“Each one of you coming here today has made our dreams come true.” It’s the kind of comment you’d expect from an up-and-coming young artist; less so from a band in their late-40s that peaked in the early 2000s. But this is how Jasmine Rodgers, the frontwoman of the English alt-rock group Bôa addressed the crowd at Islington Assembly Hall on 16 July.
Bôa’s debut single “Duvet” was first released in 1998 and became a hit in Japan when it featured as the theme tune to the popular anime series Serial Experiments Lain. After this, the band released two studio albums, played Glastonbury, and eventually retired in 2005 – their music never entering the charts. More than 20 years later, however, in late-2021, the twinkly, nostalgia-inducing song went viral on TikTok, providing the backing track to aesthetically pleasing, melancholy videos. The song garnered a million streams a day on Spotify seemingly out of nowhere, prompting labels to approach the band to return to music.
At Islington Assembly Hall, an overwhelmingly young crowd were fairly subdued for most of the set – until the band played “Duvet”, once halfway through the gig, then again for an extended, seven-minute version as their final song. The tone shifted abruptly, with the audience’s silent swaying turning into excited jumping, shouting every lyric.
It’s clear that TikTok virality has had a significant impact on Bôa. But I am sceptical of “TikTok hits” – the songs that are born, and often die, on TikTok. This cultural landscape changes faster than the length of a song itself, and since it fluctuates according to changing Internet trends, it is impossible to predict where it will go next. But music labels will be damned if they don’t try, pushing out catchy tunes designed to go viral on TikTok. Songs are getting shorter – no one wants to watch a seven-minute TikTok, after all. With shortness comes a need to pack in the potential for virality into a smaller package: the songs most likely to find new audiences on the platform are those that lend themselves to quirky choreography or other replicable trends. These social media-friendly details are often clearly manufactured. Artists and music labels make sure to jam-pack their songs with potentially viral moments, resulting in more streams and more profit for the labels.
Perhaps TikTok’s primary influence on the musical landscape is the very concept of “viral” music. Social media platforms encourage the sharp rise, and subsequent inevitable fall, of new artists and hit songs. Mae Stephens whose viral hit “If We Ever Broke Up” has garnered 312 million Spotify streams, and was featured as one of TikTok’s 2023 “breakthrough artists”, but her newer solo releases have barely reached half a million listens. Some artists do find more enduring stardom – Doja Cat and Lil Nas X would have never reached the eyewatering levels of fame they currently possess without “Say So” or “Old Town Road”, respectively. But the difficulty of maintaining relevancy in a world in which everyone is searching for the new shiny, catchy thing leads to an environment which is hardly conducive to a long-term creative process. As a result, artists are encouraged to churn out songs that follow a predictable structure, have predictable melodies and lyrics, and might predictably go viral. Maybe there is nothing strictly wrong with this: a catchy song is a catchy song. But the cynical pursuit of reverse-engineered earworms is disillusioning; it discourages true musical innovation and drowns out original artists, who are lost in the flood of viral TikTok music.
Is TikTok bad for music? This brings me back to Bôa, and the platform’s tendency to revive older songs and artists and give them a second life. As well as “Duvet”, TikTok has seen the resurgence of several other older songs. The 1977 Fleetwood Mac hit “Dreams” had its best streaming week ever after a video of a man roller-skating to the song went viral on the platform, bringing it to an entirely new generation. Other examples include “Linger” by the Cranberries and “Babooshka” by Kate Bush. Only one of the 30-odd people I spoke to at Bôa’s gig knew the band back in the Noughties – the rest had discovered the song via TikTok. The vast majority were aged between 16 and 21 (the venue changed their age restriction from 16+ to 14+ in anticipation of this younger crowd). And yet all said they had delved into the band’s back catalogue and liked what they heard enough to buy a ticket and show up for them.
The platform, in this instance, has lifted a fairly niche act out of obscurity and delivered them to a new generation of enthusiastic, paying fans. It’s an organic moment of rediscovery, a refreshing contrast to purpose-built virality. The only question remaining is how long its effects last: I reckon Bôa’s fans are here to stay. Perhaps there’s some good to be done by TikTok yet.
[See also: Rediscovering the bright lights]
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