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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

In 2017, a lIttle-known rapper named Supa dupa Humble releaSed
his song “Steppin’” to a muted response. He moved on to other projects,
but a year and a half later, he noticed a surge in the song’s view count on You-
Tube. As he scrolled through the comments, he kept seeing one word over and
over again: “Who came here from TikTok?” “TikTok brought me here.” “Greet-
ings from TikTok but this song is fire.”
“I’m like, What is TikTok?” the rapper, who is 27 and lives in Brooklyn, recalls.
Some quick research led him to the app TikTok, which he promptly down-
loaded and began to explore. The app allows users to post short videos of them-
selves lip- synching to music, doing makeup tutorials, performing synchronized
dances or acting out comedic skits. There he found that people were creating
skits lip-synching to the first 15 seconds of his song.
As he kept coming back to the app, the number of videos kept ballooning: his
music had formed the soundtrack to a viral meme. And as TikTok users tried to
find the song in its entirety, his numbers on Spotify and other streaming plat-
forms were shooting up too.
“I was so hype,” he says.
“It was unbelievable.”
TikTok is the latest
breakout platform to house
these types of short-form
videos, following Vine,
which shut down in early
2017, Dubsmash and Tik-
Tok’s previous iteration
Musical.ly. In November
2017, the $75 billion Chi-
nese media company Byte-
Dance bought Musical.ly
with the intent of folding
its 60 million users in the
U.S. and Europe into its
own successful video app,
TikTok (known as Douyin in China). Its new global TikTok app took off in 2018, rising to the
top of Apple’s App Store and racking up a record 3.8 million first-time downloads in October.
Teenagers in particular drove its success in the U.S., and its most popular videos began to spill
onto other platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. While some users view it as another
silly online diversion, it does for artists like Supa Dupa Humble what other online platforms
have done in recent years: allow them to get their music in front of potential fans while bypass-
ing the traditional gatekeepers.
“TikTok empowers artists by being an avenue for visual output and creativity,” Mary Rah-
mani, TikTok’s director of music content and artist relations, said in an email. “We offer a plat-
form that is creative, collaborative, global and unique.”
Its ascension, however, comes at a fraught moment for the music industry, in which streaming
revenue has surpassed physical sales but overall revenue remains soft, in large part because of how
much music is available free online. Most musicians must rely on touring, merchandise and even
side hustles to make a living, and the meager revenue generated by streaming has contributed to
an on going battle over how much artists should be paid across different platforms.