The New Yorker - USA (2019-09-30)

THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 37

collecting and exposing the location” of
these children, according to an agency
statement. TikTok handled this in a blunt,
makeshift fashion: it added an age gate
that asked for your birthday but which
defaulted to the current date, meaning
that users who failed to enter their age
were instantly kicked off the app, and
their videos were deleted. TikTok did
not seem terribly worried about the com­
plaints that followed these deletions. It
was now big enough not to care.
A few months after TikTok arrived
in the U.S., a nineteen­year­old rapper
and singer from Georgia named Mon­
tero Lamar Hill uploaded a song that he
had been trying for weeks to promote as
the basis of a meme. Hill, who goes by
the stage name Lil Nas X, had spent much
of his teens attempting to go viral on
Twitter and elsewhere. There is a sweet­
ness to his self­presentation, which seems
optimized for digital interaction; he wears
ten­gallon hats and fringe and glitter, a
laugh­crying­cowboy emoji come to life.
“The Internet is basically, like, my par­
ents in a way,” he told the Times this
spring, after people began making vid­
eos featuring a snippet of his song “Old
Town Road,” in which they would drink
“yee yee juice” and turn into cowboys and
cowgirls. The song went to No. 1 on the
Billboard Hot 100 in April, and stayed
there longer than any song ever had.
Certain musical elements serve as
TikTok catnip: bass­heavy transitions
that can be used as punch lines; rap songs
that are easy to lip­synch or include a
narrative­friendly call and response. A
twenty­six­year­old Australian producer
named Adam Friedman, half of the duo
Cookie Cutters, told me that he was
now concentrating on lyrics that you
could act out with your hands. “I write
hooks, and I try it in the mirror—how
many hand movements can I fit into
fifteen seconds?” he said. “You know,
goodbye, call me back, peace out, F you.”
TikTok employs an artist­relations
team that contacts musicians whose
songs are going viral and coaches them
on how to use the platform. Some vid­
eos include links to Apple Music, which
pays artists per stream, though not very
much. Virality can thus pay off else­
where, relieving the pressure for Tik­
Tok to compensate artists directly. It is,
these days, a standard arrangement: you
will be “paid” in exposure, giving your

labor to a social platform in part be­

cause a lot of other people are doing it

and in part because you might be one

of the people whom the platform sends,

however briefly, to the top.

If you are one of those people, Tik­

Tok can be a godsend. Sub Urban, a

nineteen­year­old artist from New Jer­

sey, got a deal with Warner Records

after millions of TikTokers started do­

ing a dance from the video

game Fortnite to his song

“Cradles.” In August, a

twenty­one­year­old rap­

per from Sacramento who

goes by the name Stunna

Girl learned that a song of

hers had gone viral on the

app, and soon signed a rec­

ord deal with Capitol. Tik­

Tok also offers artists the

uniquely moving experience

of watching total strangers freely and

enthusiastically produce music videos

for them. Jonathan Visger, an electronic

artist known as Absofacto, told me that

it had changed his entire outlook on his

career to see nearly two million Tik­

Toks all set to his 2015 single “Dissolve,”

a heady pop song that inspired a meme

in which people appeared to be falling

through a series of portals.

“I think the song worked well for

the platform because the lyrics are ‘I

just wanted you to watch me dissolve,

slowly, in a pool full of your love,’” Vis­

ger told me recently. “Which is a lot

like ‘I’m on the Internet, I want to be

seen, and I want you to like it.’” I asked

him if he’d been thinking about the In­

ternet when he was writing it. “No!” he

said, laughing. “I was thinking about

unrequited love.”

ByteDance is developing a music­

streaming service—which will likely

launch first in emerging markets, such

as India—and it is currently negotiat­

ing the renewal of old Musical.ly licens­

ing agreements with the three compa­

nies that control roughly eighty per cent

of music globally. ByteDance also has

acquired a London­based startup called

Jukedeck, which has been developing

A.I. music­creation tools, including a

program that can interpret video and

compose music that suits it. Incorporat­

ing such technology into TikTok could

give ByteDance total ownership of con­

tent created within the app. Multiple

people at TikTok and ByteDance told

me that they were not aware of any plans

to add this sort of tool, but TikTok’s

plans have a way of abruptly changing.

In some respects, what’s sonically valu­

able on TikTok isn’t any different from

what has long succeeded on radio; no

pop­songwriting practice is more estab­

lished than crafting a good hook. But

the app could begin to influence com­

position in other ways. Dig­

ital platforms and digital at­

tention spans may make hit

songs shorter, for instance.

(“Old Town Road” clocks

in at under two minutes.)

Adam Friedman has begun

producing music directly for

influencers, and engineering

it for maximum TikTok suc­

cess. “We start with the snip­

pet, and if it does well on

TikTok we’ll produce the full song,” he

told me. I suggested that some people

might think there was a kind of artistic

integrity missing from this process. “The

influencer is playing a central role in

our culture, and it’s not new,” he said.

“There’ve always been socialites, people

of influence, the Paris World’s Fair.

Whatever mecca that people go to for

culture is where they go to for culture,

and in this moment it’s TikTok.”

T

ikTok’s U.S. operations are currently

based at a co­working space in a

generic four­story building on a busy

thoroughfare in Culver City, in Los An­

geles. I visited the office twice this sum­

mer, after an extensive e­mail correspon­

dence with a company spokesperson.

The first person TikTok offered for an

on­the­record chat was a twenty­ year­

old TikToker named Ben De Almeida,

who lives in Alberta and, on the app,

goes by @benoftheweek. De Almeida

first went viral on TikTok with a video

that noted his resemblance to the actor

Noah Centineo, best known for his roles

on “The Fosters” and in teen movies on

Netflix. De Almeida wore red striped

pants and a yellow shirt and was accom­

panied by a handler; he radiated good­

natured charisma. When I extended my

hand, he immediately went in for a hug.

“I’m excited to share what it’s like to be

a TikToker,” he said.

De Almeida was in L.A. for the sum­

mer, “collabing,” he told me. He said