How a young generation of musicians use TikTok, amassing huge followings but making little money, while some older musicians remain opposed to the platform
The social-media platform is transforming the music industry. Is that a good thing? … In December, 2020, after spending nine months …
Context & Ripple Effects
The New Yorker piece lands at the end of a three-year arc the related coverage has been tracing since 2019. Early on, the question was compensation mechanics: some artists got paid through their labels' blanket-license sales while others accepted exposure instead of money. By mid-2019, the deeper shift was visible — TikTok users were supplanting traditional label functions like talent scouting and publicity.
First-order effects
- Young musicians on TikTok now hold large audiences with no reliable revenue behind them — as VICE reported in 2020, stars with millions of views were struggling to make money for lack of monetization tools, many keeping day jobs.
- Older musicians who stay off the platform cede the discovery channel where the next fan base forms, betting their careers on channels TikTok has already displaced.
Second-order effects
- Labels and A&R increasingly treat TikTok virality as free scouting and publicity, formalizing what users began doing themselves in 2019 — and shifting bargaining power toward whoever can manufacture a viral moment.
- A parallel career track opens inside the business itself: Billboard's December report shows TikTok helping a new class of executives circumvent the industry's exclusive entry path, just as it does for artists.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry splits into platform-native artists whose audience value exceeds their streaming income, and a gatekeeping class rebuilt around viral metrics rather than label hierarchies — with the whole structure exposed to political risk, given how devastating young creators said a US ban would be when some began migrating to YouTube and Byte in 2020.
The trend: Music discovery is migrating from record-label pipelines to a single short-video platform faster than any monetization system has followed, leaving audience-building decoupled from income.