In February, Australian TikTok users noticed a strange glitch: the app was limiting the number of songs some users could post.
TikTok, it turned out, was using Australia as a test market to find out whether popular music was driving time spent on the app.
The experiment finished in March, and TikTok Australia told the Guardian that only half of its users were impacted. But it left the local music industry rattled – providing a discomforting demonstration of the power wielded by the tech industry over artists.
Australian musician Kota Banks, for instance, had been on the eve of releasing a new single. As she explained to fans in a post on her Instagram account, she wasn’t even able to post her own songs; she labelled the test “lazy and inconsiderate”.
“It’s already so hard for Australian independent artists, and now we’re the test,” she said in her post. “It just feels wack to be a guinea pig.”
The move by TikTok highlighted an increasingly urgent issue for new Australian music: it’s becoming harder and harder to reach audiences. Traditional channels such as radio and gigging still matter, but the explosive growth of TikTok in particular has given it a disproportionate power over the industry. As Los Angeles music industry maven Ari Herstand pointed out last year, “TikTok is currently the most powerful free promotional tool that musicians have at their disposal.”
In January, the federal government announced its long-awaited cultural policy, which included a new body to support the sector, Music Australia. At the policy launch, the federal arts minister, Tony Burke, drew attention to the fact that only two Australian artists featured on that week’s charts, with none in the top 20. One of Music Australia’s priorities, he said, would be to address the issue of discoverability – the ability for Australian listeners to find new Australian music – and to ensure that Australian music was “visible, discoverable and easily accessible across platforms to all Australians”.
‘We are creating a vacuum’: the music discovery crisis
It’s been three months since Burke’s announcement and once again there are no Australian artists in the top 20 singles on the Aria charts and only two in the top 50 – both by the Kid Laroi. Across 2022, 296 songs appeared in the weekly top 50 singles – only 22 of which were Australian; and there were only five Australian songs among the top 50 most streamed tracks that year, and four among the 50 highest selling.
Veteran music manager John Watson says there’s an “existential threat” facing Australian music. “Every year there are fewer and fewer songs being added to the great Australian songbook,” he says.
It’s being driven by a confluence of factors, including the increasingly narrow reach of terrestrial radio and the dominance of tech platforms. Consumers who might once have fallen in love with an Australian act on radio or down at their local record store are now more likely to have a US or British act pushed to them by a digital algorithm.
In this new landscape, an app with TikTok’s footprint becomes vital. According to market research firm We Are Social, the app reaches 32% of the Australian population aged 16-64, with Australian users scrolling out more than 23 hours per month – a 40% increase since the beginning of 2021.
TikTok’s power as a vector for music virality has made it a focus for music labels and managers. “TikTok has really become a critical part of artist storytelling,” said Kristen Bender, a senior executive at Universal Music Group, in a 2021 webinar. Watson agrees. “TikTok is, in my mind, easily the number one place of music discovery, particularly for young people right now,” he says.
James Clark from Digital Rights Watch Australia believes TikTok’s power is being driven by a consolidation of music industry power players. “We’ve lost a lot of the infrastructure like smaller labels, smaller curation – like community radio, music magazines, even venues – and now algorithmic curation is driving music discovery more than those human, communal projects,” he says.
There’s been much discussion about algorithmic curation and the way in which tech platforms push certain products in front of consumers – but it’s begun to seem like algorithms may matter less on these platforms than more straightforward corporate decisions. At Audible, for instance, Amazon drove a calculated policy that gave listeners a free credit when they “returned” an audiobook they’d bought – in the process, bilking authors of royalty revenue. Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has also made a series of personal decisions affecting content on his site, even ordering Twitter engineers to boost the views of his own tweets. Decisions like these can have a massive impact on the careers of creators, who are beholden to the corporate owners of the platforms they rely on.
On top of that, the algorithms themselves can be gamed. There is a vibrant grey market for songs on TikTok and Spotify, where influencers are happy to promote or playlist a new track on their next post – for the right price. On the other side of the equation, big-name pop artists such as Halsey, FKA twigs and Charlie XCX have complained about the incessant demands from labels and platforms for ever more posts. Last year, Halsey told her followers that her record label, Capitol, wouldn’t let her release her new single “unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok”.
Digital Rights Watch’s James Clark says the federal government needs to work harder on cultural regulations to protect local culture. “A thriving cultural scene is rooted in place. No great artist emerges from a vacuum … but we are creating a vacuum.
“We need to see a bigger investment in public sector content, in the ABC, funding for community media, and ensuring there are vibrant public spaces out there,” Clark says. “These [digital platforms] capture audiences and then they capture creatives – we do need to look at how to break down their power.”
‘What are TikTok trying to prove?’
A number of prominent Australian labels and managers refused to comment for this story, an indication of the risk at play when criticising platforms they rely on. But Aria’s CEO Annabelle Herd tells Guardian Australia that while TikTok’s experiment only lasted a few weeks, it had “a real impact” on artists and “didn’t make any sense”.
“We know music is such an important part of the platform,” she says. “What are they trying to prove, and why are they doing this to Australia?”
Watson believes the app wanted to show artists that they needed TikTok more than TikTok needed them – and to build a stronger case when negotiating with record labels over music royalties, which TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has only recently started paying. TikTok has also launched its SoundOn app in Australia, which it is selling as a creator-friendly platform for independent artists.
“TikTok is seeking to show that by removing these artists from the platform, they can do more harm to the artists than the absence of the artists is doing to the platform,” Watson says. “That the benefits of quote unquote ‘exposure’ is such that artists should be willing to provide their content for free.
“They’re trying to say: we don’t need that content, because people will continue to consume TikTok and they won’t notice if artist X or label Y is not on their platform.”
The experiment may have proved the opposite. In March, Bloomberg reported the number of people using TikTok in Australia actually fell following the test, suggesting the platform still needs users to access the artists it had tried to cut out.
But the essentially unregulated nature of tech platforms poses interesting questions for policymakers. The arts minister has signalled the federal government is moving to impose local content quotas on streaming video services, but their intentions for streaming audio are less clear. In February, Burke told the National Press Club he will send the issue to the newly created Music Australia for advice.
The possibility of local quotas for TikTok in Australia may be the least of ByteDance’s concerns. In March, its CEO Shou Zi Chew was hauled before the US House of Representatives for tough questioning on the company’s practices and future. The US, UK and Europe have banned TikTok from government mobiles, and in April the Australian government followed suit.
But for Australian musicians, the quota question across all platforms is becoming pressing – and the industry hopes the government will act on its promises.
As Burke told the National Press Club: “The streaming services do not only have available what you might choose; they also push music to you. Getting inside those algorithms and getting a better deal for Australian music will make a huge difference for Australian artists.”
