Washington DC-based Nigerian artist, Mannywellz, has been one of the most prominent voices in Nigeria’s alternative scene since 2022. Since his debut in 2017, he’s perfected a mellifluous but gorgeously poignant sound that takes equal inspiration from RnB, Hip-Hop, and Afrobeats. He recently released a snippet from his just-released Lala EP. Almost immediately after its release, a flurry of critiques bemoaning his predilection for TikTok-optimized music followed. One rather hilarious wisecrack reads “Mannywellz should allow us rest nauuu. Everyday he’s making TikTok sound. idk if he’s a musician or a tiktok sound generator now.” He seems to be taking the situation lightly and has reposted a number of critical tweets. But this conversation, of artists optimizing songs for TikTok vitality, is hardly unique to him and is probably one of the most hotly contested cultural debates in recent times.
Since 2020, when the covid-sponsored global lockdown drove digital media consumption to an all-time high, permanently altering user behavior, TikTok has surpassed other mediums—radio, and television— to become the foremost channel for music distribution. Its power to propel an artist to the nexus of the zeitgeist is both wholly unprecedented and unbelievably potent. Some of the biggest hits of the past four years—Love Nwantiti, Calm Down, Million Dollar Baby & Espresso—were spawned from viral moments on the app. Outside its ability to create mega-hits, the platform is also adept at providing nascent, and often obscure acts, a sizable slice of the spotlight. An artist like Mannywellz falls into this category. While he has yet to score any mega hits on the platform, he has recorded a number of smaller moments that have enabled him to thrive as a small independent artist.
However, the ascendancy of TikTok, for all its manifold benefits, doesn’t sit well with everyone. It’s a frequent target for pedantic, pearl-clutching culture critics who typically enact a pointed distinction between traditional hits and TikTok hits, treating the latter with less seriousness. Many listeners also share this sentiment. The phrase “TikTok hit” has almost become a slur in certain corners of the internet, casually deployed by self-proclaimed music purists in music debates. Curiously, some artists also treat the platform and hits spawned off of it with passive derogation, almost to make a distinction between themselves and other artists who have found home on the platform.
Asides the snobbery trafficked by so-called purists, critics of the platform typically deploy a litany of gripes; ranging from hilariously tenuous quips to thought-provoking philosophical arguments. One tenuous but equally legitimate concern is that a lot of music-related practices on the platform are just cringe.
Songs posted on the platform often get remixed in interesting ways. These songs get sped up, slowed down, reverberated, spliced, fused with other songs, sometimes with trending sounds—anything capable of turbocharging their appeal for the playful short-form videos that form the core of the platform. Artists typically also create dances for songs posted on the platform, to enhance their chances of finding success on the app. While these practices are not inherently cringeworthy—millions of users revel in this flavor of content everyday—to a sedate few, they represent perhaps the apotheosis of cringe.
The other popular gripe is more artistic in essence. The argument goes that TikTok, by design, incentivizes artists to water down the essence of their music by favoring a narrow set of criteria; simplicity, whimsy, danceability, the use of trendy phrases—oftentimes with layers of references—and repeatability. Artistes seeking TikTok virality often contrive their music to reflect these features. The result is often soulless, mechanical music.
This is however an extreme scenario. A lot of artists still prize artistic integrity. And so, even when optimizing a song for TikTok success, they still ensure said song retains elements of authenticity. Mannywellz is the quintessential exemplar of this. Also, while in theory, identifying the features of successful TikTok hits is as easy as taking candy from a baby, in practice, contriving a successful TikTok hit is very difficult. A perfect illustration would be the famous and elusive secret Coca-Cola recipe. The reality is that the constituent parts of the recipe, per FDA guidelines, are not at all secret. In fact, the ingredients are boldly scrawled on every coke bottle. What remains covert, the subject of manifold speculation, however, is the exact proportions and technique of combining these ingredients into the magic elixir that is Coca-Cola. Similarly, while the features of a successful TikTok hit are easy to place, fine tuning these elements to the whims of the algorithm is a herculean task that often leaves desperate artists in the lurch; unsuccessful at gaming the algorithm and yet stripped of their artistic bonafides on account of selling out.
While these critiques are, to some degree, reasonable, they fall apart, as they ignore several realities. The first is that TikTok, and the broader social-media-led order, has heralded an impressive array of positive changes. Music, in addition to being one of the purest and most affecting art forms, is also a source of livelihood to artists. The implication of this truism is that the amount of individuals practicing this pristine craft depends, to no small extent, on its commercial value. TikTok, above catapulting established acts to stratospheric levels, is revolutionary for its ability, and tendency, to bestow small, incipient artists with a share of the spotlight. Without TikTok, niche artists like Mannywellz would struggle to earn a living, fated to scrape by with whatever meager income they earn from performing at local bars and whatever trickles of the streaming spoils the motes are typically accorded.
Earlier this year, Mannywellz, in protest to the tenuous slice of streaming revenue that goes to small artists, threatened to remove his music from streaming platforms. He walked back on the move as did other well known acts like Kanye West and James Blake, whom, earlier this year, proposed similar moves. But these examples serve as an embodied reminder of the fractured revenue system in today’s music industry. It’s perhaps a stretch to hypothesize that Mannywellz, and the canon of resplendent music he has served over the years, wouldn’t exist without TikTok. However, at the very least, countless other artists of his stature would not exist without this platform.
The second reality often ignored by critics is that art has always evolved, morphed, shape-shifted to accommodate the demands of new technology or a changing commercial appetite. When an art enthusiast, wreathed in awe, gazes at the resplendent frescos that festoon the sprawling ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they rarely, if ever, consider the technical hurdles Michelangelo had to saunter through. The tedium of painting while hanging aloft a scaffold towering twenty meters above the ground; the intransigence of the painting pigments of the day; the political machinations he had to nimbly traverse—all those elude the viewer. All that comes into view is the magnificent tapestry that drapes the storied building. Similarly, music has always morphed to reflect the changing times. The invention of synthesizers and pitch correction software rendered live music recordings obsolete. The ascendancy of radio compressed song sizes into around three minutes. The invention of vinyl records ushered in concept albums. The advent of streaming established mellow music, replete with replay value, atop the totem pole. Countless other examples abound. TikTok is simply the next frontier, for better or for worse.
Finally, no amount of hand-wringing or denigration can roll back the influence of TikTok. At every juncture where the winds of new technology have nudged humanity onto a new path, there have always been cynics dawdling at the periphery, luxuriating in nostalgia and peddling grisly visions of the future. This contingent was however unable to stymie the industrial revolution or the advent of music streaming, neither can they impede or thwart TikTok.
TikTok has become not just a mainstay of pop culture but the preeminent vehicle for music promulgation. But like every other medium, it’s complete with its attendant drawbacks, chief of which is the toll it takes on artistic expression. How then can we reconcile these two seemingly divergent concepts—artistic expression and commercial ambition? The answer begins with dispelling the notion that these are parallel worlds. Ambling the path of commercial glory often implies relinquishing some measure of artistic integrity. This is, however, not always the case. Over the years, stalwarts have walked the tightrope between these two worlds: Lauryn Hill, Nina Simone, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Michael Jackson, Queen. These artists maintained a tight grip on the pulse of the culture whilst remaining some of the most forward-thinking musicians of their day.
This year, after years of stumbling in the darkness, Western pop has spawned artists preternaturally adept at straddling TikTok virality and artistic integrity. Sabrina Carpenter, Chapelle Roan and Charlie XCX have surfed the wave of TikTok success, spawning seismic cultural moments. These artists owe their success to an array of factors but a throughline between their stories is modular music; songs that can be decoupled for platforms like TikTok but still work well as a whole. One vital flaw of many of the songs that make windfall on the platform is that only tiny sections of the songs—30 seconds or less— have the infectiousness that propelled them into successes on the app. And so, a lot of the success gleaned remains local to the app. Charlie XCX, Chapelle Roan and Sabrina Carpenter—the avatars for this iteration of global pop—have however broken out of this mold and their successes have been surreal.
Skewering TikTok and trafficking in nostalgic notions of a long-past era might be a gratifying sport but regarding effecting change, these are acts of futility. With or without our permission, the machinery of change chugs along, constantly, reshaping the world according to its peculiar whims. Change is constant, unrelenting. As such, it leaves waves of disaffected anachronists in its wake. But looking ahead, towards the horizon, is always the heartening option. The ascendancy of TikTok and its attendant drawbacks may be disconcerting and fraught; but for the music industry, annealed and forged by centuries of upheavals and constant evolution, it’s merely familiar waters.
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