Fifteen Seconds of Fame: How Diffusion and Cascades Enabled by TikTok Makes Viral Hit Songs
While 2020 has been a lot of things, we cannot ignore that it was a year of impressive technological advancement and expansion. As widespread as the pandemic is currently, another contagion is happening right under our noses. Its propensity to churn out viral creators, challenges, and trends has made the app almost impossible to ignore, even to the United States government. Anyone with a pulse and access to the internet has heard of it: Tik Tok. Home to multiple “sides” (Bustle quantifies at least thirteen, but I would argue there are at least 50), Tik Tok’s appeal resides in its ability to cater to every individual who downloads it; if there is something you are interested in, there is more than likely a nuanced group on Tik Tok who is also interested in that same thing.
That being said, if we consider each “side” of Tik Tok as a cluster, or even the entire entity of Tik Tok as a facet of social media as a whole, we can apply concepts of diffusion to different phenomena that occur. Namely, the app and its function as a viral hit machine. Adopting the idea that clusters are the so-called “enemy” of cascades, to effectively utilize the network of the app in order to promote for instance, a new album, would require the marketer to innocuously plant songs from the album within each “side”, in the hopes that the songs would diffuse around each community individually. Therefore, there would now be a common link between each side which did not exist before, a common denominator that is this artist’s music. Once they have unified/conquered the whole of the monster that is Tik Tok, we can consider Tik Tok itself as a cluster; one pocket in the great cargo pants of the internet. Except, in that metaphor, everyone is separate. In actuality, users on the internet who have a Tik Tok account probably have at least one other form of social media, whether it be Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This theory would enable the app to act more like a central node of a social media network, with edges (on which the song could travel) protruding to other sites.
So, once a song has diffused across the “cluster” of an entire app, the majority of the heavy lifting is done. That is, if any given user is exposed to a new song on Tik Tok repeatedly, they would be reinforced to form an affinity for it, and perhaps, add it to a playlist on their Spotify or maybe even buy the song (if people even do that anymore). This now begs the question: if the process is this formulaic for a song to go viral, why doesn’t everyone do it?
Because the difficulty lies within planting the song in each “side” of Tik Tok without making it look like overt advertising. Think; like Leonardo Dicaprio planting an idea in your head like in Inception (2010), it only works if you think that you conceived it on your own. Enter Miley Cyrus and her marketing team. Recently debuting her rock album Plastic Hearts, she took to the viral platform to promote it in a novel and unexpected way. For every fan that simply used an audio clip from one of her new songs in a fifteen second video, she would interact with the video, making the user feel special and garnering more views to both their profile and more plays of the song that was used. This “trend” grew in popularity, to the point where people were posting videos with captions from “if Miley responds, I will dye my hair whatever color she says” to “if Miley responds, we will get married.” It looked as if she was genuinely conversing with the masses, especially considering the fact that she was finding the videos at breakneck speeds. For context, the Tik Tok algorithm pushes videos that have more views to more people, as they have already gained the reputation of popularity, and people are more likely to want to watch them based on past positive viewing history.
What was bizarre about this trend was the element of intimacy; Miley Cyrus appeared to be finding videos with less than 500 views very soon after they were posted, making the user believe that she really did want to interact with them by personally seeking them out. The thought then crossed users’ minds: how is she replying so quickly? Before long, many had deduced that multiple people from the pop star’s marketing team were likely logged into her account and commenting on as many posts as they could find, as quickly as they could find them. Although the crowd had become self aware, the album had already been publicized to viral proportions. The media was successfully planted, ripe for diffusion across the “sides” of Tik Tok, and eventually, the internet as a whole.
Sources
- https://www.today.com/tmrw/tiktok-users-are-asking-miley-cyrus-make-their-life-decisions-t202673
- https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/laurenstrapagiel/most-viral-tiktok-songs-of-2020
- https://www.bustle.com/life/sides-of-tiktok
- https://www.grammy.com/grammys/news/what-music-goes-viral-tiktok#:~:text=Its%20users%20upload%2015%2Dsecond,song%20to%20gain%20viral%20fame.
- https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-trumps-tiktok-ban-the-2nd-court-to-fully-block-the-action
- Image: https://people.com/music/tiktokers-say-theyll-get-married-if-miley-cyrus-comments-on-video-and-she-does/