This article is part of Resident Advisor's technology month, dedicated to coverage at the crossroads of electronic music and future-forward innovation throughout the month of June.

In more ways than one, TikTok feels like a high school talent show. It's a forum that nurtures niche content, encourages experimentation and taps into raw creativity in a way that no other platform does. In the music industry alone, this $72 billion app has both challenged and confused us all.

Names like PinkPantheress or Nia Archives echo in every major A&R department, placing TikTok at the centre of modern-day artist acquisition. Both 21 years of age, their fame and virality call to mind the success of SoundCloud rappers—the golden era of SoundCloud being the career launcher for new, young acts. But TikTok is quickly catching up to SoundCloud as not only a discovery platform but a powerful marketing tool for labels to leverage new releases. FKA Twigs, Megan Thee Stallion, Tiesto, Caroline Polachek, Olivia Rodrigo and many more have broken singles on TikTok by tapping into timely social trends.

Unlike other social networks, the app was founded with an explicit tie to music. It is the second iteration of Musical.ly (a mildly popular dance app that was acquired in 2017 by Chinese company Bytedance for $1 billion.) More than half of American adults use TikTok every month and use it more than Instagram and Facebook. Its algorithm expertly connects artists to fan communities better than any other social platform, positioning it as a game-changer for music markets struggling to compete on social media.

Electronic Music Is in a Social Rut

The virality of TikTok comes at an opportune time for electronic music.

Thanks to both total market growth and total market share growth in the UK and Germany, the dance and electronic music market grew for the first time in 2022. At the same time, according to the 2022 IMS report, engagement with electronic music declined dramatically–dropping 34 percent on Instagram, 32 percent on Twitter and 15 percent on Facebook.

Despite those statistics, video content has proven a strong point for electronic music: engagement on YouTube went up by 7 percent, but not for the reasons you'd expect.

Most would attribute that growth to livestreaming and lockdown. Yes, in part, DJs who have normalized livestreaming as an entertainment medium thrived on YouTube. But David Boyle, lead researcher for IMS, found that "while livestreaming grew in 2020, it didn't grow that much in 2021. New follower rates dipped lower than ever before, leading Boyle to doubt that livestreaming is significant enough to explain the recent uptick on Youtube. "I think a big part of the story for 2021 is for the first time in recent history, electronic music has seen market growth globally," Boyle states. "One could argue that YouTube's an early indicator of that growth, but that that growth isn't translating into Twitter. It's not translating to Instagram. It's not translating to Facebook for electronic music."

This year's IMS report reveals that electronic artists are struggling to engage with and market to their audiences on explicitly social platforms where it's not about the music, it's about the culture around music. "We think we have a culture around our scene, but it's quite small compared to the culture around hip-hop," says Boyle. What's more, electronic music is the sixth of seven genres in the 'actions' ranking (i.e the number of shares, likes, retweets) and only a two percent share of social engagement around music across YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

"As a genre, electronic music has traditionally been very faceless as far as artists are concerned. The artists and household names can probably be counted on a couple of hands ..." says Anton Partridge, Director of Global Strategy, Electronic Music at Warner. This is one explanation as to why electronic music's social following is more heavily reliant on YouTube than other genres. YouTube's long-form format inherently suits the Boiler Room-style content that has sustained our social ecosystem up to now. But unlike hip-hop–a genre that has a strong social media currency–the cultural content adjacent to electronic music hasn't been competitive enough. Still, considering electronic music's inherent advantage on video platforms, TikTok could be the solution to the genre's social slump. As a short-form video platform, it's a natural marketing opportunity for creators to leverage and reshape their existing content on YouTube.

In Comes TikTok

TikTok is challenging how music is packaged, shared and listened to. There are no rules; one minute you might see Vogue choreography in the middle of an airplane runway and the next you're watching a mushroom being wired to a synthesizer to produce #plantmusic. The platform's short-form format encourages a kind innovation and creativity that's lost on Youtube.

Eager to keep up with various trends, musicians on TikTok are experimenting with how to market their art and looking to adjacent mediums to complement their output. "Now there's a personality, or a dance or a meme to go with a track," says DJ Kikelomo Oludemi in their IMS presentation. DJs like Alex Chapman, DJ Habibeats, and Jyoty are developing electronic music's social media currency, and they're doing it primarily on TikTok. The platform funnels a variety of music content like sample breakdowns, live mashup videos, viral Boiler Room moments, bitesize gear reviews, tutorials—you name it.

"I can't even begin to wrap my head around what it is I do" says Fred Sargolini, AKA The 1FS, a performance artist and DJ who's worked with the likes of GTA, HBO, Adult Swim and more. "But the reason TikTok has worked for me, over other social platforms, [is] because it's not explicitly social… It lets people go down the rabbit holes they want to go down, and that's where they find me."

For introverted creatives like Sargolini who otherwise struggle to market their art on social media, TikTok is where they can shine. Sargolini found receptive and hungry audiences "who had the openness, energy and bandwidth to interact with technical content," says Sargolini. His videos are a birds-eye view of his creative process where he samples, cuts and mixes video clips live to make beats. Most of his fans have never seen his face, but his videos are still intimate. Shot completely in the dark (except for the flickering lights from his CDJ and screen), we are the flies on the wall watching Sargolini fixate on his new, creative experiments.

TikTok's viral appeal lies in the fact that creators still view it as a meritocratic platform uncorrupted by media giants. "And because of the way the algorithm works, it feels like we all have a fair shot. I can get more views on a video than Diplo on a given day. I'm not saying this to praise the algorithm, but anyone can win big in terms of engagement and views on TikTok," says Alex Chapman, a DJ and producer who's gotten millions of views on viral mashups. "To be honest, I think I was desperate for that kind of attention and communication from an audience. I always claimed that if I could get the right people in front of me, I could make them fans. But getting the right people in front of you, as an artist, is a challenge."

While adding a trending TikTok sound can increase the chances of a clip going viral, producing or remixing viral sounds can be a sustainable and professional strategy for artists like Sargolini and Chapman. "I remember the first video that blew up for me," starts Chapman, "It was a mashup of Lady Gaga and Ash Niko. And I just posted it for fun, I wasn't expecting anything. Then it got like 1000 views, then 5000 I was like, shocked. Then 100,000 and that really opened my eyes to the fact that there are actual people—on a major scale—that like what I do, not just a couple hundred at a party I played at."

Today, Chapman is one of the creators that has opted into TikTok's distribution platform SoundOn. His new single "Horsey" is distributed by TikTok, meaning that he can earn royalties for it directly on the platform. Chapman also uses TikTok's creator fund and has a contact at TikTok that supports his creative output.

Similarly, one of Sargolini's most important professional milestones came from him leveraging an already viral sound. In 2021, there was an Adult Swim trend: one billion hashtags using "adultswim," where TikTokers created their own take on Adult Swim-style bumps, along with a sound created by a user named Vano 3000, a remixed version of Time Moves Slow by BadBadNotGood.

Sargolini was one of the creators to participate in this trend, but rather than producing his own 'bump' he mixed the sample with a Rick & Morty clip. "My video blew up and was one of bigger videos in the trend,1.4 million across IG and TikTok" Sargolini explains that Adult Swim followed him shortly after that video," then Timbaland reposted my Adult Swim video… and I was honestly surprised it all seemed very unlikely. A few months after, Adult Swim commissioned me to do the Toonami 25th Anniversary videos. That right there is the power of TikTok."

The platform itself is nurturing its relationship with electronic music fans and creators. In June of this year, TikTok UK relaunched the #ElectronicMusic hashtag, intended to be a central place for discovery of the genre, with Shygirl leading the campaign. This follows their initial attempt to engage with the community in August 2021 through specially curated playlists from Carl Cox and TSHA, and a livestreamed tour bus performance from Disclosure.

Gen-Z TikTok Stars Are Blurring Lines Between Genres

PinkPantheress and Nia Archives are two stars that stand as symbols of change in our industry. Their fame grew in tandem with the "aesthetic" type content that took over TikTok in 2021. In the early days of PinkPantheress's career, her track "Break It Off" soundtracked a particular kind of time-lapse video—dreamy footage of high schoolers driving off into the sunset, a painting coming to life or a montage of one's makeup routine. It turns out that a drum & bass motif pairs flawlessly with a timelapse edit. Both of these stars attract diverse, inclusive audiences who value aesthetics over the genre.

"A lot of artists in electronic music are drawing boundaries where young people, in particular, don't see those boundaries," says Boyle, "They don't see genres the way that we see them, and they are generally more fluid on all things. So being rigid about electronic music is not going to help us engage with them. Boundary-breaking and culturally rich music is the soundtrack of this generation, young people don't care about genre classification and they don't care about hip-hop versus dance."

Hip-hop and electronic markets have historically contended with each other economically. This is especially true in the UK, where when one sector reports growth, the other drops. They are working in opposition and competing for the same audience, and this is seen in IMS' analysis of BPI data. But, "depending on the countries, electronic music plays a very different cultural role," says Boyle while discussing lower market growth in the US compared to Europe and the UK. In the US, casual listeners (i.e. not audiophiles) of pop or hip-hop largely group electronic music under mainstream EDM or techno—both of which are associated with European music culture (despite the American origins of house and techno). But functionally speaking, electronic music can include a number of intersectional artists like PinkPantheress or established, experimental stars like FKA Twigs.

For this community and this genre to enter its next phase (both as a market and culture), it needs to adopt a more fluid mindset, brand and social presence. And the time is now. "We're at the start of this new cycle of growth. A year ago that was not the case, or the year before," says Boyle. "Now is the time to invest, to shape the new future…now is the moment of excitement and optimism" asserts Boyle. It's the same kind of optimism that TikTok rekindled in the hearts of creatives like Sargolini and Chapman, but not everyone relates.

TikTok Can Cut Both Ways

It's true, TikTok has given artists hope that they can succeed without having to rely on the resources of a record deal. But it also cornered other creatives into a digital burnout.

There are a lot of mixed feelings about how this platform is changing our industry. Celebrities like FKA Twigs, Halsey and Adele have spoken out against the pressure placed on them by major labels to go viral. That means posting TikTok content up to three times a day, which is demanding for anyone, but especially artists who came before this TikTok craze.

There's no sugarcoating that this social network (like most social networks) is a double-edged sword. On one hand, TikTok places crippling demands on artists to post content that blurs the lines between musician and content creator. This last point is especially problematic for those who feel uncomfortable gamifying their creative processes to satisfy TikTok's algorithm and reach listeners. But on the other hand, TikTok is an opportunity to trigger a shift in power dynamics within the larger music industry and redefine how an artist can connect with their fans.

For unsigned, up-and-coming artists, going viral on TikTok creates leverage that empowers creators to either negotiate fairer contracts (like 50/50 record deals) or stay independent. What's more, the platform helps remove the veil that separates artist and fan, meanwhile making labels redundant as the primary mediators of public image. We all go to TikTok "to watch humans have fun," as Sargolini put it. We look forward to authenticity, goofiness, transparency and relish in watching some of our biggest heroes simply make smoothies at home.

Major labels will always be fixated on the next biggest acquisition platform—first Facebook, then SoundCloud and now this. That will never change, but what is changing are the power dynamics. TikTok has tipped the scales, and now that they're in the artists' favour, creators should make the most of it while the platform is still relevant. The message here isn't that every artist—established or not—should be on TikTok, it's that TikTok is the best place to launch a career today.