Tik Tok’s Global Trend in New Media (Formal Analysis)
Tik Tok at first glance can be a very shocking sight, it is a giant database filled with viral videos from people who otherwise would probably never be seen in any form of “high art”. Yet once a user scrolls through the app enough, trends can start to be seen and the user can follow a sound from one video to another, watching different people manipulate and parody the original sound. It is one of the most creative social media apps the world has ever seen, and it is allowing countless content creators to gain a following they would never have known before. In this essay, I will be examining one of the more popular sounds on Tik Tok “M to the B”, showing its transformation on the app. Tik Tok is presenting people with a brand-new form of creativity, that is both challenging and rewarding but, more importantly, is unlike any entertainment platform we’ve seen before.
Firstly, I think we need to examine the app itself. Tik Tok takes advantage of plenty of bits and pieces from all major social media apps before it but is most closely related to the ever popular (now dead) app: Vine. Vine was an app where users could make and post videos no more than 6 seconds. Then users could “re-vine” posts they thought were funny and have it displayed on their followers feed, it was an instant hit and allowed many creators the chance to become “vine famous”. We see this term come up again with Tik Tok, the most notable “Tik Tok famous” star is Charli D’Amelio who currently has over 80 million followers. Charli was not famous in any way before the app, her parents aren’t big names, she was just a 15 now 16-year-old dancer from Norwalk, Connecticut. So how does a 16-year-old become a multi-millionaire with 80 million followers in about the span of 1 year? Well, to put it simply: the Tik Tok algorithm. Any video posted on the app has a pretty good chance of being sent out to a handful of random people through the “For You” page. It is a constant feed of videos anywhere from 3 seconds to a minute long. Based on how a post does (average watch time, engagement rate, sound used, etc.) it gets pushed out to more and more people. This is what allowed people like Charli and thousands of creators to get hundreds of millions of views on their content.
Now that we know how the platform works, let’s examine what makes Tik Tok a brand new form of media: sounds. Sounds are the bread and butter of most posts on Tik Tok. Whether it is a new dance trend, or it’s a funny sound getting repurposed and remade for small scenes in a video, sounds can blow up in an instant. One of my personal favorite sounds is known as “M to the B” made by Millie B and has been used in 5.5 million videos across the app. The sound is a remix of a Millie B song “Soph Aspin Send”, a diss track posted on YouTube in 2016. It blew up after popular creator Bella Poarch used it in a video, where she, well, just bopped her head to it.
The video currently has over 400 million views. It was an instant hit and from that point on the trend was made and millions of people replicated the video while putting their own spin on the head bopping. User stivensonj made a parody using some computer magic to make Vladmir Putin do the dance.
User tootymcnooty remade the Bella Poarch video but sketched (on a computer) each frame for an animated version.
Even Millie B herself made her first post on the app under that sound announcing the real (bee emoji) is here now.
The sound is one of the most popular sounds on the app and has started a trend that has exploded on the app.
Any time a sound blows up on Tik Tok there tends to be plenty of users that remake the sound and modify it even more. This is where jokes on Tik Tok start to become a little harder to explain to people that don’t use the app on a regular basis, but it is one of the cornerstones of what makes Tik Tok so addicting. Users will see a trend that gets very popular, leave the first part of the sound or trend alone so that viewers are expecting a normal video of that trend and an unaltered sound when they are struck with a whole new sound, or in the case of the most popular remake of the M to the B sound: the voice of Spongebob Squarepants yelling at his pet snail Gary. This Spongebob Squarepants quote was made popular as another trending sound on Tik Tok with no specific trend to go with.
Since the sound was “orinally posted” by multiple users on the app, I’m not sure how many times the sound has been used but it is most likely in the hundred thousands. But user itsmenapkin then had the genius idea to combine the two sounds leaving millions of viewers delightfully shocked with a new sound.
This sound titled “M to the Gary” has been used 71.5 thousand videos with the most popular video under the sound having over 4 million views.
This is just an example of the way sounds get remade on Tik Tok and has been done countless times to keep viewers engaged and interested with these trends.
It is important for my argument to note that this parody style of content has existed on the internet before, and what comes to mind for most people when thinking of parodies would be YouTube. From Weird-Al to Harry Potter but with Guns, YouTube has been parodying videos long before Tik Tok. So, what is so new about Tik Tok’s form of entertainment that hasn’t already been seen on YouTube. Firstly, distribution wise they are on a whole different algorithm, on YouTube, your video is seen if you have been posting good content consistently and YouTube starts to recommend it to users, or maybe it’s ranked high in a certain keyword search, or a user already has a lot of subscribers. For all of those situations, however, the viewer has to like your title and thumbnail enough to actually click on your video for it to be seen. On Tik Tok, the videos are shown straight away meaning the creators video is getting seen (unless a person is looking under a sound, hashtag, or on a profile, then the viewer would have to click on the video). Secondly, I would argue that because of the differentiation of distribution on the respected platforms, it is much harder for a mass amount of users remake videos and have them seen on YouTube than it is on Tik Tok. Lastly, the biggest difference there is would have to be sounds. On Tik Tok, the strong majority of videos are made under a specific sound which essentially puts a limit on what a user can make, some sounds can be trimmed and you can start it in a different point, while other sounds are a specific amount of time and can not be altered. This puts a creator under a set of limitations, forcing them to create under a strict set of confines. While every social media app has certain limitations, Tik Tok has presented an entirely new form of entertainment that can only exist on their platform.
Tik Tok has presented the world with an entirely new form of media. Tik Tok’s platform takes advantage of new media in a way that has led to it being one of the most popular social media apps of all time. It allows tons of creativity to users who all have a shot of getting eyes on their work. Tik Tok allows creators to manipulate sounds, videos, and trends to create new content that keeps people coming back for more and has created a global trend in new media.
