Canadian musicians are getting noticed on TikTok and music labels are scrambling to keep up

Ottolini, an Uxbridge-based country music singer and songwriter, posted a 15-second video snippet of her song “F150” — a breakup song that prominently mentions the model of a Ford truck as its point of reference — and then her world exploded.

“I posted my video and then I started noticing people starting to use my sound,” says Ottolini, referring to the trend when a TikTok viewer “borrows” a song to use as a soundtrack to either dance or lip sync for their own video post.

“Overnight, 1,000 people used my sound. Then I looked at my Spotify, there was an exponential increase in my streams — 100,000 streams in a day!”

Ottolini noticed similar results on her other platforms, including Apple Music, as her TikTok fan base rocketed to 35,000 people.

But that was just the beginning: ultimately, 10 labels reached out to sign her.

“That’s how the labels found me: they were like, ‘Who is this girl who is getting insane amounts of streams out of nowhere?’”

When the dust settled, Warner Music Nashville emerged as the victor, with Ottolini signing a lucrative deal even though she has yet to visit the label’s Tennessee headquarters due to pandemic travel restrictions.

But she’s fully aware that TikTok was the trigger that catapulted her career into the big leagues.

“It turns out that a lot of people have gotten their heart broken by somebody who drives a vehicle,” she laughs.

Songwriter Simon Wilcox also marvels at the power of TikTok, but for more creative reasons.

Wilcox, a veteran song doctor and collaborator who co-wrote the 2015 Nick Jonas chart-topper “Jealous” and Three Days Grace’s “Home,” says she was working with 16-year-old TikTok discovery Jessie Murph on the song “Upgrade” but had hit a wall.

“She brought in this chorus that she said had gone crazy on TikTok, a chorus and a really great song title called ‘Upgrade’ and we wrote the song,” Wilcox recalls.

“Then this really amazing thing happened: fans had started to react to what she had written: ‘If you think this is an upgrade/You gotta be out of your mind babe/That b—-h is crazy/You’re going to have some ugly-ass babies.’

“So the voice of cancel culture comes out and they say to Jess, ‘You’re so shallow. What are you doing? You’re just tearing this girl down.’”

Wilcox said the duo made a lyrical adjustment, based on fan feedback, and gave the song a slightly different context by adding how Murph had been victimized by a cheating boyfriend.

“We wanted a sympathetic character, so how could we dismantle this idea and shape and frame it differently? We realized, the character singing the song: she’s the one suffering, she’s the one hurt, so then the chorus is for lashing out.

“So she releases the song; it goes crazy and it unleashes a label bidding war.”

Wilcox, currently working on Lennon Stella’s new album, says the instant reaction and gratification was unlike anything she had experienced in two decades of songwriting.

“Midway through a session, we’d post something on TikTok and ask, ‘Guys, what do you think of this song? Should we finish it?’

“This is while we’re writing it! The fans are connected to the creation of the song in the moment it’s being made, which is super, super cool. I mean, how exciting is that for me creatively that the song was shaped by the fans?”

Wilcox understands why the medium is so appealing to record companies as it’s a far cry from the antiquated model of “finding a kid in Moose Jaw no one’s ever heard of, putting them in the studio for a year, making them do the radio dance and then touring them across the country to an audience of 10 to 20 people.”

“Instead, I sing it into my phone and I send it out to the world,” she explains. “As an artist, you have to be excited by this because there’s no filter anymore.”

Wilcox suggests that because of its immediacy, TikTok is now the most important frontier for record labels to sign new acts.

“I think it’s the best tool that A&R people (those that sign artists to record companies) have right now,” said Wilcox. “It’s easy to track for engagement: they can actually see what’s working.

“Because TikTok has democratized distribution, there isn’t this elitism in A&R anymore. You don’t have to ‘look like’ a recording artist or sound like one. What do people love? What do people want? OK, that’s what people are reacting to, that’s what I’m going to sign.”

It seems to be striking a chord with the labels: in 2020, they signed 70 TikTok discoveries, undoubtedly buoyed in part by the app’s first and most prominent success story since its 2018 launch: Montero Lamar Hill, better known as Lil Nas X.

Hill’s 2019 hit “Old Town Road” first went viral on TikTok and was later spruced up by a Nine Inch Nails sample and a duet with Billy Ray Cyrus. The less-than-two-minute-long “Old Town Road” broke all kinds of records as the longest chart-topping song in Billboard Hot 100 history at 19 consecutive weeks, selling more than 14 million copies.

Canadians have also fared well, with Tate McRae, Curtis Waters and Powfu benefitting from the initial catalyst of TikTok to watch their streaming careers skyrocket: Powfu alone has seen his song “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)” surpass one billion cumulative streams.

Alan Cross, music historian and radio host of “The Ongoing History of New Music,” notes that the company’s demographics, along with other stats leaked in April from a TikTok sell sheet to its U.S. advertisers, would be reason enough for record labels to be watching this phenomenon closely.

According to the leaked document, the majority of TikTok users — 42 per cent — are between 18 and 24 years of age, followed by 22 per cent of the 25 to 34 crowd. Seventeen per cent of them fall between 13 and 17; 12 per cent are 34 to 44, and only seven per cent are 45 and older.

“Current music is always driven by youth,” says Cross, who notes that TikTok — the most downloaded app in 2020 — currently has an estimated 818 million users and adds an average of 14 million daily, with an expectation that the platform will host one billion users by the end of 2021.

With an average of 100 million people in the U.S. using TikTok monthly and an average user checking in with the app 19 times daily, spending an average of 89 minutes per day, consumer purchasing power is also a prevalent attraction: 47 per cent of users bought something that they say they saw on their phone app.

The fact that a TikTok video recently brought the 1977 Fleetwood Mac hit “Dreams” back to mainstream and commercial attention only whetted label appetites for more, says Cross.

“They are watching TikTok very closely because this seems to be another avenue for exposing new artists and for also revitalizing some back catalogue stuff,” says Cross. “The thing that really woke a lot of people up was the Fleetwood Mac ‘Dreams’ thing and now all the labels are looking at what’s hot on TikTok to do two things: No. 1, if they find something that, it doesn’t matter whether it’s old or new, it’s something that they can focus on and secondly, TikTok has become a bit of a barometer as to the way pop music is going.

“There’s even a phrase now, TikTok pop, which is the kind of stuff that lends itself to these videos and some of these artists who have blown up on TikTok have crossed over mainstream.”

The only thing that Cross says labels should be concerned about is the speed with which they react.

“If you look at the engagement numbers on each of the posts, and you start digging a little deeper and find out exactly what songs are being streamed, not just on one video but across multiple videos, that tells you that something is really, really hot and that it’s worth digging into,” Cross says.

“The problem is that the labels still don’t really understand how TikTok works. It moves really, really, really fast: by the time something is happening and you’re in meetings figuring out what to do and then perhaps capitalize on it, it’s gone.”

With a label deriving 65 to 70 per cent of its revenue from streaming, Cross says TikTok can up the ante even further.

“If you can find that TikTok is driving that additional revenue — I mean, the labels get money from TikTok plays, and if you can augment that by somehow translating that into additional streams … well, you’re golden,” he says.

There also a suggestion that TikTok becomes more deeply involved in a career than any other medium. A recent article by Shelly Banjo in Bloomberg Businessweek said that TikTok management had a very influential hand in helping Megan Thee Stallion’s hip-hop hit “Savage” reach No. 1.

“TikTok’s management analyzed user data and advised (her) label on how to promote her, eventually landing on the infectious hit as the best vehicle to do so,” she wrote, explaining that company owner ByteDance Ltd. advised Megan’s label, 300 Entertainment, to place five tracks on the platform to monitor its metrics.

While the label picked the song “Captain Hook” to click, TikTok users instead chose “Savage” to keep in their “sounds” folders for future use.

Banjo reported that TikTok’s management placed “Savage” in their playlists and banner ads on the search page and sound library, the two spots where users select music for videos, and then launched the #SavageChallenge named after a dance routine created by a 20-year-old Texas TikTok user.

For its part, 300 Entertainment ran an influencer marketing campaign involving the #SavageChallenge dance that included videos posted by Hailey and Justin Bieber, who have more than 200 million followers.

The successful campaign motivated record industry pundit Bob Lefsetz to observe in his music industry-distributed Lefsetz Letter, “TikTok is not only a platform; it’s essentially a manager, in deep contact with its stars, it’ll even give them money.

“But even better, TikTok tells them how to stay atop the charts, it tells creators which songs are priorities, to make videos for them so these creators can continue to dominate and grow bigger.

“Used to be acts were broken on radio,” Lefsetz adds. “Then they were broken on Spotify and radio came next. Now they’re broken on TikTok and then they spread to streaming and radio.”

Robyn Ottolini knows this: her stats as of this writing — 35 million views of her TikTok videos and almost 35,000 user-created videos involving her music that have resulted in 60 million plays of “F150” on TikTok.

For Ottolini, who didn’t discover the platform until the pandemic hit, it’s been a godsend.

She is currently in the studio working on a new single and an EP, and says she knows where the demand is coming from.

“People have been waiting for these songs to come out because I’ve been showing them on TikTok,” she says. “It’s definitely a catalyst for a lot of artists, including myself.”

There may be another barometer in the making: Bell Media’s revival of the influential Canadian video music channel MuchMusic as a TikTok programming choice.

When it launches on the platform July 7, there will be a new contingent of MuchMusic VJs hosting a mixture of artist-hosted streams and live performances aimed at Gen Z and young millennials, as well as the return of such Much staples as “Video on Trial,” “Intimate and Interactive” and “MuchMusic Spotlight.”