Like most musicians, Ryan Guldemond of the Canadian indie band Mother Mother had an extremely quiet 2020. Towards the end of the year, however, the frontman noticed that songs from the band’s 2008 album O My Heart were suddenly spiking on streaming platforms. Day after day, the numbers continued to rise. Something strange was happening. “We were able to track it to TikTok and it was like, ‘Well, what’s TikTok?’” Guldemond recalls. “There was this whole alternate universe of people enjoying Mother Mother songs written long ago.”
In 2008, Guldemond says, Mother Mother couldn’t get a song on the radio or build a significant international following: “There’s a thing called the Canadian curse where you can do well in Canada but you can’t break out.” They grew used to operating at a modest level. Now, thanks to TikTok, they have 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify – almost double that of their more lauded Canadian contemporaries Arcade Fire. Hayloft, an oddball tale of rural violence, has surpassed 400m streams — more than any song by, say, REM (bar Losing My Religion). In February, five years after they played to 350 people at London’s 100 Club, Mother Mother will headline the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena.
TikTok is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Popularity on the social media platform, which enables users to create and share videos up to three minutes long, has shot Miguel’s 2011 single Sure Thing into the UK Top 10 a dozen years after its release, made Edison Lighthouse’s 1970 hit Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Grows) a generation Z standard, and given the formerly niche Californian slowcore trio Duster more monthly listeners than Sonic Youth and Pavement put together. And nobody really understands why.
While TikTok is an essential component of any record label’s marketing plan, true virality cannot be engineered – and has upended conventional industry wisdom about what makes a song a hit. For older artists some years distant from TikTok’s core demographic, the resuscitation of a song can feel like a delightful but inexplicable gift from the gods. How does it feel when TikTok suddenly turns its searchlight on you, and how can you finesse that happy accident into a genuine career revival?
In the summer of 2022, Jarrod Gosling and Dean Honer of I Monster observed that their 2004 EP track Who Is She? was suddenly overtaking their sole Top 40 hit, Daydream in Blue. They learned that it was taking off on TikTok with A-list influencers such as Charli D’Amelio (“I’d never heard of her,” admits Gosling) and Kim Kardashian (“I’ve heard of her”). An eerie gothic grind based on a Hammer horror sample, Who Is She? turned out to be perfect for makeover videos and fan edits of scenes from the Netflix show Wednesday. Thanks to that one song, the duo currently have more monthly Spotify listeners than Wolf Alice, Björk or the Stone Roses. “It wasn’t a single because no one was interested in it,” says Gosling. “It took 20 years to take off with a completely different generation.”
Daniel Hunt of the electro-pop band Ladytron tells a similar story of watching 2002’s Seventeen eclipse their longstanding streaming champion Destroy Everything You Touch. “Seventeen hadn’t been on the band’s setlist for a very long time,” he says from his home in Brazil. “Suddenly we were going into the Top 10 of the viral charts. It felt really eerie because this old record cover would be next to Little Simz or something, completely dislocated in time.” Because the song’s synth-pop revivalism has since been normalised by artists such as the Weeknd, many listeners assumed it was a new release. “This new audience has no sense of chronology,” says Hunt. “You become part of this permanent instant everything.”
Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley is such a “classic Victorian dad” when it comes to online culture that he didn’t realise what was happening to the band’s 2004 debut single Somewhere Only We Know until they played festivals last summer. “Not that we’re totally ancient,” he says, “but over 20 years we’ve watched our audience getting older with us, and suddenly there were lots of much younger people. I started asking why, and I started being told about TikTok.”
You could say that Somewhere Only We Know didn’t need the boost. Huge at the time and a reliable live highlight, it was covered by Lily Allen for the John Lewis Christmas advert in 2013. But only recently has it joined Spotify’s elite club of songs with more than 1bn streams. “The rise has been so quick and so massive,” marvels Rice-Oxley. “A few years ago we had a handful of songs that were equally weighted as big singalongs. But that one’s taken on a life that the other songs don’t have. It’s a song that everybody knows.”
Venturing on to TikTok for the first time, Rice-Oxley enjoyed the numerous bedroom cover versions but was nonplussed by the trend of speeding up the original recording. “It’s baffling,” he admits. “I don’t know if it makes the song more high-energy or if people want to get through it more quickly.” He sounds somewhat aghast. “Maybe they think it’s better that way.”
TikTok’s music taste is utilitarian: songs usually go viral when they become attached to a certain format or message. Some therefore acquire entirely new meanings via the hivemind. Mother Mother’s Hayloft has become a coming-out anthem for trans and non-binary users while Tom Odell’s 2013 hit Another Love is now a de facto protest song, deployed to soundtrack resistance in Ukraine and Iran. Hunt found that Seventeen’s deadpan fashion-world satire (“They only want you when you’re 17 / When you’re 21, you’re no fun”) touched an unexpected nerve among young women on TikTok. “Most of it was like, ‘I’m 21 now!’ But among that were these quite dark, disturbing videos about their problems and their experiences of being this age. There was only so much of that we could take. We thought, this is not for us, this is for them.”
TikTok pays out to rights holders based on the number of videos that use a song rather than the popularity of individual videos, so the more creativity you inspire, the more money you stand to make. I Monster’s Honer, whose song features in around 56,000 videos, says of his TikTok earnings: “It’s not a life-changing amount of money but it’s a decent wedge.”
Serious financial benefits accrue down the line, when TikTok virality translates into streams on other platforms and more prestigious live bookings. Most TikTok users won’t explore an artist’s work beyond their viral hit, but if just a small percentage of tens of millions of new listeners become genuine fans, it can make a huge difference. Almost 20 years after they last played live, I Monster have been receiving offers from booking agents. They have reissued Who Is She? (including sped-up and slowed-down mixes) and have been galvanised into making a new album. “The next single’s called Who Is He?” quips Honer.
It is not always obvious how to exploit TikTok success. Buoyed by over 2bn Spotify streams for Another Love, Tom Odell recently returned to the Top 40 for the first time since 2016 with the single Black Friday, but neither of Miguel’s singles since Sure Thing’s viral success have been hits.
“The label wanted us to post videos saying, ‘Hey guys, thanks a lot!’” says Ladytron’s Hunt. “And we said: ‘Why would we intervene in this beautiful weird thing that’s happening? Let it run.’ Then some major labels wanted to license the track but we didn’t want to actively promote a 20-year-old record. We were focused on the new record.”
Mother Mother, however, explicitly acknowledged the resurrection of Hayloft by recording a sequel, Hayloft II, which has since inspired 56,000 videos. “It was my bad idea,” jokes Guldemond. “It would seem like something a suit conjured up but I thought it was a fantastic creative experiment. The song is a tale and it begged to be continued.” More profoundly, O My Heart’s revival has restored the band’s artistic confidence. “That album was where we felt we were most ourselves, unfettered by the direction of the music industry,” he says. “The fact that people were resonating with this music invited us to return to what we do best.”
Ask an artist how exactly their song went viral and you’ll get a version of William Goldman’s maxim about Hollywood: nobody knows anything. I Monster don’t understand how D’Amelio became aware of Who Is She?, any more than Rice-Oxley grasps why Somewhere Only We Know skyrocketed in Indonesia. “My vanity makes me want to think that it’s a really good song and it speaks to people, but beyond that I don’t understand how it snowballed in such an insane way,” he says. “I’m sure someone’s trying to find out.”
Fifteen or 20 years ago, these artists were beholden to the gatekeepers of radio and MTV, hewing to received wisdom about which songs could be popular. On TikTok, though, a hit can be anything at all. “That can be seen as a positive shift but with no gatekeepers and no formula, it’s chaos,” says Guldemond. “For us, because the universe suddenly bestowed this TikTok gift, we can say, ‘Oh, it’s lovely! It’s liberating!’ But I think for a new artist who’s casting these stones into the abyss of the internet, it can be really daunting.”
If, in 2019, he had said that Hayloft would become a TikTok sensation, would anybody have believed him? “No, not then,” he says. “But now I think anybody would believe anything might happen on TikTok.”
