I Don't Have Tik Tok

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Arts And Culture
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Don't get TikTok? Here's an explainer

The Chinese-owned social media app is taking Gen-Z by storm – but how does it actually work, and what do the kids see in it?

What are these people doing? Trying to get famous on TikTok, the social media video app that is more popular than Instagram and Snapchat combined. Patrick Driscoll

Anna Nicolaou

Nov 30, 2019 – 12.15am

On a stormy night in October, a handful of students met for the first time at the Manhattan campus of Columbia University. It was 11pm, cold and raining, but the group trekked here after being summoned by text messages and flyers pasted to dormitory doors and in the library. They were here to, in the words of one student at the meeting, "become TikTok famous".

This was the inaugural meeting of Columbia University's first club devoted to TikTok, the latest social media app to capture the attention of teenagers. It's a short-form video app that offers users sophisticated editing tools and visual effects; lip-syncing, comedy sketches and "challenge" dance videos dominate TikTok, which is free to use.

TikTok content creators Isaac Quiles and Rob Hwang browse trends on the app daily to see what's popular. Patrick Driscoll

The app is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech company valued by SoftBank last year at $US75 billion ($110.5 billion) – making it one of the world's most valuable start-ups. It claims to have more than 1 billion active users, which would make it more popular than Twitter and Snapchat combined, but trailing Facebook.

Many of those billion users – a milestone that was reached faster than any other social media app – are young people hoping to parlay the app's burgeoning popularity into their own.

Isaac Quiles is one of them. At Columbia, he has set out to turn his hobby – filming silly videos in the hopes of going viral – into a campus-wide organisation and charity fundraiser.

Quiles is in his second year of university. He comes across as a typical Ivy League student: ambitious and well-spoken, with a surprisingly extensive LinkedIn profile for someone only a year out of high school. But in between studies and résumé-padding activities, Quiles spends an hour or two every night meeting with his friend Rob Hwang to plot ideas that are "obscure enough" to gain traction on TikTok, on which they go by the username @waterpong.

It's all kind of spur-of-the-moment: what's the strangest thing we can do and most relatable thing we can think of?

— Isaac Quiles

Quiles and Hwang's fascination with TikTok was borne out of boredom. Quiles is a songwriter and Hwang a creative writing major, and TikTok was "an outlet for us to express ourselves in weird ways" amid everyday stresses, says Quiles.

They browse the trends on TikTok daily to see what's popular, gathering clues about what kinds of videos rise above the rest. For the karaoke videos, a beat drop and simple lyrics that are easy to gesture to or mime do well. Brevity is best, meaning under 30 seconds. "It's all kind of spur-of-the-moment: what's the strangest thing we can do and most relatable thing we can think of?" Quiles says. "Strange and relatable resonates."

They've tried stunts to get views, such as lying on the floor spraying whipped cream on Quiles' face ("That one didn't hit the views that we hoped"). Their brush with TikTok fame came from another such idea, though: Hwang corners Quiles in an elevator and slaps him in the face with a tortilla covered in sriracha hot sauce, synchronised to the Village People's YMCA. This video has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.

"Strange and relatable resonates": a TikTok video of Hwang slapping Quiles in the face with a sauce-laden tortilla has got more than 1.4 million views.

At 18, Quiles feels almost too old for TikTok. Many of his friends make fun of him for using the app; they are primarily glued to Instagram. "A lot of people didn't take this idea seriously because it's a sort of goofy social media format," he explains.

Many adults, including Millennials, dismiss TikTok as a hazy part of the Gen-Z media ecosystem to which they don't belong. Online personality Jack Wagner told The Atlantic last year that "a grown adult doing a cute karaoke video on an app and trying to make it go viral is odd behaviour".

If you're 15, TikTok makes complete sense. For grown-ups who use Instagram, we're like: 'WTF is this?'

— Jack Melhuish, Parlaphone Records

But this obscurity is part of the allure, says Jack Melhuish, marketing director of Parlophone Records. "If you're 15, TikTok makes complete sense" he says. "For grown-ups who use Instagram, we're like: 'WTF is this?' But there's a purity to that ... the [TikTok] audience feel like it's their space."

For a generation that have had smartphones since primary school or even earlier, TikTok's goofiness is part of its magic. Teenagers today have watched their peers broadcast their lives online for years, with some even becoming millionaires through platforms such as YouTube, whose first video was uploaded on April 23, 2005.

As their parents once flocked to Facebook, young people have found their own communities by filming themselves with the front-facing cameras on their smartphones and posting their thoughts to the world through websites and apps.

The influence of this internet showmanship is still being worked out. The Australian Psychological Society's Digital Me survey, published this month, found that two-thirds of Australian teens felt pressure to "look good" on social media platforms such as Instagram, which has become heavily commercialised, with highly edited vacation photos and brand-sponsored posts. Meanwhile, Facebook has become overpopulated with political adverts and a decidedly older cohort.

TikTok, in comparison, is light and silly, filled with slapstick humour. The more absurd it is, the more popular a video is likely to become. Skits often veer into the cringeworthy, which makes sense given that karaoke in real life is embarrassing.

Like most things that teens become enamoured with, TikTok has also become a big business seemingly overnight. ByteDance recently denied reports that it is eyeing an IPO in Hong Kong as soon as the spring. In 2017, the company acquired Musical.ly, the karaoke app, for about $US1 billion, and absorbed it into TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg recently had to quell concerns from Facebook employees about the threat from TikTok, according to leaked audio tapes.

The app's influence has even caught the eye of Washington. This month, US regulators opened an investigation into ByteDance after members of Congress expressed concern that the app could send users' data back to China.

Nearly everyone I spoke to likened TikTok to what YouTube was 10 years ago, or a new version of Vine, the popular six-second video app that Twitter bought in 2012 and shut down in 2016. Two-thirds of TikTok users are under the age of 30, and users on average spend a whopping 52 minutes a day on the app.

Most TikTok videos are still made by normal kids. Scrolling through the app, one is transported into the daily life of teenagers.

Investors have taken note. "As TikTok has become more visible to investors (likely through watching their children's mobile behaviour), they have begun to view TikTok as a threat to Snapchat," said Rich Greenfield, a partner at the technology research firm LightShed.

While companies, celebrities and brands are getting in on the action, most TikTok videos are still made by normal kids. Scrolling through the app, one is transported into the daily life of teenagers with backdrops of classrooms or kitchens, teachers and parents sheepishly looking on in the background.

"Challenges" drive the world of TikTok, as people are prompted to recreate specific dances or routines. TikTok makes this easy through sophisticated editing tools and an extensive database of soundbites and visual effects. There are reaction videos, and then reactions to reactions, and the trends mushroom into goliaths that have the power to reward self-made celebrities with big brand sponsorships or break music records.

This year, TikTok's simmering power broke out into the mainstream when a clip from TikTok propelled an unknown song to heights that are unreachable for even the most bankable artists. Lil Nas X's Old Town Road, now the longest running number-one hit song of all time, had its humble beginnings on TikTok – and unsurprisingly, executives are desperate to use the app to recreate that success for other nascent artists.

TikTok joined the list of companies that we talk about for every campaign.

— Paul Sinclair, Atlantic Records

"TikTok joined the list of companies that we talk about for every campaign," says Paul Sinclair, general manager of Atlantic Records, the label behind Ed Sheeran and Cardi B.

Music industry executives are now scouring TikTok for fresh stars, sending every new release to the app, and paying its biggest influencers to use snippets from their artists in posts.

Despite these deliberate marketing efforts, Parlophone Records, the storied London label behind Coldplay, recently launched a TikTok star by accident.

After Ashnikko's single 'Stupid' went viral on TikTok, the number of her followers on other social media platforms quintupled.

The label two years ago had signed Ashnikko, an aqua-haired singer who seemed to have all the trappings of the ideal 2019 star. The 23-year-old is lewd and loud, peppering electro-pop records with foul-mouthed raps. Parlophone's Jack Melhuish says Ashnikko (real name: Ashton Casey) is "formatted very well to a TikTok and Instagram generation".

But her EP, Hi, It's me, released in July, came and went with little fanfare. That is, until a few months ago, when her potential as a social-media phenomenon came to fruition.

On September 20, a girl with the username @Frillysocks posted a video on TikTok, dancing in her bedroom and lip-syncing to Ashnikko's song Stupid. @Frillysocks only had a few thousand followers and the video was "liked" 1169 times – a meagre amount by TikTok standards.

But the next day another TikTok user, @Kindasmileyriley, who has 23,000 followers on the platform, posted her own take on Stupid. A day later @brookiebarry, a prominent TikToker who commands 2.8 million followers, did the same. Many others followed suit, and the song was launched into the stratosphere of TikTok memes.

Now thousands of people, mostly teenage girls, are posting videos of themselves dancing and singing along to Stupid as part of the #stupidboychallenge, which - according to Parlophone - has generated nearly 3 million TikToks.

Stupid lends itself easily to a place such as TikTok – a universe designed for showoffs, karaoke lovers and viral memes. For the first 12 seconds, Ashnikko cackles theatrically while shrieking "Oh my God". Then the beat drops alongside a catchy chorus that's easy to lip-sync: "Stupid boy think that I need him; I go cold like changin' seasons," Ashnikko raps. It's easy to act out, and vaguely feminist.

Ashnikko hasn't been on the cover of Rolling Stone, but like many YouTube celebrities, she has found her audience in the bowels of the internet. The memeability of Stupid translated to popularity in Ashnikko's music more widely: people began streaming the song on Spotify and Apple, while her followings across social media such as Instagram and YouTube quintupled in the span of a few weeks.

Unlike Instagram or Facebook, TikTok doesn't ask you to find your friends or construct a meticulous biography or set of personal facts to identify you. It just starts serving videos and waits for you to keep swiping through until it can determine what you like.

When I first opened the app, I was immediately confronted with a video of a boy throwing processed cheese slices out the window of his car at people on the street, to the soundtrack of Woah by rapper Krypto9095.

TikTok starts serving videos straight away and waits for you to keep swiping through until it can determine what you like. PA

Next in the queue was a fundraiser for a high-school janitor to get a new car, with close-ups of his rusty vehicle in the school parking lot. Then a group of firefighters at their station, sliding down the pole and singing a cappella to US country group Lady Antebellum's Need You Now (caption: "firemenshenanigans"). A mother opened and shut her oven door to mimic the beat of Yeah by Usher. A group of Mennonite sisters thanked Jesus.

I dutifully kept swiping but will admit that I felt deeply confused by what the hype was all about. But TikTok is designed to make addicts of its users; the company uses artificial intelligence to predict what videos will tantalise you, programming an endless stream to distract people for hours. (Parents in China were so concerned by this that ByteDance last year unveiled "anti-addiction measures" to the Chinese version of TikTok.)

After a few days, TikTok had sifted through my preferences and the videos became soothing – and yes, addictive. Nearly an hour passed by as I watched videos of cute dogs, a girl painting butterflies on her keyboard, DIY cleaning tips, someone opening and closing their window blinds to mimic the familiar sound of 20th Century Fox's theme music.

For the most part, TikTok was a soothing cocoon of anonymous videos designed to pique my interest and keep me scrolling.

Every so often mainstream celebrities such as Will Smith would pop up, jolting me out of my TikTok reverie. There is also a small amount of Instagram-type bragging: Mykonos vacation videos, an elaborate hotel breakfast in Paris. But this type of post, seen often on other social networks, was the exception. For the most part, TikTok was a soothing cocoon of anonymous videos designed to pique my interest and keep me scrolling.

TikTok's mass appeal comes from offering an escape from the commercial machinations of its predecessors. But sceptics say that this authenticity can't be preserved if ByteDance wants to make TikTok a viable business.

Many such previous buzzy apps – the likes of DubSmash, Flipagram or Musical.ly – burnt bright for months before losing their allure. "The natural shelf life for TikTok is another six to nine months before things move on," predicts Mark Mulligan, managing director at Midia Research.

Scrolling through TikTok is like being transported into the daily life of teenagers. E+

TikTok will inevitably start doing what other long-standing media apps do – either inundating people with adverts or urging them to sign up to a subscription – because "they have to make money at some point", says a senior executive at a major record label.

This transition has already begun. TikTok is in the midst of licensing negotiations to launch its own subscription service, according to three people briefed on the matter, which would see TikTok go up against Spotify and others for consumer dollars.

"This is the streaming service Spotify and Apple really need to worry about," said the label executive. "They are going to integrate [user-generated videos] and [professional music]. So if you want to see both Ed Sheeran and dancing cats, you can personalise your own library."

It's also catching on with more and more celebrities and brands. Actor Reese Witherspoon last week declared that she's "obsessed" with TikTok on Jimmy Fallon's late-night talk show – a clear indicator that it's no longer an untouched abyss.

But for now, stardom on TikTok remains more random than the traditional media hierarchy – which is why Quiles and his peers are still hoping they can make a splash. Their sriracha success has shown they can reach an audience in the millions. "We are definitely considering making a sequel to it," says Quiles.

The Financial Times

— Financial Times

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