will they pay for a show? You know, can you start selling merch? Like, is there a deeper attachment here? First we looked at, of these artists, how
many were touring beforehand? Unsurprisingly, some of them were. Among the artists who had never toured before
or played a show about a third of them have had
at least one show and about 15% of them are actually playing festivals now. A decent chunk of these artists have been
able to channel their TikTok success into performing live music, which is often the
source of financial security for an artist. You want people to come to your shows and
you want people to buy your albums and your t-shirts and be invested in what you're doing
as an all-rounder. And actually a viral song is obviously great, but it’s about doing something so much stronger than that. In November 2021, a little over a year after
Jake went viral with his mom on TikTok, he played his very first live show. "When you perform for the very first time
after everyone said you were just a TikToker." That first moment when I was walking onto
the stage I was walking kind of slow just to like take
in what was actually happening. As I sang the first lyrics to the song and
everyone was just screaming back at me. Like I almost was like speechless. That target, we were trying to hit of like let's convert this virality into
something real, like we hit that target spot on.
