Thirteen years ago, the then unknown teenager Rebecca Black posted her song “Friday” on YouTube, hoping to spark her music career. We all remember what happened next. The song, which has amassed 171 million views and 881,000 comments on YouTube to date, has been uploaded Advertising sign chart, peaking at No. 58 on the Hot 100. “Friday” was a true cultural phenomenon — but only because it was a laugh.
“I got incredibly depressed,” Black said of the song's meme — and the cyberbullying that comes with it — on Good morning America in 2022. “And [I felt] trapped in this body of what the world would see me as forever. I wasn't even done growing up.”
Many musicians dream of waking up one morning and realizing that their song has gone viral overnight. But, as Black's experience shows, not all viralities are created equal. At best, it might bring a Hot 100 hit, radio play, and a slew of new, lifelong fans. At worst, it can be an artists worst nightmare.
One such worst case scenario took place recently with Gigi D'AgostinoItalo's 1999 dance track “L'amour Toujours”, recently co-opted by the German far-right. In a popular video posted on social media, a group of young men sang the song outside a bar on the German island of Sylt, replacing the original lyrics with a neo-Nazi slogan that roughly translates to “Germany in the Germans, out with the foreigners. » As they sang the xenophobic verse, one of the men raised his hand in a Nazi salute. Another put two fingers to his upper lip in an apparent allusion to Adolf Hitler's signature moustache.
After that, several events in Germany, including Oktoberfest in Munich, considered banning the song, and D'Agostino responded to an inquiry by the German newspaper Der Spiegel in a written statement, claiming he had no idea what had happened.
Granted, the circumstances of virality are rarely that bad, but songs usually end up on an “unintended side of TikTok” like Sam Seideman, CEO/co-founder of management and digital marketplace company Innovo, says so. “We try to educate our partners that sometimes you can't control the uses of your song [are] on the Internet.” While Innovo “can design a campaign to [pay creators to] use the song in a makeup video get ready with me,” she explains. away from its target audience.
For example, Twitter and TikTok users twisted “Cellophane,” FKA Twigs2019's heartbreaking ballad about unrequited love, in a meme starting in early 2022. Often, videos using Twigs' voice pair songs with creators acting melodramatic about things that are clearly no big deal. Even worse, a popular version of the audio replaces Twigs' voice with that of Miss Piggy (yes, the Muppet character).
“Digital marketers are able to amplify certain narratives they support,” he says Conor Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer of Indify, an angel investment platform that helps indie artists navigate virality. “It happens a lot—marketers reinforce a narrative that's more favorable to the artist's vision, hopefully directing it.” Saideman says he likes to have a “reactive budget” available during his song campaigns in case they need to try to fix a song that's headed in the wrong direction.
But digital marketing teams can't do much to fix another bad type of song virality: when songs blow up before the artist is ready. “I'm actively hoping my baby artist doesn't go viral right now,” says a manager who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his client's identity. “They have to find their sound first.” Omid Nooripresident/co-founder of management company and digital marketing agency ATG Group, adds, “It's a real challenge when someone goes viral for something when they're not ready to capitalize on it, or worse, the song that took off sounds nothing like what you want to do again ».
Come on Jane, an indie-pop artist who went viral in 2020 for making a video explaining the lyrics to her song “Nothing Else I Could Do,” says that going viral early in her artistic career had both positive and negative effects. She signed a deal with Fader Label and grew her following, but is still dealing with negatives four years later. “I'm grateful for that, but I think because my first taste of having a hit song was inseparable from TikTok, it's cast a shadow over my path in some ways,” he says.
In her subsequent releases, Jane says she chased the algorithm, like many of her peers who found TikTok success early in their careers, trying many different video gimmicks to engage listeners. “It doesn't reflect who I am as an artist now,” he says. “That feeling is addictive and you feel like you're withdrawing from it when your videos aren't hitting. It can leave artists in a place where they're obsessed with metrics.” This obsession has been fueled by some labels using metrics as the sole determining factor in whether or not to sign a new artist.
“This is no different than going to the lottery,” says Noori. “Imagine hitting the $100 million jackpot on your first try… It makes artists feel like failures before they've even really started.”
As artists are increasingly instructed by well-meaning team members to make as many TikToks as possible, some have turned to sharing teasers of unfinished songs as a form of content — which have sometimes gone viral unintentionally, despite not being fully written and has been recorded. This happened with the songs of Good Neighbors, Leith Ross, Katie Gregson MacLeod and Lizzy McAlpinecausing many of them to rush to finish their recordings so that they could capitalize on the limelight before it faded.
“People put a lot of pressure on the recorded version,” says Gregson MacLeod, whose acoustic piano version of her song “Complex” went viral before he recorded the official master. “If it's not exactly like the sound that went viral, if you don't sing the words exactly the same way or use the exact same key, sometimes people decide, 'We don't have it,'” she says. she was ultimately happy with how everything turned out, not everyone is so lucky. Within two weeks of the song going viral, she was quick to release a “demo” version to match the authenticity of her original video, as well as a production version, garnering a total of 43 million plays on Spotify alone.
But McAlpine decided to break away from her unfinished viral song. After posting a popular video of herself performing a half-written song, she told her fans in a TikTok video: “I will never release this song because I don't like it. It doesn't feel genuine. It never felt genuine. I wrote this for fun. It wasn't something I was ever going to release, or finish… It's not who I am as an artist. In fact, I think I'm the opposite… I'm not concerned with overnight success. I'm not chasing that… I want to build a long-term career.”
Noori says that TikTok's virality in particular has led to a “huge graveyard of one-hit wonders,” which is far more common today than in the bygone days of traditional, human gatekeepers. “With the algorithm, how do you know who saw your content?” he asks.
However, there is an argument to be made that perhaps, as PT Barnum it is famously said, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.” “I think a lot about this idea and whether or not it applies to virality,” Saideman says. “And it's hard to say.”
Black finally reclaimed “Friday” and her music career in 2021 by getting in on the joke, turning the decade-long cult hit into a hyperpop remix, produced by Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs and characterizes Big Freedia, Dorian Electra and 3Oh!3. From there, Black continued to release music as a queer avant pop artist and played an acclaimed DJ set at Coachella in 2023. However, the original version of “Friday” is her most popular song on Spotify by far, despite being released before the streaming era began.
“The beauty and the curse of these platforms, especially TikTok today,” Saideman says, “is that they're remix platforms. When you put your music on them, you open up your music creatively to other people using it in positive and negative ways. You can't have one without the other.”
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