Scrolling TikTok now feels like walking into the cafeteria on the last day of high school. At one table, influencers offer their handles on other platforms, telling people how to keep in touch. At another, users share best-hits montages of TikTok over the years like they’re flicking through yearbooks: the TikTok Rizz Party to Charli D’Amelio to the hyper-energized kid wonder Topher. Others remain in denial, blithely posting memes like they’re not about to say goodbye. I’ve been in denial myself, thinking TikTok would be bought or the ruling slashed before the U.S. government bans it on Sunday, January 19. Unless there’s a hail mary—which seems extremely unlikely with the Supreme Court upholding the ban—it’s over. TikTok’s time in America is up. In an instant, thousands of creators will be searching for new ways to maintain their livelihoods and fanbases they’ve spent years building.
Enriching or eroding brains, empowering “digital creatives,” or spewing forth slop and sludge: Whether you despise or delight in TikTok, its banning will hit music culture hard. Over the last seven years, the app has rewired the industry: squishing tracks into frantic blips of hooky intensity, convincing labels to sign one-off viral stars, spawning a cottage industry of sped-up remixes. It’s drastically changed the way artists gain traction and promote themselves. Spotify’s “Viral 50” chart basically reflects whatever’s popping on TikTok in a given week. So what happens when TikTok disappears? Does the music industry instantly revert to the prehistoric epoch of 2017—will Snapchat become the hottest major label scouting ground? Will popstars remember how to write bridges?
“People are massively panicking. I don’t know anybody who’s like, ‘This will be fine,’” says Olivia Shalhoup, the CEO of Amethyst Collab, a digital marketing agency that’s worked with stars like Trippie Redd and Aminé. “Most of the panic comes from the uncertainty—there’s no clear path to replicate [TikTok] followers. A lot of artists are losing their biggest audience.”
As usually happens whenever Big Tech gets its tendrils around the music industry, the ones who’ll suffer most are indie musicians. The avenue for DIY artists to blow up from their bedrooms will evaporate. “It’s going to become a less democratized landscape,” Shalhoup says. Other shortform hubs like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts will absorb many TikTok refugees, but they don’t have the same hyper-charged music discovery algorithm that propels niche experiments and soon-to-be hits as opposed to catalog and already popular songs. The app’s user interface was built around musical trends, whereas Instagram and YouTube want to push viewers to click on creators’ feeds or longform videos. I can’t think of any musician who blew up via Reels or Shorts, but I can name dozens of TikTok-driven breakouts stars and viral smashes.
The Spanish rapper Bb trickz, who appeared on Charli XCX’s BRAT remix album and has racked up over 2.6 million TikTok followers posting fit checks and dances, credits the platform with helping her rise and says it’s a special platform because “genuine content works.” She’s in denial about it getting banned, but thinks that if it does happen, it’ll hurt rising artists who crave a shot at being known. She can’t see herself switching to post on another shortform platform: “Nahhh, I hate Reels.”
Chances are, the ban won’t severely disrupt the bottom line of big labels—we saw that when Universal Music Group pulled its music from TikTok last year and suffered no damage. But majors and legacy artists will still lose revenue because of the loss of TikTok catalog marketing, the mechanism by which old songs like Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” resurface and go viral.
TikTok dominates the promo game to the point where digital-first agencies like Amethyst say 80-85% of their marketing revolves around the app. There’s simply no other platform that converts curious passersby to diehards so well. Instagram functions more like a landing page nowadays, hurling content not to randos but to people who already follow the creator. “I have yet to see an audio trend take off on Reels specifically,” says Shalhoup.
TikTok ads—whether targeted promos to get people to buy concert tickets, or labels orchestrating trends by sneakily paying influencers to use certain songs—snag stray scrollers way better than ads on other apps. “They’re probably the most effective ad platform at converting fans and discovery,” says Joe Aboud, who, as founder of the music consultancy 444Sounds and a former marketing manager at Atlantic Records, has worked with a bevy of artists and TikTokers like Dixie D’Amelio. “Labels and artists have become a little bit reliant on TikTok, using it as a crutch,” says Aboud. But creatives and companies alike are about to get a wake-up call when the app’s banned and a massive void rips open with nothing to replace it.
Huge pools of digital marketing cash will need to be reallocated, but to where? Shalhoup bets YouTube Shorts will take over as the hotspot for scouting and promoting artists. (This seems wild to me as someone who associates Shorts with a migraine-inducing flood of brainrot.) Aboud is actually excited, imagining this could spark a “creative renaissance” where dethroning TikTok means artists can stress less about tailoring their songs solely to thrive on the app. “If TikTok is your only strategy, you’re probably freaking out right now,” he laughs. “The industry used to discover talent at bars, A&Rs were scouting artists organically—there were no metrics to rely on outside of, ‘Is the fan into this? Does the artist have a real je ne sais quoi?’ It may be the return of true artist development.” Aboud envisions a rise in grassroots promo and digital realms—Discord channels, email and text marketing—that operate far from the fickle algorithms run by Big Tech.
Chaos and confusion will consume the industry in the immediate aftermath of the ban. Creators will test alternatives, like the Chinese-owned Xiaohongshu (but who knows how long that will last given the circumstances behind the imminent TikTok ban). Developers will puke out new similar apps. Others might cling to TikTok using VPNs. Many pundits thought the app would still be accessible to users who had already downloaded it from the app store, but TikTok now says it’ll shut off the platform for everyone in the U.S. starting Jan 19. The worst-case scenario, which seems highly unrealistic, is that ByteDance annihilates every U.S. account and video—a complete wiping of the memelog, the Fried Library of Alexandria deleted in a click. Just in case, Shalhoup has started backing up her clients’ videos, using a third-party service to download watermark-free files so they can rebuild on another app.
As someone who’s been hooked on TikTok since the “Renegade” days, the biggest loss feels like the demolition of the platform’s anarchic, often wondrous virality machine. No other platform has trampolined so many unknown freaks and aural oddities in so short a time: The bedroom’n’bass of PinkPantheress, the gothic gibberish of Yeat’s “Gët Busy,” hemlocke springs’ theater-kid odysseys, the next-gen horrorcore of sigilkore. Sure, the frenetic yet ultra-precise algorithm—perfectly calibrated for carving little communities out of the internet ether—had negative consequences, boosting some pure slop. But the genius redeems the garbage.
