Have you ever met a pothead who tried to convince you that marijuana is healthy? Not mild compared to other recreational drugs, but actually beneficial for your body? That’s how people sound when they try to make the case that TikTok is a good platform for discovering music: The arguments are so bad that they’re practically an admission of addiction.
To be sure, music discovery is not TikTok’s primary goal, as parent company ByteDance pushes the business model closer to Temu than YouTube. But that hasn’t stopped the company from bragging about its impact on the music industry, and it certainly warped the music business for a couple of years. TikTok’s lip-synching technology (acquired from another app, Musical.ly) gave it a sonic edge over other video-based platforms like Vine and YouTube. And the way that TikTok treats sounds as sortable hashtags allows songs to go viral in a different (worse) way than they had before — though even diehard defenders have to admit that the number of viral songs far exceeds the number of artists who can parlay that success into a livable wage.
As TikTok slouches towards a US ban, four fallacies are being repeated, sometimes all together in the same article. These are: conflating the efforts of the users with the choices of the platform; citing success stories without understanding survivorship bias; ignoring the prejudices in the algorithm; and confusing the early version of TikTok that focused on audience growth with the mature app committed to swimming through piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. Let’s look at these one by one, starting with the piles of money.
This Isn’t the TikTok You Fell in Love With
Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe a now-familiar tech cycle: Burn through capital to build an audience, the whole time bending over backwards to keep the experience great. Then, after achieving a formidable market share, cut costs, make the product worse, and rake in the dough.
TikTok begin enshittifying in 2023 with the creator affiliate program, which is also when TikTok Shop took over everyone’s feed. TikTok doesn’t make it easy to track what’s popular, but as far as I can tell, this is also around the time that the platform stopped producing new stars. As recently as 2021, when Khaby Lame broke out by mocking overcomplicated life hacks, the algorithm rewarded fresh ideas and new talent. But today, all the biggest creators associated with the platform started using it pre-enshittification.
Like Uber, which destroyed the taxi cab business before hiking prices, and GrubHub, which offered amazing customer service before basically telling wronged users to fuck off, and Google, which is relishing its near-monopoly by turning into the single worst big search engine, this was inevitable. The fun, early version of TikTok was never meant to last.
Enshittification made music discovery harder, but it’s not the only thing. Even before Universal Music Group strong-armed Tiktok into a fresh licensing deal, big music labels were paying TikTok to advertise their back-catalogs. Old songs from the ’80s and ’90s returned to the charts, and there’s evidence that TikTok users were listening to these classics instead of new music.
A 2024 paper found that when UMG pulled its library, there was a notable increase in new music streams on other platforms, which was accompanied by a drop in streams of older songs. If TikTok used to help rising artists, it’s not doing that anymore — in fact, when people took a break from the platform, they listened to more new music, not less.
The Not-Quite-Accidents of the Algorithm
TikTok’s supposedly democratic algorithm, in which the users decide which sounds become popular, is based on a biased pool of candidates. Internal documents reviewed by NPR suggest the algorithm boosts hot people while deprioritizing, as an employee wrote, “not attractive subjects.” Spotify’s discovery playlists have plenty of problems, but at least the big green circle isn’t penalizing artists it thinks are ugly.
TikTok has a pop bent, but it occasionally surfaces more obscure acts like ’90s cult faves Duster, while amplifying underappreciated genres such as shoegaze. This is good! But why Duster and not another deserving band from the 1990s? Why shoegaze instead of math rock or trip-hop?
Because TikTok thrives on easily digestible emotions — songs that are sad or funny or ironic, but catchy on the first listen. Duster tunes can get pretty heavy, and they work well as background to emotional videos. But other sub-genres don’t fit neatly into popular posting patterns, which means they never had a chance.
So while lots of users found music on TikTok, they were only exposed to a fraction of what’s out there. This curation — if you can call it that — wasn’t quite accidental, but it definitely wasn’t based in quality.
