#6: Red Lights, Stop Signs
"drivers license" is doing numbers & the music industry seriously owes it to Gen Z and TikTok. plus, miley! tiny! desk!
hi and welcome back to music & beans! first off - I just want to address the brief hiatus I unintentionally went on last week. big things are happening in my life (i got a job! i’m moving to new york!) and in the chaos of getting both of those things in order, the newsletter i prepared just felt subpar. i decided to give it a break, so i could give you guys the A1 content you signed up for. anyway, we are back in business this week. as always, lmk your thoughts by replying to this email, and if you haven’t signed up already you can do that here.
Remember when you got your driver’s license? Maybe you spent the day driving around your friends, blasting music through rolled-down windows, and showing off your shiny new piece of plastic. Maybe you drove yourself to school for the first time and panicked when you realized how dire the parking situation was. Or maybe you drove alone through the suburbs at night, crying and heartbroken that you couldn’t drive up to your ex’s house to celebrate.
If you experienced the latter, maybe it’s time to produce a catchy four-chord pop song, because there’s a super high chance it might go viral. Being a part of a scandalous Disney Channel love triangle also wouldn't hurt your chances. You would, however, have one powerful marketing tool at your disposal: TikTok.
A fascinating phenomenon (imho) is happening in the music world, and I want to talk about it today. TikTok has become the new platform to get your music recognized. Any song uploaded as a sound seems to exponentially grow in popularity. Take “drivers license”, the single from 17-year-old Disney actress Olivia Rodrigo. By now you’ve probably heard the song (and if you didn’t then I know you didn’t read last week’s letter.) The song is doing absolute numbers.
On Monday, the song reigned supreme as number one for the second week in a row on the Billboard Hot 100. It broke Spotify’s record of most single streams in one week: 65,873,080. It broke another Spotify record for most streams in a day for a non-holiday tune: 13,714,177. The song has well over 200 million streams…and that’s just on Spotify. It reached number one spots on Apple Music and Amazon Music as well. The heartbreak-pop queen herself even called Rodrigo her “baby” in a rare shoutout. (a moment of silence just to take in how insane this all is.)
For the haters thinking ok so big deal. she’s a young Disney actress making her official debut in the music scene. that’s why it’s so popular, you’re wrong. When Selena Gomez (& the Scene lol) made her debut in 2009 with her single “Falling Down,” it peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 at 93. Even a song as iconic as “See You Again” by Miley Cyrus only ever charted at #10. But that was late aughts. And the music industry now has a new ace up its sleeve.
The magic touch of TikTok has shown that launching a new song on the app can be an artist’s most powerful marketing tool, but what’s really fun to watch is the sheer randomness of what the algorithm seems to promote. In the case of ‘drivers license,’ the perfect storm of TikTok’s large Gen Z audience — and a pandemic that’s left all of us to reminisce on our own breakups — helped skyrocket her single to number 1 after it became a viral sound on the app. Her song became completely memefied (but like, respectfully). TikToks started popping up using the song in every way imaginable. Charli D’Amelio (TikTok’s resident Regina George) rolled around on the floor to the song and it got over 5 million likes. Parodies started popping up faster than people were streaming. (My favorite is this remix.)
The sheer virality of the song and how fast it became a number one is just more solid evidence mounting for the case of TikTok vs. The World. But viral sounds don’t just work for Disney actresses; it works for established artists, too.
Remember Nathan Apodaca? aka 420doggface208? He was cruising on a skateboard with his camera in one hand and a gallon of cranberry juice in the other? His impressive balancing act was captivating enough to watch, but the hazy sound of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” floating along with him in his viral TikTok elevated him to a whole new level. Within hours, the song was a household tune again. For one week in October, it really felt like that song was everywhere, thanks to Apodaca. The “Dreams” challenge instantly went viral on TikTok, and even band members Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks posted their own parodies.
Virality is not a new concept. Internet fame comes fast and hard and it sweeps its newest accolade into a social-media-fever-dream for days (weeks for the lucky ones). It was expected that the novelty of Apodaca’s TikTok would wear off, but I don’t know if anyone expected Fleetwood Mac to be the biggest winners in this case. After the TikTok was posted on Sept. 9, “Dreams” returned to the Billboard chart for the first time in 43 years a month later. Which is wild because “Dreams” really did have her moment before in the past. The former number one single was released in 1977, when its parent album Rumours spent 31 weeks at No. 1, the longest consecutive reign ever for an album by a group. In 2020, the song was back on the charts at the No. 21 spot and brought in over 13 million streams. How often is it that a song gets another viral moment, a whole lifetime later?
The Music Industry™ as a whole really seems to be indebted to Gen Z’rs and TikTok right now. It almost feels like deja vu back to the whole early 2000s Youtube-era of music discovery that brought us Justin Bieber. TikTok on the surface presents a democratic opportunity for creators new and old to get their music recognized and appreciated. In theory, anyone who posts on the app can make it big. But the compensation battle is still up in the air. I’d be really curious to know how much Rodrigo is making off of the streams for her song, and if she’s getting anything from TikTok. (I’m sure she’s doing absolutely fine, but because of the number of records she absolutely demolished, I would hope she’s being compensated fairly for that.) There’s also a murky ethics battle emerging with music execs buying beats for songs without TikTok creators even knowing. I’d like to think the music industry would take this viral moment and take steps in the right direction to compensate creators, but I’m also not holding my breath.
Rec Corner
bits and bops from the archive or around the internet
📍having an existential crisis over this tweet
these girls who harmonize popular songs in minor key will give you CHILLS
miley cyrus’s tiny desk (home) concert
artists i’m really excited about:
bands in rotation:
that’s it for this week! thanks for coming along. as always feel free to reply to this email if you have any burning thoughts or just wanna say hi! if you know someone who’d love this newsletter — why not share?