TikTok on the radio

“Internet” and “pop” culture are synonymous

Last week I braved hordes of seltzer-drunk suburbanites dressed as slutty cowgirls to sit in a minor-league baseball stadium and sweat through my personal song of the summer. 

The song’s not exactly a deep cut. It’s not exactly deep, full stop. But damn, “A Bar Song” — Shaboozey’s twangy, chart-topping interpolation of the 2004 classic “Tipsy,” by J-Kwon — makes one hell of a warm-weather anthem. Rarely do I listen to it just one time. Nor did I last Friday, in fact! Shaboozey came on stage, played “A Bar Song” four times, and … abruptly ended his very short set.

Personally, I was baffled.  Had something happened? Was this some kind of protest?¹ Behind us, however, a trio of rowdy, hard-drinking bros confidently propagated their own thesis. “He’s only TikTok famous,” they said, first to each other … and then to anyone in the vicinity who would listen. “He only has one big song.” They tapped Jason on the shoulder to share this insight with us.² Only TikTok famous! Ridiculous!!

I probably don’t need to tell you, if you know Shaboozey, what was actually going on here. Shaboozey is Black; mainstream country is white — by marketing and exclusion, if not artistic heritage. I’m pretty confident the TikTok shade reflected that, rather than any sophisticated understanding of modern music distribution. (See also exhibits B and C: the bros’ lengthy deliberations on “REAL country music”; their hoots of approbation when a later artist asked if there were “any rednecks” in the audience. 🫠) 

Still … the implication intrigued me. There was arguably a moment, early in TikTok’s ascent, when being “famous” on the app was distinct from being “famous” in other cultural contexts. TikTok music was not pop music, per se — it was “absurd, croaked-out, bass-gurgling,” a soundtrack for adolescent dance challenges. 

But internet culture is pop culture now. No one calls Lil Nas X, Olivia Rodrigo or Noah Kahan “TikTok stars” anymore. (No one ever called Kate Bush or Stevie Nicks “TikTok stars,” though their stars rose a second time through the platform.) Meanwhile, even global mega-musicians — world tour type musicians — host influencer listening parties and gin up “viral” challenges in the hopes that some of TikTok’s algorithmic magic will rub off on them. In 2024, “TikTok famous” isn’t a dig — it’s a sign that you are, in more ways than one, living in another, less-enlightened period. 

The charts themselves bear that out, to a point, if you’re willing to dig through them. Days after the Shaboozey show, and empowered by a 14-day free trial I really can’t forget to cancel, I subscribed to a wildly expensive music data service called Chartmetric, which tracks song and artist metrics across more than a dozen platforms. I was curious to what degree mainstream radio stations, like the one that brought Shaboozey to Buffalo, also play viral TikTok songs.

The answer was higher than I expected: Per Chartmetric, 94 new songs by American artists earned at least 100,000 TikTok posts in the past year. Of those, 68 also saw some radio play over the same period.³

The majority of these crossover hits are by global superstars, of course — Taylor Swift could record her cat dry-heaving, and it’d probably go platinum a dozen times over. But under that, there’s also a surprisingly deep layer of lesser-known or emerging artists whose songs appear to have taken off on TikTok before they made the jump to mainstream radio.

Those include songs like “Austin,” by 24-year-old singer-songwriter Dasha, who choreographed an accompanying line dance that went viral on TikTok in March; “Someday I’ll Get It,” by Alek Olsen, whose brooding blip of a song became the favored soundtrack for reminisces about departed pets; and “Act II: Date @ 8,” by 4batz, whose sudden viral success fueled speculation he was an “industry plant.”

The second most-played song on FM radio right now, Tommy Richman’s “MILLION DOLLAR BABY,” also took off on TikTok in early May as the soundtrack to a teen dance challenge and a relationship meme called the “Black wife effect.” 

Meanwhile, “Beautiful Things” — the first single off Benson Boone’s debut album, and the seventh most-played song on U.S. radio yesterday — took off on TikTok three months ago, when users realized its cathartic, eight-bar chorus could soundtrack just about any strong feeling.

The dynamics of online popularity are noisy and multidirectional, of course: I can’t say what’s causation or correlation here, and I can’t disentangle an artist’s TikTok success from other equally important factors. (Boone opened for the Eras Tour in London last week, for instance, and Shaboozey appeared twice on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.) There’s actually a growing panic, in some corners, around how and why some musicians achieve viral fame — a reflection of just how little we understand the interplay between social media, radio and streaming.

I include myself in that “we,” for sure: I had no idea that so many songs I like actually took off on TikTok first. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is maybe the prime example — I encountered it through a Spotify playlist long before I realized TikTok had found infinite storytelling potential in that “oh my … Good Lord” chorus. And I realized *that* long before I knew “Bar Song” made the jump to country radio and the sorts of mass-market stadium shows like the one I saw last week in Buffalo.

Platform and provenance hardly matter anymore — we’re all just swimming in a sea of content! And if it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now: “Internet” and “pop” culture are synonymous.

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Further reading & listening

• “The Anatomy of a TikTok Hit,” by Cat Zhang for Pitchfork (2019)

• “TikTok Has Been Saved. But for Music, Is That a Good Thing?,” by Mikael Wood for the Los Angeles Times (2020)

• “TikTok Has Changed Music — and The Industry is Hustling to Catch Up,” by Mia Venkat for NPR (2022)

• “The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big on TikTok,” by Matt Daniels for The Pudding (2022)

• Spotify’s “Viral Hits” playlist, which mirrors the TikTok charts

Plz drop your song of the summer nominations in the comments. Until the weekend!! Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

1. Still tremendously curious about this. I have tweeted at the relevant authorities, without satisfaction.

2. This is not even factually accurate: He has three albums AND two songs with Beyoncé, which is at least one more Beyoncé collab than every other artist in country music.

3. Of the 526 new songs that earned more than 100,000 TikTok posts last year globally, 328 of them also logged one million or more Spotify streams. It sounds good until you realize a million Spotify streams is only about $4,000.