The Effectiveness of Different Trends on TikTok and Other Social Media

Music has a fundamental social dimension, it's part of its DNA. At the same time art, form of entertainment and means of expression, it accompanies us collectively in different contexts: the artists occur in public, we attend concerts with friends, teenagers gather (among others) according to their taste musical, we go club with friends, we meet by dancing on music, we sing during religious ceremonies, the list could be longer and can clearly establish this postulate.

Music and Social Networks

In the same way music played a key role in the development of social networks. We think especially of Myspace who had largely based its identity and aggregated its users around her. Music is at the center of many content shared on networks: photos/videos of concerts, news about an artist, releases of albums. However, if we put aside the particular case of Youtube (which combines the status of social network with those of content host and search engine) the integration of music on social networks has however relatively little changed until to recently with the arrival of music in Instagram and Facebook stories or their function 'Lyrics' and 'Lip-sync'

Many Attempts and Especially Failures

In 2015, Facebook launched a feature called 'music stories' that allowed users to post a 30s music sample, from Apple music or Spotify, but it did not cause much interest. On the Twitter side, the #Music service attempt did not meet its audience either. However, these abortive initiatives of Facebook, Twitter & co constituted study areas for the further development of social music applications.

'Social' functions on music streaming platforms remain limited. On the side of the DSP (Digital Service Provider) this social dimension remains limited, despite the possibility of sharing a song or a playlist between users (and still the course is not necessarily more intuitive) we do not find the attraction networks. At the end of 2018 there were 255 million paying subscribers to a streaming service (Global Music Report 2019, IFPI) and in the end they spend most of their time listening to their music alone.

Apart from the comments on Youtube and Soundcloud, sharing between friends on Spotify the playlist 'friends mix' Apple Music and shared playlists, the range of possibilities appears limited as shown by Mark Mulligan in his infographic for Midia Research, below. The landscape of social music applications: traditional streaming platforms have a weak social dimension.

It is this observation of lack that has led a multitude of companies to invest in social music. It was thus necessary to make the music 'Social', The idea behind this assertion, at first sight presumptuous, is to bring to the musical consumption the same attraction as the social networks in terms of connectivity, interractivity as well as their collective and collective dimension . Despite the enthusiasm around the subject, there are still many failures: Crowdmix whose launch has never occurred, Cymbal (the instagram of music as they presented themselves) closed in June 2018 or #Music ( Twitter) which finally went out of business in 2014. All these failures finally lead to questions about the interest of the association of Social and Music? what are users really looking for?

The systematic sharing of tapping between 'friends': we are not necessarily interested in everything our 'friends' listen to, already because we do not necessarily share the same tastes. On the other hand the interest of an automated playlist based on the activity of friends as the weekly 'Friend's Mix' Apple Music is questionable if a sort of their listening is not done upstream (account used by a third - children for example, fancy searches for a birthday playlist etc ...) In short the result can quickly be heterogeneous.

On the other hand, the notion of 'friends' brings together disparate degrees of proximity: family, colleagues, acquaintances, friends of friends, etc. We do not wish to share our listening with all these circles. Facebook's idea in 2011 of sharing all Spotify plays on the newsfeed turned into a fiasco. Spotify ended up adding a 'private' listening mode a few weeks later. With this in mind, a specific and personalized recommendation as proposed by the site This is my Jam was more interesting.

Playlist transfer tools between platforms: Sharing playlists between users of competing services is not a big enough problem for a mainstream business to come out. The Songdrop failures, or the bop.fm stop testify. This point of friction is really more about the portability of personal data than a requirement to share from a 'social' point of view. Some services, however, like soundsgood.co have managed to make this activity viable, aiming rather at a professional use, by addressing brands, labels or influencers for whom the administration and regular manual update of a portfolio playlists on multiple platforms is particularly tedious and time-consuming.

The gamification of discovery: Periodically the gamification of music discovery resurfaces: the idea is to encourage users to share their favorite titles in exchange for points or to invest virtually on their discoveries. Here are some examples of which none survived: Hits Maker, The Sixty One, TastemakerX, Tradiio ... Finally no solid business model comes out. Recently, however, the FIX application (Fan Integrated Experience) has launched on this niche with a rather interesting ecommerce in-app, allowing to convert the points accumulated in reduction on merchandising or tickets concerts; to be continued.

Here is the answer: The 'Lip Sync' (playback) or the sharing of short videos where you perform on a musical excerpt, the phenomenal interest for TikTok is the most obvious example today.

TikTok

A quick look back at the history of TikTok: the application as we know it today is the result of the fusion in 2018 between musical.ly (application of lip-sync born in 2014 and which has conquered more than 100 million users with its playback videos) and the TikTok app launched in 2017 on a similar concept by Chinese ByteDance. Note that ByteDance also operates since 2016 Douyin, the initial version of TikTok, now reserved for the Chinese market.

The application Dubsmash had already demonstrated the interest of teenagers for this type of service of playbacks videos (rather for the replicas of cinema in this case). This is the age group coveted on TikTok, there is also a strong feminization of the audience since 60% of users are girls 13 to 24 years worldwide. In France, there is a similar trend with an overall male / female distribution of 57% vs. 43%.

TikTok is a global success with over 1 billion downloads, 500 million active users a month and a presence in 150 countries in 75 different languages. The strength of TikTok is to rely on the creativity of users (we also speak of creative social media). The mechanics of the network is to awaken the curiosity and inventiveness of subscribers through viral challenges combined with their attraction to music: sketch, lip-dubs, farces ... all in music. TikTok has also linked these challenges to partnerships with local stars for each of its markets in order to catalyze the enthusiasm of users. The formula has been particularly effective with younger audiences (Generation Z and Millenials), thanks to a format of 15s very easy to consume (we are in the spectrum of snacking) and a user-friendly interface.

Lip-Sync a Background Trend

If TikTok is the most important success story in the field, other applications 'Social Music' work very well on the model of lip sync, Triller a French application today claims 35 million subscribers for example. The heavyweights of social networks also follow the lead of this model, and make the race to the audience of TikTok. So Facebook after launched last November 'Lasso' (although already half buried) his 'clone' Tiktok and Instagram launched with its update last June the Lyrics option to integrate the lyrics of songs to musical stories. The dynamism of apps around the principle of Lip Sync seems to confirm that it is a heavy trend that will settle in time.

Even though The rapid growth of TikTok has had a number of setbacks: the cost of licensing music catalogs, a record fine (US $ 5.7 Million) imposed on the United States by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for illegal collection of personal data minors under 13 years and finally its ban in India for 2 weeks in April 2019 before being allowed again, nothing shakes its owner Chinese ByteDance which strong of the current success of Tik Tok would even be about to launch a music streaming service competing with Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music to name the main ones. The circle is complete.

Traditional audio streaming services will have to take these trends into account to attract users and maximize the time they spend on the platform. If new uses emerge around music consumption why not bring them home? We must also look at connected speakers, could they in the near future spontaneously propose a musical atmosphere taking into account the personality and the tastes of the individuals in the presence but also the context of their gathering: store, dinner, parties, hall waiting etc.