The Limits of Virality: Music Creators and Platform Negotiation in the Era of Short-Form Video

Abstract

As the lifespan of virality on TikTok has become increasingly short and operates at a smaller scale, music creators are grappling with what it means to be successful in this later stage of the platform. For this study, I conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with music artists and creators about how short-form video platforms like TikTok have affected the way they work and create music. Many participants believe that while the creation of viral content based on memes and covers of popular songs affords constant visibility, it does not result in the monetary or career milestones that they desire, so they need to use different approaches. In this article, I characterize this new period of online musical labor as a period defined by “platform negotiation,” in which creators evaluate platform demands and work to approach their content creation in ways that prioritize their personal and professional goals. This includes strategic decision-making to negotiate their presence—which can include their identity, brand, image, etc.—across platforms over time. As they engage in relational labor to support continued work, music creators cannot simply rely on the tenets of optimization to be successful. Rather, many are pivoting to utilizing content creation in ways that aim to prioritize fandom and career sustainability. This article examines the ways in which music creators grapple with the challenges of short-form video and how musical labor is changing online.

With its emphasis on music-driven memes and viral sounds, TikTok has been heralded as a launchpad for music artists, and as a result, many musicians have pivoted toward attempting to create viral or memetic content specifically geared for the platform. In this era of popular music, online virality has become particularly pronounced as a central paradigm for understanding music circulation and success. However, over time, artists have also become more aware of the cost of content creation becoming so central to musical work. In the spring of 2022, popular discourse began to shift from excitement about TikTok as a platform with the potential to break artists and as a democratizing force in the music industry (Stassen, 2020) to a platform that is burdensome to artists (Chow, 2022). This is reflective of ongoing tensions between the music industry and tech which have played out over the course of the history of the internet. Major label artists like Halsey and Florence + The Machine helped to usher this conversation to the forefront when they created TikToks in which they complained about how their record labels have been pressuring or requiring them to create TikTok content. At the same time, by the end of 2022, record label execs began to openly complain that it was becoming more difficult to launch artists on TikTok because the market was becoming oversaturated and fans were too siloed (Leight, 2022). YouTube’s Global Head of Music, Lyor Cohen, went so far as to state, “Short-form video that doesn’t lead anywhere is the most dangerous thing I’ve seen the music business face in a long time,” arguing that short-form video platforms are not successful at cultivating fandom or a deep exploration of artists’ material (Ingham, 2022). The lifespan of virality on TikTok has become increasingly short and operates at a smaller scale, as the platform has become more and more fragmented by algorithmic segmentation. By 2023, over 39,000 people had over 1 million followers (Espada, 2023), which not only changes notions of what it means to be a viral persona, or star, but also creates new types of challenges around cultivating an online presence. In the midst of this, music creators are grappling with what it means to be successful in this later stage of TikTok and short-form video platforms.

When considering the platformization of music creation (Duffy et al., 2019), a dominant idea thus far has been Morris’ (2020) concept of “optimization,” which suggests that musicians often optimize their work to be successful for certain platforms, like Spotify, through a combination of metadata and sonic material geared toward discovery. On TikTok, there are a variety of strategies that creators can use in order to increase algorithmic visibility, such as using trending sounds, meme templates, and emphasizing niches (Abidin, 2021). These studies draw heavily from frameworks that examine creators’ pursuit of visibility as something ultimately desirable, describing this work as “visibility labor” (Abidin, 2016) or playing the “visibility game” (Cotter, 2019). However, in this later stage of TikTok, optimization of music content for greater visibility on the platform does not always equate to greater monetary value or career mobility for music creators. This article examines the ways in which music creators grapple with these challenges and how they make choices about how to engage with multiple social media platforms with different affordances.

Ultimately, I argue that creators and artists on short-form video platforms need to engage in what I term platform negotiation, in which they evaluate platform demands and approach content creation in ways that work to prioritize their personal and professional goals. This includes strategic decision-making executed by artists and creators to negotiate their presence—which can include their identity, brand, image, etc.—across platforms over time. Within this framework, I am complicating theoretical frameworks like “platform practices” (Duffy et al., 2019), “platform effects” (Morris, 2020), and “optimization” which emphasize how the creative industries and creative products have been altered as creators feel the pressure to conform to platform affordances and logics. Studies about the platformization of cultural production often emphasize efforts to make cultural goods “platform ready” and how “producers of cultural content are dependent on, and their products contingent on, the goals, features, and business models of the platform” (Morris, 2020). What I have found through my interviews is that as TikTok has become oversaturated and as creators have become more aware of the fact that high visibility does not always equate to monetization, creator strategies are changing. Honing in on a niche or going extremely viral is not always what creators want, at least not for the long term. Instead, creators are often more concerned with creating a distinctive brand or artistic identity and building a fandom, largely because these benchmarks can result in more sustainable careers.

I also want to emphasize the fact that platform negotiation is not simply a negotiation between competing frameworks of art and commerce, which is a traditional source of conflict within the music industry. Baym (2018) writes about how the “industrialization and commoditization of music” is a source of constant tension for musicians who are often more interested in music as a form of connection or expression. This particular concern is not the focus of this work. Instead, in a context in which creative workers, including music artists, are often active on social media, it is a recognition that strictly adhering to platform logics is not always analogous to profit or career mobility. Therefore, artists are finding ways to engage in processes of compromise, balancing competing demands, and negotiation in order to use platforms in a way that ultimately benefits sustainable creative work.

Platform Negotiation

In the context of platforms like TikTok, Burgess (2021) explains that “platform logics shape what counts as value (for example, in the form of audience attention or engagement) and how that value is measured (whether by clicks, subscriptions, what time, or a combination of these)” (p. 23). On TikTok, visibility through virality is often the primary logic that frames how creators engage with the platform (Abidin, 2021). Virality is the rapid, wide circulation of online content. There is no particular numerical threshold for a piece of content to be considered viral, and because of this, the definition of virality varies somewhat depending on the industrial and sociocultural contexts in which it is used. Within platform contexts which prioritize user retention and data, creators contend with algorithmic precarity (Duffy, 2020) and often choose to make content that is optimized for the platform in order to maintain visibility. For instance, in the context of streaming platforms, Morris (2020) says that the work of musicians to optimize their content is similar to that of “software developers,” treating songs like “an intermingling of sonic content and coded metadata that needs to be prepared and readied for discovery” (p. 1).

And yet, visibility does not guarantee anything besides visibility. The payout rates for the use of songs on TikTok are “negligible,” both for signed artists who receive a cut from the blanket amount negotiated between major labels and TikTok, and for independent artists who receive a royalty rate per use of their song on TikTok (Leight, 2022). TikTok’s Creator Fund, which ran from 2021 to 2023, was known for decreasing algorithmic visibility for creators who opted in (Duffy et al., 2021, p. 7), and the new Creator Rewards Program requires that creators make videos at least a minute long to get paid, which many creators have had challenges with (Duffy, 2023). At the same time, viral success does not necessarily equate to career progression. In Vox’s study of what happened to artists after their songs went viral, out of the artists who had never toured before, approximately one-third of them went on to play at least one show, and only 15% of them went on to play music festivals (Caswell, 2022). Because the results of high visibility for musicians are inconsistent, some music creators engage in a negotiation process when choosing how to engage with the platform.

Within platform studies literature, scholars have invoked the term negotiation in different contexts. Poell et al. (2023) have considered “spaces of negotiation” with the platform ecosystem in terms of power relations between different institutional forces, such as platforms and news organizations. In Platforms and Cultural Production, Duffy et al. (2021) suggest that “negotiations” between cultural producers and platforms can include entertainment corporations meeting with platforms to discuss terms or creators gaming algorithmic systems (p. 102). But negotiation can also be understood through a longer intellectual tradition of studying audience agency and negotiated readings (Hall, 1973/1991) within different contexts such as fandom (Jenkins, 1992/2012), in which readers understand a cultural text through a “mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements” (Hall, 1973/1991, p.137). To give a platform-specific example of what a negotiated reading can look like, Siles et al. (2022) argue that Latin American musicians on Spotify who engage in a negotiated view of the platform “neither obey nor abandon Spotify but rather constantly assess its place as part of a broader project where artists can enact their agency” (p. 561). In this case, the platform logics of Spotify, such as the emphasis on playlists as central arbiters of music discovery, become the text that creators grapple with.

In her 2018 book Playing to the Crowd, Nancy Baym expressed an idea that went against the grain of much of the discourse in the music industry at the time about how artists should use social media:

Relational labor practices on social media may or may not benefit workers, but they definitely benefit those with stock in platforms. Rather than assuming the truth of claims that we need these things to have viable careers, we should look critically, asking what works for which people and when, as well as what we are willing to do ourselves (p. 198).

Through her interviews with artists throughout a period prior to TikTok, Baym found that artists should critically examine their social media use to assess whether it was ultimately beneficial to them and their professional goals. During a period in which artists were beginning to feel the pressure to be constantly accessible online to their fans, Baym offered a prophetic warning to suggest that maybe all this online labor is not always worth it.

Across the platform ecosystem, and beyond the realm of music, there are studies emerging that examine cases in which creators find high levels of visibility to be antithetical to their goals. On Instagram, Kubler (2023) found that fitness influencers recognize that sometimes the attention that they receive is highly sexualized and does not translate to potential customers for their training services. Because of this, some influencers choose to engage less with Instagram once they have attained a certain level of visibility that has enabled them to find customers. Kubler also observed that some fitness influencers chose not to take as many brand deals because it distracted from their primary business of training. On TikTok, DeVito (2022) found that for trans creators, high levels of visibility can become an “algorithmic trap” that results in them receiving hate and abuse on the platform. The creators interviewed in the study expressed that this can take place when one of their videos receives so much engagement on their “side” (or niche) of TikTok that the algorithm sends it out to users more widely and they reach unintended audiences. These studies shift the focus from optimization based on platform logics to an emphasis on negotiation, in which creators consider what is best for them and their goals. Creators who make music or work with viral music still care about visibility and acknowledge that it is necessary for success, but they can recognize that their role is not to serve the platform or to let platform logics fully govern what they consider as “value.” They can work to set the terms of what they value—whether that includes ticket sales for live performances, brand deals, or sustained engagement from fans—and begin to utilize platform affordances to optimize toward that end.

The example of artists on Spotify having a “negotiated reading” of the platform (Siles et al., 2022) also highlights the idea that platform negotiation can take place in varied ways across different types of platforms, including digital streaming platforms. Platforms like Spotify do not enable much customizability, so in that context, artists can choose to distribute their music on Spotify and pursue playlist placements but ultimately understand that high streaming numbers do not necessarily equate to deep relationships with listeners, cultivating fandom, or ticket sales. They can utilize every affordance possible on the platform to personalize and update their artist profiles with photos and live performance dates, but ultimately see the platform as only an important component within their overall internet presence and one of their income streams as musicians.

Artist and Creator Brands

Part of the process of artists enacting their agency online means figuring out how to carve out their artistic persona and brand on platforms. Hansen (2019) explains that the “pop persona is not confined to sound recordings or other musical texts, but is negotiated within every domain in which pop artists have a presence” (p. 507). A recording artist is “a symbolic figure offered for our consumption, contemplation and identification” (Stahl, 2013). This figure emerged in relation to music’s commoditization when phonograph companies in the early twentieth century realized the benefits of marketing music around specific performers (Suisman, 2009). Within the current music industry landscape, Hansen argues that a pop persona is “constituted by symbolic fragments scattered across multiple media” (p. 506). He draws from Jenkins’ concepts of transmedia storytelling (2011) and convergence culture (2006), arguing that an artist’s persona and story now need to be understood as something that unfolds across various platforms as audiences are encouraged to seek out information in different contexts. This is highly related to the decline of the record as the primary music commodity (Negus, 2019). As musicians are becoming more reliant on the internet for reaching audiences, they can now be meaningfully characterized as omniprofessional entrepreneurs (Baym, 2018; Haynes & Marshall, 2018). According to Meier (2017), “The recording artist ‘personality’ is the primary hub around which various ‘ancillary’ products and licensing agreements may be forged” (p. 4). An artistic persona also exists in relation to ideologies about authenticity and realness, which includes the circulation of “persona narratives” which construct feelings of “intimacy” (Hansen, 2019). Ideologies around artistry and authenticity are also continually in flux, as observed by Klein et al. (2017), who argued that the stigma that was once associated with indie or alternative artists signing to a major label has diminished in light of changing industrial dynamics.

In the era of TikTok and short-form video, music artists exist at the crux of this longer legacy of the “artist persona” in the music industry and the emphasis on the “self-brand” within the neoliberal marketplace, in which online content creators need to “create branded personae that span the social media ecology” (Poell et al., 2023). Content creators need to make sure that they “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” and instead, extend their brand across platforms (Glatt, 2022). For artists on short-form video platforms, this means that they need to learn how to foreground their artistic identity within viral media, as a mode of communication that involves mass participation, strikingly fast speed, and a common lack of attribution. Because TikTok is oriented around the endless scroll of the For You Page as opposed to an emphasis on exploring individual profiles, it can be a difficult space to develop a long-term connection with followers on the platform itself. Therefore, an artist’s brand and persona need to be strong enough to endure “algorithmic precarity” (Duffy, 2020) and to be able to translate to other platforms, both digital and in-person.

Method

For this study, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 27 music artists and creators on TikTok who work with viral music. All participants were active on TikTok, most were active on Instagram Reels, and some also made content for YouTube Shorts. Because of TikTok’s dominance within the short-form video space, the interviews largely focused on TikTok strategies, although participants also frequently spoke about posting the same material across Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts as well.

The participants were diverse in terms of music genres, the types of content they create, gender, and racial and ethnic backgrounds (see Appendix 1). They included Electronic Dance Music (EDM) artists, singer-songwriters, R&B artists, comedic remixers, DJs, touring musicians, music curators, a music industry professional, and creators from different spaces of TikTok like LatinoTikTok and MathTok who use viral music as part of their content. I worked to recruit a diverse group of participants because I wanted to understand how participants in different contexts make and work with viral music. These participants had different personal and professional motivations for the outcome of their content creation, as well as differing relationships to music. Music-makers, music curators, and music industry professionals often had very complex, nuanced views and practices related to how they create and circulate music. On the contrary, several participants who are not music-makers and who regularly participate in sonic trends explained that they chose which songs to use in their videos merely based on how popular they were on TikTok or because they were culturally significant in their content niche. The purpose of this project was ultimately not to do comparative work between groups, but rather, to better understand the complex socioindustrial context of viral music and how it can impact creative labor.

At the same time, in the current music landscape, it is important to note that it is often difficult to siphon out the music artist versus creator binary. The participants who were music-makers often had different ways of self-identifying using these terms and definitional structures that were not always consistent. Because a consistent binary or definitional structure between music artist and music creator did not emerge organically in the data, I ultimately did not divide the participants who were music-makers into groups to focus my analysis on comparative work. Instead, this ambiguity provided an opportunity for an in-depth analysis of how individuals working in and around viral music are constantly making sense of these dynamic, historically, and discursively constructed terms.

This ambiguity between “artist” and “creator” ultimately demonstrates the ongoing tensions and entanglements between the music industry, as a form of legacy media, and the platform ecosystem. Musicians feel the pressure to become content creators, a phenomenon reflective of “influencer creep” (Bishop, 2023) or “creator creep” (Prey & Lee, 2024). At the same time, the prevalence of viral music in online activity and communication means that creating and circulating music is now often a core part of content creation for social media users. As will become apparent in the following sections, participants working with viral music at the crux of the music industry and the creator industry are constantly navigating and “negotiating” these meanings and definitional structures in the formation of their online presence.

The participants were based in the United States, Mexico, and New Zealand during the time of the interviews. Most participants were in their 20s and early 30s. The participants had between 855 and 2.6 million followers on TikTok at the time of the interviews, with 515,487 as the average follower count. Sixteen participants identified as male, eleven identified as female, and one identified as nonbinary.

I recruited participants through direct messages, email, and snowball sampling. Interviews were conducted over Zoom and lasted between 30 and 90 min. Each participant was compensated for their participation. The research methods used in this study were approved by the institutional review board at my university, and each participant gave informed consent to be identified by name. I coded and analyzed the transcripts utilizing thematic analysis. In particular, the interviews were focused on the participants’ creative process, their experiences with virality, and how their work on short-form video platforms impacted their careers.

Findings

Music artists and creators who work with viral music on TikTok have to make constant negotiations between platform demands and the need to build their artist identity or brand when they are thinking about how to use the platform. These concerns impact how they approach virality and brand deals. Almost all of the artists and creators who participated are constantly thinking of TikTok as only a piece of their overall strategy to build their careers, whether they are engaging in aspirational labor to do music full-time or they are engaging in sustainable semi-professionalism.

Working for Virality Versus Making Virality Work for You

On short-form video platforms like TikTok, optimization for visibility often involves hopping on viral trends. For musicians this includes engaging in intertextuality and quotation (Boxman-Shabtai, 2019), incorporating sonic and visual material from other viral content, and building on memetic templates (Milner, 2016; Tannen, 2007). At the same time, it is highly tempting to conform to tonal characteristics of other viral material that is currently circulating on the platform in order to attain what Milner (2016) calls meme “resonance.” However, many of the participants who lean heavily into meme-driven remixes, viral covers, and specific niches complain that they become algorithmically “pigeonholed.” When participants establish themselves and render themselves algorithmically visible through a specific type of content, they say that it is harder to transition to something different. This characterization of the algorithm as something which relegates creators to a particular type of category or niche is a type of algorithmic imaginary, “ways of thinking about what algorithms are, what they should be, how they function and what these imaginations in turn make possible” (Bucher, 2019; Jones, 2023). These creators enjoy high levels of visibility, but if they are interested in releasing original music as artists, they express that it can be more difficult to figure out how to share and launch original songs and experiment with new types of content that interest them but are not highly recognizable.

Because of this, creators working with music on TikTok need to make decisions about how much they want to optimize their content for high visibility. This process of platform negotiation is complicated but ultimately shows that the kind of musical activity that takes place on TikTok often does not coincide neatly with traditional routes of artistry or fandom. It takes great nuance and strategic decision-making to determine what routes to take as a creator on the platform, especially when thinking about translating TikTok creation into sustainable work. While almost every participant optimized their content to retain attention, they varied in terms of how they approached virality based on what their goals were. For many of the participants interviewed in this study, the concern has shifted from “How do I go viral?” to “How do I sustain and leverage virality for my personal and career goals?” When a song goes viral on the platform, how does the artist or creator who made it harness that viral moment and make sure they are the center of conversation?

In the context of online activities increasingly driven by audiovisual synchronization with viral sounds (Arrieta, 2021), music artists need to find a way to harness the viral sync activities around their music in a way that foregrounds their individual artistic identity. This is related to the argument from Marshall et al. (2016) that:

celebrities operate as a transcendence of categorization in their obvious display of their uniqueness, their singularity and their public visibility and thereby serve as the locus of debate about all forms of cultural codes, etiquette and discussion of what is “normal” and acceptable. (p. 2)

Artists, as a kind of celebrity, operate in relation to genre categorizations and algorithmic segmentation, such as specific TikTok niches, but ultimately need to transcend those categorizations in their “uniqueness” and “singularity” as well. R&B artist Thomas Ng says that music artists making content on TikTok need to think about relatability, virality, and aesthetic demands, all while trying to center their own brand:

No one nowadays likes seeing content where it feels like an ad unless it’s like a really smart, well done ad. And they want it to feel relatable so they could feel like, “Oh, I’m that person that found that guy that was just singing in his room. But now he’s big, you know, like I was that person.” Everyone wants to feel that personal connection. If you want to build a foundation you have to have some type of virality or some type of aesthetic that is very you. So that the fans and the followers of yours feel like you’re the main person.

Several participants in this study mentioned Laufey and Lizzie McAlpine as two young artists who have successfully attained repeated virality that is centered around their own artistic world and persona.

For A&R professional David Rodriguez, who works closely with artists on TikTok strategy and has a presence on TikTok himself in which he posts about the artists he works with, getting artists to feel comfortable posting on TikTok has occasionally been a challenge. He explained that some artists believe that TikTok is “cringe” and are hesitant to start posting on the platform, although he considers it to be a necessity. Referring to one of the artists he has worked with, ALDN, Rodriguez commented:

For his type of music, it is like that is where it’s going to break is TikTok, and so he has done a really good job of finding a balance between making content for TikTok that’s still aesthetically really, really cool and stuff like that. But it definitely took months for him to kind of find his spot of stuff that he was comfortable posting because he’s definitely not comfortable just taking a selfie video in front of the screen with some caption of like “pov,” like he’s not gonna do that. So definitely a lot of artists have to spend time with it and find a balance and find a way to still maintain their artistic integrity and identity, and all that stuff while being able to post on there.

EDM artist Garrett Murphy, who goes by the artist name it’s murph, believes that the key to his success in launching his artistic career on TikTok was his focus on telling his story as an artist. Some of his most viral posts were videos of him playing his songs in front of his EDM and Sound Design classes as a senior at the University of Southern California (USC). The videos, shot from the back of the room, showed him standing in front of the class while the other students listened. TikTok users were intrigued not only by the music itself but also by the absurdity of the other students listening to high-energy EDM and sitting still, seemingly unfazed. They immediately latched on, both to Murphy’s euphoric house singles and to his vulnerability as a student putting himself out there in front of his classmates. According to Murphy,

It’s hard to toe the line of like, how do you make good content that people are interested in without being cheesy, or without being too much in your face like, “Listen to my song.” No one wants to be told to like someone’s music or go listen to this song. That’s kind of the way I’ve been trying to do it is like telling a story behind the songs. The video is not going viral now (like my last one, “Food for the Soul”) because I say, “Go listen to my song.” It’s more of like, what’s the story behind how this song was made, and I think people are more interested in that, because it feels like they’re the one pushing my success on my song, which they are. My whole artist project is fan driven and I want to keep it that way. I want to be the underdog.

When asked whether TikTok has changed the way that he produces music, Murphy says that he has been crafting his sound for too long for it to be changed by TikTok trends. He admits that sometimes he is tempted to create songs inspired by trending sounds, but he pulls himself back when he remembers that he wants to have a cohesive artistic project. He also says that it’s important to be seen more as a music artist than as a content creator:

I feel like a lot of people put themselves into a box of becoming a TikTok artist, and I’m trying to stay away from being a TikTok artist. I think EDM’s a little easier to stay away from being a TikTok artist, even if you’re on TikTok, because, like the music, there’s a big scene for it. But for pop singers and stuff, it’s hard to break the mold of being like “oh, like they’re content creators on TikTok, and they just sing all the time.” My whole thing is that you gotta maintain some authenticity to your artist project, and not just do stuff to be a content creator and go viral. All my stuff is based around the story of my artist project, and so that I think helps me not become just a content creator. It’s like my content is created around my project, so it brings it back to me, being an artist, and I think that’s how you toe the line. But I think a lot of people struggle with that for sure.

Music-makers have differing levels of comfort identifying with the term “creator,” and some preferred the term “artist” as a signifier of the intention to primarily make music, as opposed to content, or to de-emphasize the amount of work they actually do to render themselves visible on platforms. They also viewed terms like “TikTok artist” disparagingly, even when they launched their own music careers on TikTok. This tension and ongoing discursive work demonstrates that “artist” and “creator” are dynamic categories that participants actively negotiate as part of their work on platforms. At the same time, the emphasis of Murphy and others on content creation that centers their own original music and artistic story represents a departure from previous scholarship about creator reliance on trend-based practices that conform to TikTok logics.

Many of the participants in the study also suggested that one way to achieve greater longevity in their careers is to strike a balance between posts that are geared toward garnering virality and posts that are geared toward artistic experimentation or showcasing original music. According to Ray Alva, who goes by the artist name RayBurger and is known for making Latin EDM, it has been important for him to find a balance between comedic meme-related content and his own music:

I have pretty much morphed into like a 50/50 split of my original music. But I will spend time making a beat out of like a cat meowing, and I will take that sound and make it a song, because I know people will be down to watch it and listen to it and that maybe they’ll come over and maybe check me out, and actually like my music. So I’ll try to make the remix sound in the same world as [the music] I’m making. Like I wouldn’t make a crazy drum and bass edit. I would still make like a cumbia type something, maybe some guaracha or [. . .] merengue.

Importantly, for RayBurger, even his meme-related content, such as songs that sample meowing cats, needs to be within the same sonic world as his artist project so that he can maintain cohesiveness as an artist. Related to this, some creators, such as orchestral musician Steven Alesso, say that it is vital to figure out “what is good for longevity” instead of focusing on trends. For Alesso, this is important not only in terms of sustainability but also in assessing what kind of content is going to have a more lasting impact. This same kind of principle applies to other types of creators as well. Zach Justice and Jared Bailey, who are known as The Dropouts on social media, make comedic content as a duo, while Bailey has a project as a music artist. Justice says that in terms of their comedic content, he balances video formats that consistently go viral and work well for their page with more experimental comedic content that they want to explore.

At the same time, when an artists’ song is going viral on TikTok, that doesn’t necessarily mean that engagement with the song translates to growth in fandom around the artist. Participants in the study noted that when their music is used by thousands of TikTok users, they observe different types of engagement with their music taking place. Chloe Ament, a singer-songwriter whose music is particularly popular on BookTok, says that some engagement is trends-based and some is fandom-based:

So when people make content regarding my music, 70% of the time it’s because they found me and they want to make something about me because I am like their best kept secret. I’m an underground artist they just discovered. They want to share me with people [. . .] but then, like the other 30%, is probably people just using it as an audio that fits their content in their account, which is also fine, because as long as people are circulating the music I will not complain.

Ament explains that when her single “The Water is Fine” started trending on BookTok, people were using it without necessarily making a connection to her as an artist. After a while, she began to be known as “The Water Is Fine” girl, especially when she released a second version of the song. Overtime, she has seen an increase in users posting her music in videos that directly talk about her as an artist. David Rodriguez noticed something similar about the varied ways that the music of artists on his label trends on the platform. He said that when a song is used in a trend, especially when it is a sped-up version of the song, it does not translate as well in terms of driving higher streaming numbers. Instead, when the regular version of the song is used in posts, it tends to result in bigger streaming numbers:

It’s all just about the song and fans just using it as background music that has converted a lot stronger than 10 times as many “creates” on a sped up and trend-based sound [. . .] I think something that plays into that too is artists. If a sound is working, if it’s coming from the artist, it tends to translate more.

Like other participants, Rodriguez emphasizes the importance of artists being able to center themselves as their music gets popular on TikTok. Part of this involves making sure that the artist continues to create posts with their song as it gets popular on the app and not leave it to other creators to dominate it. All of these strategies emphasize the fact that it takes an immense amount of work for artists to make sure that when their music goes viral on TikTok, recognition is directed back to them and doesn’t get lost in the TikTok ether and in the ephemerality of trends. It is a balancing act between creating an artistic world around their music and harnessing attention. When these participants talk about “balance” or creating an overall strategy that is a “split” between different types of content, they are referring to the need to manage competing or varied demands in their overall content creation strategy. Platform negotiation often entails different types of compromise, meaning that artists and creators fulfill platform demands to some degree in the process of achieving their goals, even when that part of the work isn’t as interesting or important to them from a creative standpoint.

Determining Whether Brand Deals are Worth It

Brand deals from external sources can be an important source of income for creators, with 66% of creators making most of their income from brand deals in 2022 (Geyser, 2024). A key finding of this study is that most of the music artists, remixers, and curators interviewed found it difficult to secure and to navigate brand deals while trying to maintain consistency of their content or artist image. Music artists often grapple with tensions around integrating artistry and commerce that look similar to challenges that other types of creators deal with. However, the artists and creators focused on music in this study believed that they have a harder time attracting and navigating brand deals than other types of creators. Therefore, the decision about whether to create content that is more attractive to brands is often related to their personal goals and career ambitions. Do they want to cater their content to the pursuit of brand deals as their primary income source? Or do they want to pursue diversified revenue streams that are more directly related to their creative work and performances in order to mitigate their reliance on brand deals? In this way, brand deals are a key area in which participants work out their professional identities at the crux between the music industry and creator industry.

Cunningham and Craig (2017) argue that creators need to conform to a “discursive logic” that prioritizes authenticity over financial concerns (p. 73). This means that although brand deals are one of the most important income sources for creators, they still have to make decisions about what deals to take based on what feels authentic to their brand and making sure that they don’t come across as too focused on profit. Within this discursive logic, they also need to downplay corporate affiliations in order to be successful (Cunningham and Craig, 2017). Some participants said that they do not naturally gravitate toward doing lifestyle content that would make it easy to partner with brands. Pop artist Alayna Thompson (Alayna Grace), who goes viral regularly for her vocal covers, commented on these challenges:

I’m not one of those influencers that is like, “This is what I use on my hair today, and this is what I use for my makeup.” A lot of brands love to reach out to those people because they’re showing their everyday life with products they use where I’m not doing that. So I definitely feel like it’s harder to monetize in that way on social media from my experience.

Other participants gravitate naturally toward lifestyle content and yet have difficulty navigating brand deals because they want to maintain their integrity as music artists. Andrea Bejar is a singer-songwriter whose music blends alternative pop and traditional Mexican music. She has gone viral many times with videos of herself singing while doing makeup. According to Bejar,

It’s hard to do a brand deal without knowing that person or creator is doing a brand deal. Because I want to be seen more as an artist and less like a creator, it’s more difficult for me to find those types of sponsorships that make sense for my music. So that’s been a little bit tricky, and I think I’ve been trying to find different ways to navigate that.

Thompson, Bejar, and some of the other participants who have original music released on streaming platforms said that their primary way to monetize their work online was through streaming royalties. Because of these challenges, brand deals were not as much of a focus for participants who are music artists.

It is possible, however, to be a creator who integrates brand deals and musical creativity. Karma Carr, who is known for comedic content on TikTok, is the creator of the viral “girl dinner” audio, in which she sings about having a low-effort, snack-based meal. The audio was used in over 400,000 videos, and TikTok dubbed it the #1 U.S.-based trend in their 2023 Year in Review. Carr explained that after “girl dinner” went viral, she was flooded with requests for brand deals, and it also opened up the opportunity for her to work with music producers on releasing original music. To communicate with her followers to help them understand why she was doing more brand partnerships, she made a comedic song in which she sings somberly (accompanied by layers of vocal harmonies):

When I’m making promotions, please know I’m in my bag!! / I’m in college and I don’t want debt / that would really make me sad / I’ll make them entertaining when I have to do an ad / so please help me get in my bag.

Her followers responded positively and filled the comment section with statements of support and requests for her to do covers of particular songs. When asked about navigating this process, Karma Carr said:

I was thinking, like, yeah, I do want to make money. But at the same time I want to make funny videos that make people happy. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do. So maybe I can do those at the same time and make my ads really funny and happy. So that’s what I try to do now. I’m approaching ads and brand deals from a mindset of I’m going to do this for you, but I’m also doing it for all of the people who got me here [. . .] I’m gonna put my personality in it. You can’t stop me.

For creators that are music tastemakers on the platform, there also are unique opportunities to generate income from companies who want to reach music listeners. Some participants mentioned that they have partnered with music labels, tech companies, and artists’ teams to promote music on TikTok. Most of these creators have a focus on particular genre spaces. These participants can be characterized as “taste entrepreneurs [. . .] musical professionals who function as cultural intermediaries” (Barna, 2018, p. 265) and build a brand around their cultural capital and taste. While there is more transparency around brand deals for lifestyle creators, Brooks Welch (SoulSugarJoint), a DJ and creator who makes content focused on soul and R&B music, says that there is still a lack of information out there for creators navigating advertising partnerships with music companies. Multiple participants said that large corporations have the tendency to underpay creators. At the same time, creators need to be careful about which deals to take because of the need to prioritize maintaining their followers’ trust. Welch explained,

All I do is love music, and I’m not gonna compromise my taste for a check, and that also builds the credibility that makes the audience be like, ‘Okay, if she recommended it, I trust her’ and that is also essential, and that’s why a lot of brands will reach out.

Similarly, Cam Sullivan Brown, a tastemaker who specializes in highlighting R&B music, said:

My taste is what people come for, so I’m never going to promote, I’m never going to talk about songs that I don’t like. So the majority of time, it’s all my taste. Actually, I would say 99% of the time it’s all in my taste. So that’s difficult, finding ways to monetize, because, as I continue to grow, it’s hard to find a way to push that.

Brown does not make music and, therefore, has different aims than the participants who wanted to be full-time music artists. While artists may avoid brand deals to attempt to foreground their music artistry and avoid being seen as lifestyle creators, tastemakers like Brown who work with viral music have to carefully select what kind of partnerships serve their brand and reputation as a trusted source for music recommendations. Sometimes this may entail partnering with tech companies to promote music services more broadly, such as Brown’s recent partnership with Spotify, as opposed to promoting particular artist projects. Even when tastemakers decide to engage in partnerships with labels or artist teams directly, the music itself also has to have particular characteristics to be successful. Besides aligning well with the creator’s taste and genre specialization, Conner Dusterburg, a tastemaker within Regional Mexican genres, says that he believes that in order for songs to work for these types of campaigns, they need to be catchy and short in length.

For music artists, remixers, and curators, the process of monetization on the platform presents a particular set of challenges. When asked about how they make money from their work, many of the creators complained about TikTok’s Creator Fund, suggesting that the payout rates were negligible and that it is not worth the potential risk to their visibility. A point of criticism among creators is that once they opted in to the Creator Fund, they saw a significant drop in their views and engagement (Duffy et al., 2021, p. 7), suggesting that the TikTok algorithm actually suppressed the visibility of their content. In part because there are such difficulties in monetizing their work on the platform, music artists and creators whose content is primarily focused on music often look at TikTok as a platform that leads to opportunities and work elsewhere. This is part of a growing movement of workers across the creative industries, including social media entertainment and music, to diversify their streams of income to make their careers more sustainable (Kajabi, 2024).

Moving Beyond Short-Form Video: Strategies for Career Sustainability

Related to Hansen’s (2019) theorization of the transmedia artistic persona, creators often think of TikTok as just one component of their overall strategy. For many, part of the process of negotiating with the logics of TikTok is using it as a transitional platform to build a brand and fandom that can effectively move to other contexts. Related to this, participants often either thought of TikTok as an on-ramp to careers other than content creation or as one of their many sources of income. Most of the creators interviewed identified themselves as part-time creators, meaning that they worked other jobs to supplement their income. This included some creators who participated in the study who had over 1 million followers. Many of the creators interviewed have backgrounds in either videography, marketing, or advertising, and some still work in those industries as their primary profession. They often mentioned that their prior experience in video creation helped them on TikTok or that their content creation on TikTok helped to open up opportunities for them to work in marketing. For the musicians in the group, most of their goals were related to successfully releasing more original songs, going on tour and supporting themselves through doing music full-time. Chan (itschandj_), a DJ and producer who makes Latin EDM, expressed:

I want to take advantage of Tik Tok, because it’s been helping me out so much and just take advantage of everything that I can do on it, because who knows? It could be banned next week. But yeah, like that’s my main priority, just to do music full time and just keep showcasing my talent, keep showcasing the Latino community, and that’s my main goal.

Like Chan, many of the participants had an attitude of strategic ambivalence about TikTok’s fate, expressing the idea that TikTok may not be around for long, so they should “take advantage” of it now and create a more robust, cross-platform brand identity so they don’t have to be dependent on the platform. Garrett Murphy said that while he considered pursuing a career on the business side of the music industry, he ultimately decided that he did not want to have a “desk job.” Instead, he wanted a job that enabled greater autonomy. He saw TikTok as something that could open opportunities for what he ultimately wants to do as an artist:

I want to play massive festivals. I want to play the biggest shows in the world. And then I want to make a career out of just doing what I love, [. . .] Now, I literally just experiment, make crazy music from the most weird places, and I enjoy that because it feels like a creative endeavor, but also, I can see the feasibility of translating it back to like a monetized something. Just having control over my own life and career, and being my own autonomous driver of my life would be super fun.

Musicians like Murphy or Ricky Jabarin, a guitarist that was interviewed for the study, prioritize their music career over the need to be super active on TikTok to maintain algorithmic visibility. Jabarin, who was on tour with punk artist Taylor Acorn during the interview, said that it’s okay for him to take a break from posting frequently. He valued TikTok because it opened up opportunities in music production and touring as a guitarist, as opposed to focusing on his career as a content creator.

Similarly, Conner Dusterburg describes TikTok as a platform that is an on-ramp to an actual career “somewhere else.” He says that creators across different content genres leverage the platform for career mobility within different types of entertainment and arts-related industries, including film, TV, and theater:

The majority of my friends on Tiktok have actually gone into modeling [. . .] There is a very strong ex-TikToker to modeling pipeline that I see. Some of my friends have gone into music and some of my friends are actively trying to pursue acting [. . .] It’s like a platform for people to go somewhere else.

In order for this to happen and for TikTok to lead to other various career avenues, sometimes creators need to think strategically about how to position themselves through posting particular types of content. Karma Carr said that she has gradually introduced varied types of creative content over time to lead to connections in different arts spheres like music and theater:

I was wondering before when I was just doing straight content, no music, no silly stuff on the side, how am I gonna break into anything else from this? Is this really going anywhere for me? And then I was like, what if I just put it in what I’m already doing? What if I make a pathway? And then I started singing on there. And now people, like producers, have reached out to me. It created an avenue. I’m thinking of posting musical theater videos on there. And then that creates another avenue, or I can post like acting reels and stuff and just different monologues I find funny or write monologues. And then that creates another avenue. All of the materials that you need to pave the future that you want are completely there at your disposal. It’s just about do you have the courage to do it and do you have the patience.

One of the most interesting aspects of this study was seeing some of the participants involved begin to achieve their goals soon after their interviews with me. Garrett Murphy (it’s murph) went on to play at festivals at Coachella and Electric Daisy Carnival and embark on a headlining tour across the United States. Brooks Welch (SoulSugarJoint), who expressed the desire to begin hosting live events, has gone on to curate and to DJ events across the United States, including for large platforms like Soulection. For creators who make viral remixes and mashups and cannot release their music on streaming platforms, these in-person events are becoming increasingly important as a form of monetization and building their brands. Saxophonist and artist Justin Klunk said that in an online context which prioritizes “shareability,” instead of merely chasing trends or showcasing virtuosity in the hopes of going viral online, it’s beneficial for artists to make sure that their online persona ultimately “funnels” toward the live show and ticket sales. In a viral landscape, the pace of career growth can be very fast if navigated well. However, it is also clear that none of this success came without years of development, sacrifice, and experimentation that their current followers often didn’t get to see.

On the contrary, another common theme among the participants was that they would like to work in music full-time, but they are also open to hybrid career paths. In Diana Miller’s (2018) study of different music scenes in Toronto, she found that musicians often approach the idea of semi-professionalism as musicians through two frameworks: the “stepping stone model” in which semi-professionalism is seen as a segway to full-time work as an artist, and “sustainable semi-professionalism” in which musicians engage in long-term part-time work and communal music-making. The first framework can be characterized more in terms of “aspirational labor” (Duffy, 2016), in which individuals engage in large amounts of mostly unpaid labor in the hopes that they can attain a career in which “labor and leisure” coexist, a route in which a small portion are successful. In the second framework, which is easier to attain within certain music scenes than in others, musicians intend to do music part-time over a long period of their lives and can have a meaningful career and artistic practice without an all-encompassing commitment to it. Chloe Ament says that full funding through music is within reach for her and her brother, who is a producer, but she is open to other types of jobs as well:

I’m getting my degree in writing. I’m very excited about that. I want to use that degree. So, I’m not totally sure what the future is gonna look like. But I mean, if we could do music full time in any kind of capacity, absolutely, who wouldn’t want that? It just seems like I like having several different jobs. I can work on all at once, because I don’t do very well at sitting still.

Some participants believe that within their particular sphere of music, hybrid careers for musicians need to be destigmatized. Kirsten Haddox (KirstenOboe) believes that music schools often do not do an adequate job preparing students for the realities and challenges of careers as professional orchestral musicians. Because salaried orchestral positions are so limited and the terrain is so competitive, Haddox believes that orchestra musicians need to be more strategic and flexible about their career paths. She wants to better educate other musicians about the idea that there are varied paths toward financial stability and success:

If you want to go that route of keeping followers, keeping brand deals, making that sustainable, it’s totally fine to integrate different fields. For me, it’s marketing. I work a full time marketing job, and I love it to death. It helps me step away from oboe for a bit, too, and I get to do that. I think I realized that I couldn’t do marketing without oboe and vice versa. [. . .] Someone came in [to my college] and said a successful musician in 2023 is one that can make a sustainable career for themselves, whatever that means. If you’re financially stable, if you’re comfortable, if you can do that doing music, that is good. In orchestra, that’s just really far fetched with the situation. If anything, orchestras are disappearing. So we kind of have to make this hybrid situation. And also, like music is 90% business now, and it really comes down to who you are professionally and how you market yourself.

Haddox believes that her career opportunities in marketing have stemmed in large part from her activities building a brand as a music creator online. Some young musicians are becoming more comfortable with the idea that music does not have to be their entire source of income in order for them to be considered successful. Many of the participants in this study make music part-time and still reach millions of people and make a significant cultural impact within digital spaces. At the same time, what that suggests is that within the music platform ecosystem, which includes different types of platforms like TikTok and Spotify, music has been devalued to such a degree that artists can go viral on a regular basis and yet be unable to provide for themselves through their music. As user attention has increasingly taken precedence over music as the primary commodity of platforms, sustainable semi-professionalism as musicians is often not a choice but rather a necessity.

Conclusion

The varied responses from participants in this study make it clear that there are different routes for approaching content creation on TikTok and short-form video platforms. It is important to note that these participants did not talk about their work on TikTok as a form of art that is detached from commerce. Everyone had hopes or expectations of being able to monetize their labor. This differs from other studies, such as Everts et al.’s (2022) study of early-career musicians in the Dutch music industry, in which artists thought about their music-making “as art,” “as business,” or “as hobby.” In this case, the question was more about whether monetization came through their work on the platform directly (through sources such as brand deals or payments directly from TikTok) or through opportunities elsewhere (such as streaming, touring, and other types of career development). Participants often engage with TikTok and other short-form platforms in a way that negotiates between the platform logics and the need to build a professional brand or fandom that is transferable to other contexts.

This theorization of platform negotiation helps to bring greater nuance to examination of the platformization of cultural production by closely attending to artist and creator motivations. It recognizes the theoretical gaps that emerge when we merely consider how cultural products have become “contingent” on platform logics or overemphasize the necessity for cultural products to be “platform ready.” Instead, what this article works to do is examine how artists and creators frequently consider and negotiate with these demands in light of their own personal and career ambitions. This study also brings greater nuance to the field of creator studies by considering how the tensions between legacy media institutions and the platform ecosystem contribute to the day-to-day decision-making of artists and creators in this particular context of viral music. There is an opportunity for future studies to explore how platform negotiation differs across creative industry contexts and platform contexts. For instance, although these participants used different types of short-form video platforms, there is an opportunity to explore some of the distinctions between TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts in greater depth. Finally, this conceptualization of “platform negotiation” is not a denial of the precarious working conditions of creative laborers within the platform ecosystem nor of the very real demands that platforms place on creators and the content they produce. Rather, in the midst of a proliferation of studies focused on how platforms set the terms or govern the work of creators, this is a study focused on how creators are able to think critically about what role platforms like TikTok should have within their career and take concrete steps to set the terms for their own creative work.