With TikTok every song ever released has the chance to be a hit
‘I think the reality of the landscape is that TikTok is the only platform where you can discover new music,’ says musician Ben Lee.
A blue-haired middle-aged man is not the image that immediately springs to mind when one hears “TikTok success story.” And yet, that’s the reality for Australian musician Ben Lee.
Never mind that his last major hit, ‘Catch My Disease’, was released almost two decades ago, Lee has found a new audience among Gen Z fans on TikTok — 35,000 of them to be precise.
On Wednesday, he will appear on the TikTok Australia panel “House of Music Discovery” at the inaugural SXSW Sydney to discuss the ways that the social video app has turned the music industry on its head.
“I think the reality of the landscape is that TikTok is the only platform where you can discover new music,” Lee tells The Australian. “I’m constantly being exposed to new ideas.”
Since Lil Nas X first bolted out the gates with his 2019 song Old Town Road, TikTok has become the most powerful promotional machine in the music business. Most of the industry’s biggest success stories of the last few years owe, at least in part, their success to the app.
Lee says that TikTok lives up to the early promises of the internet: that there would be positive accidents. “The more tightly controlled the media is, the easier it is for people to game the system, and the more conformist it becomes.”
He says that “the volatility of the TikTok algorithm” has completely changed the music industry — noting the success of the U.S. band The Mountain Goats, whose 2002 song ‘No Children’ went viral on the app.
“Now they’re in their 50s playing sold-out venues to Gen Z kids across America. It’s totally just through TikTok,” he says.
Lee says that, because of the way the app can resurface old songs and propel them to the top of the charts, he feels as though, “every song that I release or have ever released is a contender to be a hit.”
“It doesn’t matter when it came out. I have a lot more horses in the races than I use to have.”
Lee says the app has been a welcome disruption of the usual record label promotional cycle stranglehold. “As artists, we don’t want our music to be disposed of as soon as it is out of its album cycle,” says Lee.
He adds that in the past, if you were an artist signed to a label with a promotional budget, there was a small window where they would push the music. “It either took or it didn’t, and if it didn’t, it was done forever.”
It is Lee’s view that TikTok has ushered in a paradigm shift the encourages emerging artists to be more personality-driven, and to express themselves more authentically: “It’s for artists that have more of their psyche that they want to share as opposed to just their music.”
“The game of the music industry is as crazy as it’s ever been. It’s always been a bizarre world that is not for the faint of heart, and it is nothing that I’d recommend. But if you have that creative impulse, and you are the type of person that wants to make things and share them, there’s a lot of opportunity to do so now — you never know what’s going to happen.”
The SXSW TikTok “House of Music Discovery” panel will take place on Wednesday, 18 October at Pleasures Playhouse, Sydney.
More Coverage
