In December, 2020, after spending nine months of the pandemic at home with her family, Katherine Li began posting her music on TikTok. “There was nothing else for me to do,” Li, who is a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Toronto, told me when I visited her in Oakville, a leafy Toronto suburb, where she had holed up during the lockdown with her father, Chengwu, her mother, Xiaohong , and her brother, Vincent, who is five years younger.
Her mother had imagined Katherine’s future differently. The Lis, who speak Mandarin at home, left Beijing for Canada in October, 2001, “in search of a better life,” as Chengwu Li, a mechanical engineer, put it. Their middle daughter was an outstanding student. “The best in everything,” Maggie told me, with fierce pride. She thought that Katherine would attend medical school and become a pediatrician. Alice was the performer in the family.
At first, Li was only a viewer, rather than a “creator,” as TikTok flatteringly refers to anyone who uploads videos. To soundtrack their videos, TikTok creators can choose from a vast library of licensed sounds, which are mostly parts of songs, and which vary in length from a few seconds to a minute.
After lean years early in the new millennium, when the industry saw CD sales crater while its technophobic leaders dithered over converting to file-sharing, the major labels figured out how to turn streaming to their advantage.
In March, 2019, “Old Town Road,” a little known song by Lil Nas X, went viral on TikTok, thanks in part to a video by a twenty-one-year-old Boston-based creator named Michael Pelchat. In the video, Pelchat did a dance featuring a quick-cut costume change into a cowboy outfit , which was synched to the lyric “I got the horses in the back.” An explosion of videos by other creators using the song and the same gimmick followed in the next few months.
But how does the algorithm launch viral trends on TikTok? Machine learning is a form of A.I. that identifies patterns in data and makes predictions and recommendations based on them. Because of the complexity of their calculations and the sheer volume of data they ingest, the exact workings of powerful A.I.s like TikTok’s are difficult to comprehend. Still, there are theories about TikTok’s algorithm.
Likewise, record executives have scouted talent online since the early years of YouTube, which launched in 2005 and was purchased by Google in 2006. But before the pandemic few would have signed an act without first hearing the artist perform live. Caren recalled going to a basement club in London in 2010 to see an unknown artist named Ed Sheeran. “I had already seen data which led me to go,” Caren said. “He opened for a rapper and there was a hip-hop d.j. on before him.
And be alert that driver which brought u there informed them abt ur location!?
What happen all fine ?!
Tik tok is TV, not social media
American youth on TikTok:
tiktok will rot your brain
I think I discovered the real reason some Americans want to ban Tiktok. Maybe they don’t like that it cuts into the profits of American social media. Twitter can’t make profit. TikTok makes billions! And even your average middle age dude can go viral.
It's not music anymore. No Top 20 list. Not MTV videos either. Something new has been created with TikTok. What that is can be described but it's hard to define. Six-second sound snippets, teen bedroom pop, lots of money, fleeting virality: it's not music, but something else.
Guys that is Why we need to understand who is right guy . After all, if we hv to work for nation together we will hv to take risk . But risk nd work wd right person not with replicas .
😂🤣 I m Already a Tik Tok star . Cz I hv adrenaline in my veins ,I do whatever it takes
I have 12k and I charge $150 per post! You don't need to be an influencer to make money
As a Chinese, glad to know it has such an influence around the world.
Maybe Mozart or Shakespeare would’ve been tiktokers back in the day.
By the way ,Tik Tok is banned in India . Im working on collaborations wd legit organizations to boost my work. I don't need any big hand or mafia gang t get flourished ,I just need people who can join in . And,Yes I know what to do ,just gv me a peaceful space if u can .
🙄
jmseabrook I m again saying , disconnect wd SRK iamsrk right now . No deal wd him ,nothing . But don't boycott . Read that again !