TikTok Allows Artists to Reveal — and Curate — Their Creative Process
Charlie Puth and GAYLE may be providing the new music marketing blueprint.
No Polls, Just Vibes
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The leader of the Islamic State (formerly ISIS) blew himself and his family up on Thursday as US troops raided his hideout in Syria. More from AP here.
Republican officials are planning to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their outspokenness against Donald Trump and their role on the House January 6 Committee. More here.
The US Army began discharging soldiers who refused to receive the COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday. The move affects roughly 3,300 service members.
The Winter Olympics began. (I’m officially obsessed with curling and I highly recommend it.)
Finally, I listened to an amazing podcast episode about the politics of Dolly Parton. It’s a great listen:
TikTok Allows Artists to Reveal — and Curate — Their Creative Process
Charlie Puth first teased his latest single, “Light Switch,” a little over four months before its release. In a TikTok video that has since been deleted, he showed himself coming up with all the individual parts to the song, as if in a sudden spark of genius. By the end of the one minute video, we had heard the hook, and fans were, well, hooked.
Comments on the video called the song “fire” and demanded he finish and release the song as quickly as possible. Later that month, he posted another video with the same hook, this time with the caption “pre-save the song and I’ll finish it.” Eight days later, another video. This time a phone call from his record label about the song and its demand on the app.
These teases continued for months. Even videos unrelated to “Light Switch” had comment sections filled with fans demanding he release the song. He continued to direct fans to pre-save the song on streaming services as a way to tell the label that there was demand for the single. Then, finally, on January 20, 2022, “Light Switch” was released. After months of hearing only snippets of demos on TikTok, fans could finally hear the finalized version.
The strange thing about the finalized version of “Light Switch,” though, is that it sounds completely identical to all the demo versions featured in every teaser video since September.
There are obvious reasons why Puth would want to reveal his creative process on TikTok. This is an artist who has built an entire brand around being able to quickly write some of the catchiest hooks you’ve ever heard. By depicting his process on video as he did, he’s not only contributing to his brand as a great pop songwriter but also teasing his music in a way that makes fans feel like they are a part of his process — like they are collaborators in the making of the song.
It helps that Puth then asked fans to pre-save the song as a way of “convincing” his record label that he should release the song. In doing so, fans could feel like they played some role in getting this single released. So, once “Light Switch” was released, it didn’t feel like just another single from their favorite artist. This was a gift made especially for them.
But what if all those behind-the-scenes teasers were fake? After all, the similarity between the demos and the finalized version seems to suggest as much. If that were the case, then Charlie Puth may have laid out the blueprint for a new kind of music marketing.
Of course, Puth isn’t the first artist to try this tactic of revealing the creative process behind a song in order to tease it. In perhaps the most successful example, up-and-coming singer GAYLE made a video replying to a comment asking her to write a “breakup song using the alphabet” in July of last year. She did as much, playing the song on guitar on her bathroom floor. That video went viral, and two weeks later the song “abcdefu” was released. By the end of 2021, it had peaked at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the Global 200 chart.
Months later, though, TikTok user @danielswall looked into the original comment that allegedly inspired the song, and revealed that the comment was made by a marketing manager at GAYLE’s record label, Atlantic Records.
That doesn’t mean the song wasn’t good or that it didn’t deserve the success it had, but it does reveal how smaller artists are utilizing TikTok to effectively curate virality. While many artists have attempted to create “trends” around their songs in order to make them go viral, GAYLE and her team understood that it’s a lot easier to create a viral story on TikTok than a viral trend. After all, TikTok is a community-based app that makes users feel like they are all working together to make certain videos go viral and others not — like they hold the fate of artists and creators literally in their hand.
By creating this fake story around “abcdefu” that it was inspired by a comment, and that the only reason it was released was because of fan demand, GAYLE and her team created intrigue behind the song. GAYLE’s existing fanbase felt like they were in on the process the whole time, and new fans could fall in love with the idea of an app full of people actively choosing to elevate a talented artist to stardom.
This strategy, of course, can’t be exactly copied. TikTok as a community doesn’t like to repeat the same virality twice. But both GAYLE and Puth have shown that a curated creative process can act as an effective means for teasing music and making fans feel involved in ways they never have been before.
The fact that it’s all fake is almost irrelevant. It works, and I won’t be surprised if we see a lot more artists attempting strategies like these in the future.
More from Cansler Culture
For The Custard TV, I wrote an opinion piece about the successes and failures of Marvel’s TV shows so far. You can read it here.
The Weekly Soundtrack
In honor of pop songwriting king Charlie Puth, I highly recommend visiting (or revisiting) his criminally underrated sophomore album, Voicenotes, as well as the accompanying episode of New York Times’ Popcast.