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Montero's parents "Lil Nas X" Hill were worried when their son left college eight months ago to pursue a career in rap. as was the trap country said Time magazinehis parents briefly pointed out that millions of rappers were already crowding the scene. Hill did not listen. He had to compete with aspiring rappers on streaming services such as SoundCloud and Spotify, but Hill had a secret card in reserve – a meme based on Billy Ray Cyrus' country hit, "Old Time Road" and TikTok.
"I've been promoting the song as a meme for months, until it joins TikTok and it gets much bigger," Hill said. Time. "I knew TikTok well enough: I always thought his videos would be ironically hilarious. When I became a hot topic, it was a crazy moment for me. Many people will try to minimize this, but I saw it as something bigger. "
TikTok played a crucial role in the success of the Hill & # 39; Old Time Road & # 39; remake, which now ranks 15th in Billboard's Top 100 charts. A hashtag for "#yeehaw" has featured thousands of videos with more than 67 million plays – most of which are excerpts from Hill's song. Although Hill is not paid directly for the song (he has downloaded "Old Time Road" for free in the TikTok audio database for everyone to use), the popularity boom has financial benefits. Hill's Lil Nas X Spotify page contains over 65 million feeds on his song, and he receives a cut for these feeds.
"Maybe I should pay TikTok," Hill said Time. "They really boosted the song. It was coming to the point that it was almost stagnant. When TikTok touched it almost every day, the water courses rose. I give them a lot.
That's right, Hill owes a lot to TikTok, but maybe the platform owes him as much. The success of "Old Town Road" proves that TikTok is not just a place for lip synching or choreographed dances is not just a place for lip synching or choreographed dances; it's a new platform for a song that seeks an audience. Artists familiar with the Internet like Hill know it well. It's a scientist who used a song with a catchy hook that could serve as an excerpt to attract attention that she would not find anywhere else. It paid off for him – and for many other artists – who flocked to the platform almost as they did SoundCloud as a chance to break through the crowd. TikTok is a platform of discovery as much as a place to waste time to participate in the culture itself.
Hill understands just how successful a message on TikTok can be an integral part of his career. He said Rolling stone By managing a "meme" account on Twitter, he helped him understand "what my audience is looking for". Hill added that, for this reason, he "put some potentially fun lines."
TikTok was the next obvious step. Hill's song, released in December 2018, arrived at the right moment. A resurgence of cowboys was happening online – Red Dead Redemption 2 was still one of the most popular games and cowboy culture was popular in the hiphop community. This moment in time was referred to as the "Yee Haw Program" and in February 2019 it became a popular trend hashtag on TikTok.
The parent company of TikTok wasted no time saying that everything started with a meme. A blog post on the TikTok website notes that "short videos of people sipping E-Juice, discovering it was a Yee-Juice, were magically turning into cowgirls and cowboys -Boys were filling the diet "in recent weeks.
"The focus of this book was" Old Town Road, "a song by Lil Nas X," reads the blog. "The unobtrusive and bbad introduction of the banjo leading to an emphatic base drop was the perfect music to inspire countless creators of TikTok."
Hill's success on TikTok is one of the most remarkable, but he's not the only artist to have seen an increase in the number of jets and attention after a viral piece on TikTok. Absofacto's "Dissolve" and Joji's "Slow Dancing in the Dark" have become trends in their own right, according to the blog. Slow Dancing in the Dark exploded with #MicrowaveChallenge. These TikTok videos are often collected and compiled on YouTube, reaching a new audience and often attracting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views. Once they reach Twitter, Reddit or Instagram, it's a brand new playground for musicians. But everything starts with TikTok. As Fork reported in February:
Downloading a TikTok video to use it since the application is easy, and last summer's clips of NyanNyanCosplay's "Mia Khalifa" dance began to bounce off YouTube, where they appeared in compilations and several videos of Pewdiepie, one of the most popular vloggers on Earth. The number of songs played on iLOVEFRiDAY's official music video has been multiplied by 10, and on YouTube, clips of the song have been viewed more than 200 million times. According to reports on YouTube's royalty rates, the video giant could easily have paid the group 150,000 USD.
Unlike YouTube or Spotify, artists do not make money from TikTok's plays – but in many cases, visibility on the platform of aspiring artists is more important than direct revenue. In the case of iLOVEFRiDAY, whose song became the Hit or Miss hit, the revenue generated by YouTube compilations and videos responds. It's good for the moment.
"In the end, the relationship with TikTok is more important than asking them to pay me a disc," said iLOVEFRiDAY's director. Fork. "It gives us visibility and that's what we need to move the brand forward."
Hill is in agreement.
"TikTok has helped me change my life," Nas said on TikTok's blog. "TikTok brought my song to several different audiences at once."
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