The Powerful Hand of TikTok

“You want me, I want you baby,” is a line that millions of people have heard. This is the widely known line sung by Dua Lipa in the song Levitating, which has been popularized as a TikTok sound. These sounds, which are small segments of songs ranging from a few seconds to a minute, are used by many creators as audio backing for their TikTok content. Some sounds have a specific use, such as a transition - one example is the ‘ting’ sound in Kiss Me More by Doja Cat and SZA, whereas some others are just used as background music, like Castaways by the Backyardigans.

Songs that have become sensationalized by TikTok creators have a certain appeal to them. For example, My Potna Dem by $ilkmoney has unique lyrics that were turned into finger movements, which over a million people performed in front of their phones and uploaded to the massive social media platform. Double Take by dhruv has a tempo that matches the photo crop challenge on TikTok - a challenge where people have to move their face into randomly cropped parts on the screen in only one second. Black Out Days by Phantogram exploded in fame - more specifically, the slowed version of the song - after the “you’re pretty” trend, where a girl tells her male best friend that he’s pretty.

One such song is “Say So” from Doja Cat’s debut in 2018. It inspired a dance that allowed it to rapidly spread to the huge majority of content creators, who then uploaded themselves dancing to the music. That song marked the beginning of Doja Cat’s rise in popularity due to viral trends on TikTok.

One of Doja Cat’s currently trending songs is Need To Know, which was made in collaboration with SZA. This song contains two prominent TikTok sounds. “Can you kiss me more,” opens the chorus and it is generally used as a background sound. SZA’s incomprehensible raps come with the iconic ‘ting’, which marks many transitions.

This song was just released 5 months ago, on April 9, 2021, but the swift growth of TikTok fame brought the songwriters 600 million streams on Spotify in four months. Consequently, the popularity on other platforms increased too, as seen from the 175 million Youtube views for the music video and currently, the song is top 8 globally in Apple Music.

Most of the general public may not know dhruv and his recently famous song, Double Take. He has released two other songs after Double Take, which are “moonlight” and “vulnerable''. “Moonlight” has 17.9 million streams on Spotify, while “vulnerable” has 2.2 million streams. In contrast, “Double Take” has a stream count of about 71.9 million. This is mostly due to the widespread photo crop challenge—a challenge for people to fit their faces into frame in the split second that a crop icon appears on the screen—which follows a similar rhythm to “Double Take”. The challenge effectively launched the song into popularity and substantially raised the amount of streams because many users perform this challenge and influence their audiences to follow them and perform this challenge too.

“I got new rules I got them,” this line originates from “New Rules”, an eminent, relatively old radio song - it was released three years ago, when TikTok was unknown to the public. By then, Dua Lipa was already well-known around the world and in many countries.

One song by Dua Lipa that was greatly impacted by TikTok is “Levitating”. A segment of the song gained popularity as shorthand for a genre of couples expressing affection with captions on the platform. However countless different ideas have branched this sound out of its original purpose, and started a general use: this sound is supposed to bridge two objects or ideas that seemingly connect.

The song has received almost 900 million listens from people all around the world in Spotify, along with around 330 million views for the music video. However, apart from TikTok’s influence, her previously built fame likely played a role in helping the song succeed.

With around 2.6 billion downloads by December 2020, TikTok has undeniably boosted a huge number of artists into stardom. These artists’ increase in popularity came due to content creators finding ways to make videos using artists’ songs, and publishing them to TikTok’s far-reaching audience. More content creators take advantage of these creators’ ideas and make their own parodies of the video. This ripple effect quickly spreads to millions of TikTok users, and also to each content creators’ audiences. This TikTok-specific effect is what allows previously unknown songs to gain tens of millions of streams on multiple different platforms.