○ On a recent Monday morning, Olivia Shalhoup opened her laptop and braced herself for the day’s meetings. As the founder of marketing and PR agency Amethyst, about 40% of her work focuses on helping musicians take advantage of TikTok. Her client was nervous that day, with a Supreme Court decision looming and the fate of the app in the United States hanging in the balance. “The key thing we talked about on every call was, ‘What are we going to do?'” Shalhoup said. “It’s no exaggeration to say that TikTok is critical to artists’ campaigns at this point. No one is immune to this.”

Since its debut in 2017, TikTok has become a star-making machine, with short-form video content overtaking traditional music promotion formats like TV and radio. This app features up-and-coming artists. A-listers promotes the rise to top of the chart And make Magic FM classics like Running Up That Hill a Generation Alpha hit. With the help of TikTok, Lil Nas Ta. More recently, songs such as Djo’s “End of Beginning” and Artemas’ “I Like the Way You Kiss Me” have become global hits after going viral on the app. The ability to track a song’s tenacity, engagement, and reach is a label executive’s dream, and one that author John Seabrook provides. I called “Real-time global callout data” helps leading companies make smarter trades.

“Right now, most label strategies rely heavily on TikTok,” said Ray Uskata, managing director of the Americas at music marketing agency Round. “It’s not just an entertainment platform, it’s a discovery platform. People go to Instagram to see what their friends are up to, they go to YouTube to see what their favorite creators are up to. I go to TikTok to see something new.”

The key to TikTok’s success is a feed filled with algorithmic recommendations that seem to know you better than you know yourself, and keep you in tune, sometimes unnervingly, with the trends and music you’re obsessed with. We provide you with a stream of carefully selected content.

It was enough to give lawmakers pause. In April, the U.S. Congress ordered TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the app to a U.S.-based owner, citing national security concerns over possible manipulation of TikTok by the Chinese government and its collections. They passed a law forcing them to do so or face complete closure. Sensitive User Data Signed by Joe Biden. On January 10th, the Supreme Court convened to decide whether to force TikTok to go dark in the US on January 19th. Despite widespread protests from the creators (and the ACLU) slam On January 17, a court upheld a law that threatens to kill the app in the United States (the proposal is unconstitutional).

Music’s new kingmaker

Many marketers say they are at a loss. “I think a lot of people are in denial,” said Meredith Gardner, co-founder of agency Tenth Floor and former senior vice president of digital marketing at Capitol Records. She said that as recently as 10 days ago, potential clients at major labels were still talking about TikTok as a priority. “I think a lot of people are still hopeful that there will be some form of Hail Mary,” Gardner said.

Artists and record labels view TikTok as the closest thing to a kingmaker in today’s fragmented mainstream music industry, making it difficult to imagine a future without it. “If you look at the top 50 in the world, [chart] Compared to the viral charts, on Spotify, most of these songs are currently charting or trending on TikTok,” Uskata says. “These aren’t actually from other platforms.”

Its influence spreads worldwide. Patrick Clifton, a UK-based music and technology strategy consultant, says the power of TikTok’s network effects in the vast US market is such that it influences what people listen to on Spotify, and that TikTok directly connects Spotify to Spotify. It states that you can click through to listen to the song. Post – Around the World.

“TikTok has been a huge catalyst for music trends in the U.S., and the size and distribution of its user population in the U.S. has made it a catalyst for algorithmic trends on platforms like Spotify around the world,” Clifton said. I say. Therefore, the US ban could change what Spotify offers to listeners in regions where TikTok is still available, such as the UK.

Jeff Halliday, vice president of marketing for Downtown Artist & Label Services, said a potential ban “would immediately cause a lot of disruption.” “It’s like every stage of grief. At first it was mostly denial. A lot of people thought, ‘That’s never going to happen.’ And then the negotiation begins where you say, ‘Well, there’s another way.'”

In the face of uncertainty, marketers are advising artists not to put all their eggs in one basket. Gardner said he tells the artists he works with to take a cue from the pre-iTunes era and cultivate a digital Rolodex of fans. She was recently contacted by a singer-songwriter client seeking advice on how to share his rich archive of demos and home recordings with listeners. In another era, a collection like this would seem tailor-made for TikTok, but Gardner took a different view. “We encourage TikTok to launch Substack.”