Meghan Trainor, the pop star, sits fully clothed in an empty marble bathtub and is flanked by two of her friends. The three begin soulfully singing an a cappella version of Ms. Trainor’s fall hit single, “Made You Look,” hitting every note for about half a minute. Then they stop, look at each other and scream with joy.
TikTok users wowed by this clip in November, racking up over 100 million views and drawing comments like, “I’m sure this is happening at the gates of heaven.” It’s now Ms Trainor’s most popular video on the platform.
While the performance seemed informal — after all, it was filmed in a bathroom — it was an example of how Ms Trainor has managed to take TikTok to a science, revitalize her music career and gain her popularity in the mainstream over the last few years Way she hadn’t seen since the release of “All About That Bass” in 2014.
When this upbeat body-positivity-themed doo-wop anthem — “Every inch of you is perfect from bottom to top” — and its accompanying pastel-hued music video burst into the public consciousness, Nielsen said it sold 5.8 million copies and became the best-selling digital song by a female artist of 2010. Ms. Trainor won the 2016 Grammy for Best New Artist.
Today, TikTok is the engine that powers streams on Spotify and influences what’s on the radio and Billboard charts. Popularity there is a currency record companies crave – and are dying to emulate.
Ms Trainor now has nearly 18 million followers on TikTok, thanks largely to Made You Look, which inspired a viral dance challenge shortly after its release in October. For comparison, Taylor Swift, who uses the app sparingly, has 18.9 million and Lil Nas X, one of the platform’s breakthrough stars, has 29 million.
On TikTok, Ms. Trainor posts numerous of her own music videos and dances to her own songs, as well as split-screen duets with smaller artists. But she’s also developed a playful, over-the-top kind of personality, posting videos about taking adult laxatives, shaving her face before a live TV appearance, and having sex with her husband.
On a recent afternoon in Manhattan, the 29-year-old was just as candid — describing a popular video she’d made about anal fissures as proof that TikTok rewarded her “TMI” honesty — but she was also clearly strategic about the apartment Ms Trainor, then seven months pregnant and in fluffy slippers in her agency’s office, had just arrived from The Kelly Clarkson Show, where she revealed her gender (a different boy!) after weeks of hyping the announcement on TikTok. She was joined on a couch by her close friend and TikTok Sherpa Chris Olsen, a cheerful 25-year-old content creator with a large following of his own who has worked as a consultant with the singer-songwriter since 2022 and frequently appears in her videos.
“A lot of artists go in there and say, ‘I get yelled at for not having enough TikToks,’ and I’ve never had a conversation with my label,” Ms Trainor said. “I think that’s why I enjoy it so much and why I don’t feel like it’s a job.”
TikTok has emerged as an undeniable culture shaper in America since the pandemic, making hits in music, television and films, even as lawmakers are increasingly calling for the app to be banned over concerns surrounding its owner, Chinese company ByteDance.
It’s used by two-thirds of 13-17 year olds in the US, according to the Pew Research Center, while TikTok says it has a total of 150 million users. TikTok has won the music industry with its massive audience and features that allow users to create dances and other videos to song snippets, as well as its opaque algorithm that takes obscure songs or singles carefully placed by record labels and sends them to Spotify can, strongly influenced radio dominance.
But not all artists are willing or able to get involved with TikTok the way Ms Trainor has.
“I thought you were gone forever”
“She’s still alive?”
That — or “I thought you retired!” — were the kind of comments Ms Trainor saw under videos of her songs, or even ones she was featured in, as she scrolled on TikTok in 2021. People remembered her hits, but they didn’t seem to know what she’d been up to lately.
By the start of 2020, Ms Trainor’s visibility had plummeted, aggravated by health issues that included two vocal cord surgeries. She was poised to step back into the limelight with the album Treat Myself, which she hailed as her finest work to date. But then the pandemic came and everything was closed.
“I couldn’t perform it anywhere, I couldn’t do anything with it,” she said. “Nobody heard, nobody saw.”
Like millions of other Americans stuck at home, she turned to TikTok, playing covers on a ukulele and entering dance competitions. But it wasn’t until late 2021 that she witnessed the phenomenon of her earlier songs suddenly going viral on the platform and being haphazardly picked up by TikTok users as the soundtrack for their own videos – a scaled down version of last year’s cultural moment when TikTok videos brought ” Rumors” by Fleetwood Mac in 1977 entered the top 10 on the Billboard album chart.
“I heard things like, ‘Did you know your song has 60 million views or whatever, and there are people making videos about it?'” she said. “I thought, ‘What do you mean about that song that’s seven years old, that song?’ It was like waking up on a birthday or Christmas morning.”
The first song to break through was called “Title” from their debut album, which was never released as a single. Ms Trainor posted a dance to the song and shared the unreleased music video.
She was thrilled – and so were the fans, who found out she was still there, she said.
“They said, ‘Wow, I listened to you as a kid and I thought you were gone forever,'” she said. “And I was like, ‘No, I’m still here.'”
Ms. Trainor received another unexpected boost in credibility with younger Millennials and Generation Z — people born between 1997 and 2012 — thanks to her husband Daryl Sabara, an actor who played the character June Cortez in the 2001 children’s film Spy Kids Sequels. “Every day they still say, ‘You and Spy Kids!’ and I’m going to say, ‘And we have a kid!’” she said. The enthusiasm knows no bounds. (In fact, many comments on her videos quote June Cortez and “Spy Kids” in all caps.)
When two more of Ms Trainor’s old songs took off on TikTok with no apparent effort on their part or for any reason, it became clear that the popularity was having another significant effect: an increase in streams on platforms like Spotify, which translated into royalties. According to Tommy Bruce, Mrs Trainor’s manager, who also manages Harry Styles.
TikTok actually pays out some money to record companies, which is passed on to artists when their songs go viral. But the bigger bucks come when songs are streamed hundreds of thousands of times because people want to hear more than just the snippet of current TikTok sound. That, Mr. Bruce said, could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties, which would then be split among the song’s rights holders — in the case of Ms. Trainor, that could be her label and other songwriters.
“These are things that we literally had nothing to do with,” said Mr. Bruce. “It just happened, people used the song and it created the moment.” And since Ms. Trainor was already an avid user of the platform, he added, she found it easy to assimilate into TikTok culture by she reacted to fans and reposted videos with her direct reactions. The fans ate it up.
For music industry executives who yearn for the success Ms. Trainor has had on TikTok — and who’ve had to put in the extra effort to convince established artists from Halsey to Ed Sheeran that it’s worth posting there — that’s kind of it of random virality difficult to produce .
“For the vast majority of people under the age of 30, TikTok is basically the new FM radio,” said Bill Werde, director of the Bandier Music Business program at Syracuse University and author of a popular music industry newsletter. “But instead of being controlled by big labels that pay big radio programmers to foist certain priority songs on fans, it’s much more chaotic and disaggregated.”
So intoxicating was Ms Trainor’s attention after her Pandemic album that she thought hard about TikTok when it came to writing her latest album.
“I remember thinking about how significant that was, how ‘Title’ came about, and I was like, ‘Oh, people on TikTok love this old-school sound that I did on my very first album, really,'” she said. “I thought what if I studied ‘All About That Bass’ and those older songs and figured out why they’re so catchy and timeless – why they work seven years later and try to write some of them? And I think that helped a lot.”
Ms Trainor stressed that she didn’t just write last year’s album Takin’ It Back for the platform. The new material included her experiences as a mother, among other life experiences. But their reflections were in line with the way everyone from aspiring musicians to big record labels sees TikTok in 2023, for better or for worse.
And in the case of Ms. Trainor, it worked.
“made you look”
Mr. Olsen is a TikTok expert whose humorous videos during the pandemic and a recurring coffee delivery stunt transformed him from a regular man with a degree in musical theater into a comedic influencer with more than 10 million followers.
He said that one night in 2021 he posted an Instagram story that read something like, “Thinking about Meghan Trainor.” She reposted it on her own Instagram and said, “Love you, love your content .” Now he’s Ms. Trainor’s secret weapon.
Ms Trainor’s close friendship with Mr Olsen, who regularly appears in her videos such as the bathtub performance, has captivated young fans and has been analyzed by media outlets such as BuzzFeed.
Mr. Olsen has become something of a TikTok prodigy, advising a variety of public figures including Kerry Washington and Vice President Kamala Harris. He said he has advised two other verified TikTok celebrities. About a year ago, he said, Ms Trainor invited him over and casually suggested he was coming up with “some TikTok ideas.”
He took the request seriously, researched the trends in advance, and made a list. From then on, their get-togethers became bi-monthly events called “Content Days,” where they could create ten videos at a time.
Mr Olsen has Ms Trainor’s TikTok account on his phone and they share an iCloud album of video drafts in which they discuss topics such as emoji choices and captions before posts. He said they could tell if a TikTok was going to be a hit based on the views and comments within 15 minutes, which they monitor closely; Both looked horrified when asked if they had TikTok notifications turned on, with Ms Trainor noting that “the phone would go up in smoke”.
Record labels and marketing agencies now regularly contact TikTok dance personalities to choreograph potentially viral shimmies for new songs and then pay influencers to perform and release them.
But Ms Trainor and her team say they got lucky when a duo named Brookie and Jessie happened to create a hugely popular dance for Made You Look, which resonated with Ms Trainor herself, everyday users and celebrities like Penn Badgley. Mr Olsen believed the TikTok presence they created for Ms Trainor was what kickstarted the single.
“Everyone was already on the Meghan Trainor team,” he said.
Waiting for One Verse
The TikTok effect is evident in the 71-second video of Steve Lacy performing his TikTok hit “Bad Habit” at a concert last year. A shaky cellphone is filming with several other cellphones in frame. Devoted fans know every word of the verse, which was used in short snippets by hundreds of thousands of people (“I wish I knew/I wish I knew you wanted me”). Then they fall silent.
With short videos, a song’s experience can now be more bite-sized and short-lived, fans could be more fickle, and people are less likely to engage with entire songs and albums.
“There used to be these one-hit wonders on the radio, you could sell a couple hundred or a couple thousand tickets if you only had one hit, and that was awkward because the fans were like, ‘Wait all night for this’ said Mr. Werde from Syracuse. “Now the fans wait all night for a verse.”
For music purists, the pitfalls go beyond that. They complain about artists developing sounds and lyrics for something that could become popular on TikTok. A song might not catch on at its original tempo, but it picks it up a bit, like Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” and TikTok could gobble it up and take it up the global charts.
Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music and former chief digital officer of Warner Music Group, said that when people on TikTok fell in love with a song — “sometimes within days, sometimes within weeks” — it climbed the charts in other places, using services . “We have artists on tour who sell out a 500-seat venue, then have a big hit on TikTok, and a month later sell out a 2,000 or 3,000-seat venue.”
Last year, 13 of the 14 No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 were driven by major viral trends on the platform, according to TikTok.
Mr. Obermann said that TikTok has honored a variety of genres, from sea shanties to Nigerian pop, and increased the number of previously unknown artists. However, he did acknowledge that TikTok was changing the way fans interacted with new music.
“The creators make these really fun, entertaining, and viral videos, which includes the music,” he said. “It’s a different way of experiencing that moment where the music excites you because it has a visual element.”
It also provided a unique level of real-time feedback. “You can upload a song or a video and you’ll know very quickly if it’s a hit. If not, you might decide, ok, there are other great songs on the album – let’s try another one,” he said.
YouTube shorts
As Ms Trainor wrote “Mother,” the latest single from her new album, she said she expected it to be an “anthem” to #MomTok and #MomsOfTikTok, which is where she spends a lot of time herself. But she didn’t feature the song on TikTok. Instead, she was persuaded to post an exclusive preview on YouTube Shorts, Google’s burgeoning TikTok rival, which racks up more than 50 billion daily views.
In March, YouTube asked users to create short videos with a hashtag for the song, and the duo Brookie and Jessie came up with another dance. But algorithms are fickle and music is unpredictable. Since then, the song has only been streamed about 49 million times on Spotify, compared to more than 475 million streams for “Made You Look.”
YouTube has tried to convince artists and record labels that, unlike TikTok, its platform will entice listeners to longer videos, including full versions of their songs, and keep them over time.
“We look at shorts as a kind of appetizer to dinner,” said Vivien Lewit, YouTube’s global head of the artist group. “We want to help artists thrive, we want to help new songs thrive, but we also want to help them grow and build lasting careers with longtime fans.”
Ms Trainor believes that as much as she loves TikTok, everyone participates in short videos, from Instagram to YouTube to Spotify, and she’s interested in everything.
In 2014, when “All About That Bass” was ubiquitous, it was the kind of success that her manager, Mr. Bruce, described as “at best, a once-in-a-lifetime moment for any artist.”
Now Ms Trainor’s music is ubiquitous again, particularly thriving on a platform that didn’t even exist when she released her first album.
And while “Mother” wasn’t as successful as “Made You Look,” she said, it went down well on TikTok and spread across the internet. She doesn’t take that for granted.
“When it comes down to TikTok, it gets played on the radio,” Ms Trainor said. “I haven’t been played on the radio for a while, you know? And now I’m back in the car and left dinner the other day. And I hear ‘Mother’ and I freak out and I’m like, ‘Turn it up – that’s my song!'”
