This significant advancement in the digitalization of music has resulted in the advent of the social media era, which has had a significant impact on how we consume music and where or what type of music we want to consume.
Social media has had a significant impact on the success of music. Previously, an artist would have to wait to be signed by a major record label, which would then invest in the artist and his music. The record label oversees promoting the artist’s music, which usually costs a lot of money to achieve the desired result and sometimes the record label lose money. However, with the advent of social media, artists no longer need to be signed by a major record label to be noticed by music fans all over the world.
Social media is like a closed community where millions of pieces of information are shared every day. Today’s artists have taken advantage of this opportunity to self-promote their music. This also gave them an advantage when signing a deal with a record label because they had already done the promotion work and the record label would not have to spend as much money promoting an artist with little to no audience compared to one with an already established audience.
Its amazing how social media platforms have helped artist songs reach a wider audience, and Tiktok had done a better job at this than many other social media platforms just between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2020.
TikTok, also known as Douyin in China, is a video-focused social networking service owned by Chinese company ByteDance. Initially released in September 2016, the app didn’t gain much traction until 2017, but its users increased significantly in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
TikTok has successfully trended many songs that would not have received much attention without the app, including Nigeria’s CKay’s hit song ‘Love Nwaniti.’
The song was released in 2019, but it did not receive much attention until 2021, when it began to make waves when it was used in many Tiktok videos, and it is now the artist’s biggest song yet. Love Nwantiti’s video received over 11 million youtube views in a week, making it the biggest song to come out of Africa in terms of youtube views in a week until Fireboy DML’s ‘Peru’ broke the record for most youtube views in a week from an African.
Many African artists are now using the app to get their songs the recognition it needs, by creating dance or fashion challenges that people can participate in to get more people to know about their song, such as ‘Live Forever’ by Kayode, which now has approximately 187 thousand videos made with the song, and ‘Nkao Tempela’ by South African artistes, Chicco & Mellow & Sleazy, which has 150 thousand videos.
Culture Beyond the Mainstream 