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The music industry’s over-reliance on TikTok shows how lazy it has become | Shaad D'Souza
Universal’s decision to remove its artists from TikTok has destabilised both companies – and lays bare how record labels have become reliant on random virality
When the app began to gain popularity in 2018, industry figures almost immediately treated it like a golden goose, thrilled by the way unsigned, previously unknown artists such as Lil Nas X and Jawsh 685 were suddenly serious players on the Billboard charts without much, if any, promotion outside TikTok itself. As many digital media outlets realised in the mid-2010s, when they “pivoted to video” in an attempt to placate Facebook’s algorithm, only for the bottom to fall out of that platform, it’s never wise to place the fate of an entire industry in the hands of a private company whose motivations and modes of operation are opaque at best. For all the short-term damage that the move may cause to emerging artists, though, it seems that this seismic event will be a wake-up call for many: it reveals just how lazy so much of the industry has become, pursuing virality on one extremely fickle platform at the expense of all else.
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