TikTok Creator
(No, she didn’t invent TikTok. Please read on to learn more.)
Her mother had plans for LI’s future as a medical doctor. LI, who loves her mother, has not entirely ruled out that career path but it’s at least paused while she pursues her passion: creating music videos. Her path has not been a straight line toward success, but few would have been as persistent following their interests.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
LI is the middle child between an older sister and a younger brother born to parents who emigrated from China. LI was born two years after the family immigrated to Canada “for a better life.” LI’s father was a mechanical engineer. Her mother earned a Master’s degree in economics after they settled in their new country.
At home, the family continued to speak in the parents’ native language, Mandarin.
CHILDHOOD INTERESTS
Like many Gen Z kids (born between 1997 and 2012; sometimes called “Zoomers” – the demographic cohort succeeding “Millennials” and preceding “Generation Alpha”), LI grew up steeped in social media; she started using Instagram in third grade and in music, much of it transmitted visually.
While her mother was studying for her Master’s degree, she would put LI’s crib in front of the TV with music videos or music-oriented programming playing. As a tween, LI became obsessed with Nickelodeon’s “Victorious,” a sitcom about a teen musical artist.
“I’d see all the music and think, ‘That looks so fun! I really want to do that!’” recalled LI later. By the end of middle school, LI was still thinking, “I believe in myself, and I can totally do this!”
The oldest child, LI’s older sister, was the performer in the family – she sang, modelled, acted, danced, and won beauty pageants. “I’ve looked up to her my whole life,” said LI about her big sister.
LI began piano lessons in first grade and could sight-read music. But apart from singing in the choir at school, her only public vocal performances were the YouTube videos she made in her room, in which she sang covers of songs by Taylor Swift, Julia Michaels and Shawn Mendes. She hoped to follow the bedroom to Billboard path blazed by her countryman, Justin Bieber, who was discovered on YouTube in 2008 and more recently, by Mendes himself, another Canadian, who broke out in 2013 on Vine, a short-form-video platform.
CHALLENGE – PARENTAL HOPES DIFFER FROM YOUR INTERESTS
LI’s mother imagined her middle child’s future differently. LI was an outstanding student, “The best in everything” recalled her mother, with fierce pride. She thought that LI would attend medical school and become a pediatrician.
Years later, after LI had achieved significant financial success within her music video career, her mother had adjusted to LI’s different career focus, noting “As long as she remained in college and got her degree, I will be content.” The mother believed that her daughter shared the mother’s view about a future career within accounting.
As of the time this career story has been prepared, LI is not committed to either accounting or to medical school. So, her mother may never be content, but LI is determined to pursue her own path.
CHALLENGE – EARLY LACK OF SUCCESS BREEDS DOUBT ABOUT A FUTURE CAREER
LI’s early YouTube videos did not go viral. Fifty views, mostly friends, was a good showing. She began to doubt herself, wondering, ‘Are people interested? Is this realistic?’
PERSISTENCE MAY YIELD EVENTUAL SUCCESS
Eventually, LI downloaded “Musical.ly, an app for sharing short, user-generated videos. She posted videos of herself lip-synching and dancing to trending songs on the app.
A start-up company bought an app called “ByteDance”, which engineered a new algorithm for Musical.ly and merged its users with those of TikTok. By mid-2021, thanks to teenagers like LI, TikTok had reached a billion active monthly users. Facebook, by comparison, had 2.9 billion monthly users at that time. TikTok users skew younger. 67% of all American teen-agers use the app and their parents are joining now, too. According to the data-analytics company “Sensor Tower” the average user spends 95 minutes on the site – almost twice as long as they linger on the “Gram.”
At first, LI was only a ‘viewer’ rather than a ‘creator’ as TikTok refers to anyone who uploads videos. To soundtrack their videos, TikTok creators can choose from a vast library of licensed sounds, which are mostly parts of songs, and which vary in length from a few seconds to a minute. The genius of TikTok’s business model is that the entertainment is almost entirely composed of user-generated videos, which cost a tiny fraction of the seventeen billion dollars that Netflix, for example, spent on professional content in 2021.
“I was on the ‘For You’ page a lot,” said LI. The ‘For You’ feed is algorithmically tailored for each TikTok user, like snowflakes, no two “For You” feeds are exactly the same.
LI had already seen other musicians’ followers ‘blowing up’ on TikTok, like new superstars Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion. But those artists’ careers had predated TikTok, and they had major-label backing. Although LI, like virtually all TikTok creators, longed for fame, she couldn’t imagine being that kind of famous herself.
LI was intrigued by D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) TikTok artists who were monetizing (earning money from) their music careers through influencer deals with brands. That way, they could often keep the rights to their songs, citing Taylor Swift as a music-business role model. “I learned from Taylor,” LI said. “You keep control of your masters.”
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, 2020, while LI was working on her college applications, she tried to write “an original snippet” of a song for TikTok, just a couple of lines generally, every other day. “Usually, I wrote it just thirty minutes before I posted it,” she said. With her phone propped up on a small tripod, she’d record the snippet, singing along to chords she played on a keyboard in her bedroom, and upload it to TikTok. In the morning, she would check TikTok as soon as she woke, then go downstairs and say, “Look, Mom, I got 30 views!”
“Woo-hoo” her mother would respond gamely.
On December 23rd, LI sat at her desk and prepared to record a new snippet. Next to her was a handwritten list which she had prepared as her goals for 2020, with a small box drawn beside each goal, checked or unchecked, depending on whether it had been accomplished. The box next to “Stay Off Wi-Fi for One Day” remained unchecked.
Looking into her phone, LI sang all that existed of “Heartache” her latest song bite, closing her eyes, her long black hair falling over her forehead. LI posted the video, climbed into her big, round bed under colored L.E.D. strip lights on the ceiling, and went to sleep.
The morning after LI posted her new song, she checked her phone as soon as she woke up. “Heartache” had amassed 17,000 views overnight, far outdistancing any of her previous videos.
“Wow! That’s a lot more than thirty!” her mother exclaimed after LI had come rocketing downstairs, shrieking. “I was just bouncing off the walls!” LI recalled. It was her first viral moment. The video hit 100,000 views by that evening and was close to a million within a week.
Having gone viral once, LI tried to make it happen again throughout the following Spring and Summer. What had made that particular video so successful with the algorithm? LI studied the comments and responded to them. Users were generous, without the snark of Twitter or any traces of envy, the green-eyed monster that stalks Instagram. In follow-up videos, LI acted as her fans’ relationship coach, advising them on their own heartbreaks. “They feel like me,” she said, of her online community. “A thousand me’s” from all over the world, including many from India and the Philippines.
In August, LI posted a new song fragment titled “We Didn’t Even Date,” which produced a second viral moment. A few weeks later, she got a call from two young men at Interscope Records in L.A., who had seen her videos in their “For You” feeds, which these days, like everyone else in the business, they rely on to spot new talent.
The men and LI had several conversations, telling her that “when these songs blow up on TikTok and you release them on YouTube, you’re not actually able to monetize because YouTube pays so little for a stream.” They thought that “We Didn’t Even Date” had potential but it needed proper production, so they introduced LI to a L.A. based producer.
In December 2021, LI posted a few lines from a new song, “Happening Again” on her singular theme, unrequited love. “That song, when I first posted it, was not the biggest video I had. But in the comments, people seemed like they were way more engaged with that song.”
LI still wasn’t ready for a record contract, the idea of leaving the nurturing confines of TikTok had little appeal. The two men had stayed in touch and told her about “SoundOn” a music distribution service that TikTok was planning to launch in the Spring of 2022, with an emphasis on its D.I.Y. stars. That sounded perfect to LI.
Meanwhile, TikTok was receiving inquiries from brands in search of music to use in its ads. One such company was American Eagle, the Gen Z-focused clothing company, looking for a “back-to-school anthem” to build its Fall clothing sales campaign around. TikTok pitched several of its artists to American Eagle, including LI. American Eagle was looking for someone who “had an instant connection, who didn’t feel manufactured, someone who felt her, or she had a personal story whose music was real but also leaning toward optimism.”
After reviewing LI’s work on SoundOn, American Eagle decided that “(LI) was just the perfect fit for what we were looking for.”
LI had fewer than 400,000 followers at that point- minuscule compared to stars such as Charli D’Amelion, who had nearly 150,000,000. But from a marketing perspective, a creator with a small but intensely engaged following who can start a trend at least semi-organically in her community could be preferable (and much cheaper) to a creator with a huge following. The American Eagle rep noted that “Gen Z audience isn’t stupid; they are fully aware that many creators are working with brands. But Gen Z also has a strong bullshit meter. If a creator is a partnership with a brand that doesn’t make sense, they’ll call you out. And it can get ugly very quickly.”
American Eagle asked LI to rewrite some of the lyrics of “Happening Again” to mention the brand. The company also paid for a professionally produced, eleven-minute music video, shot in a former high school, in which LI – clad in American Eagle’s fall clothing line – and a cast of extras acted out her crush.
In late August, American Eagle launched a three-day hashtag challenge, with Li inviting creators to make music videos for her song, wearing their own American Eagle jeans. The winning video would be played on the company’s New York City’s Times Square storefront Jumbotron and the winner would receive a $3,000 gift certificate.
The two men who brought the artist, the social media and the advertiser together were paid an undisclosed amount while LI earned slightly more than $100,000 for her role.
It was a good investment for American Eagle, which was awed by the numbers the challenge had produced: 1,500,000 creator videos, producing over 3,000,000,000 views. “We could have gone a superstar route. But this seems extremely effective,” said an American Eagle marketing executive.
EDUCATION
LI was able to remain a full-time college student, on track to earn her degree within the usual, four-year track.
CAREER SATISFACTION
LI’s success within the world of social media music videos has caused her to re-think or at least pause her thoughts about continuing her formal education toward a college degree and possibly post graduate schooling to focus on either accounting or pediatrics.
In the not-too-distant future, LI believes she will need to hire an experienced business manager to complement her initial team of the two men advisors, plus a publicist and a touring agent – the kind of support that, “in the old days” an artist with a following the size of LI’s, would already have.
The thought of creating an on-the-road musical tour causes LI some anxiety, daunted by the prospect of leaving the TikTok incubator, selling tickets to her shows, still the ultimate metric of engagement with your fan base. In the meantime, LI would be posting on TikTok every other day, to retain her name recognition through its algorithm distributing her music to fans who have shown prior interest.
Looking at her list of current annual goals and seeing the unchecked box next to “Read Three Books”, LI exclaimed “I know! I’ve still got time!”
This career story is based on an article written by John Seabrook, published in The New Yorker magazine on 12/12/22.
