Singers that stop you scrolling: TikTok and the songwriter
by Jennifer Cartwright @jennncartwright
In 2023, Jensen McRae uploaded a TikTok of her singing an unnamed original song. The set-up was simple: a white wall, a piano, and McRae herself. But the one-minute video spread like a game of telephone as users shared knowledge of the song based on lyrics they could remember about ‘video games’, ‘Christian Bale’, and ‘Massachusetts’. Other singer-songwriters did split-screen duets and comment after comment implored McRae to release the song. Six months later, McRae finally did.
Some argue that TikTok simplifies songwriting as artists prioritise creating a catchy fifteen-second hook and neglect the rest of the song. Admittedly, in an app where anyone can post almost anything, not everything is going to appeal. However, I believe that TikTok is an asset to the songwriter; posting a video is the modern-day equivalent to stepping into the record label foyer with your homemade CD in hand. And some are lucky enough to gain traction. Take Cat Burns, who started posting videos during lockdown and now has 4.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Or Laufey, whose modern twist on old-school jazz has made her a Grammy Award winner. Both Burns and Laufey were already pursuing music before TikTok, however, their presence on the platform is what skyrocketed their careers.
Personally, I find songwriters on TikTok relatable in a way that mainstream music, often filtered to be more generally appealing, is not. They write songs I feel like I could have written. This is not in the sense that I claim to have their talent or to be able to sing in key, but in the sense that when I listen to them, I hear my emotions transformed into words that perfectly encapsulate them. The songwriter is a translator of feelings, both their own, and of the many who listen. In shared experiences of love and heartbreak, community is formed.
This connection between the songwriter and their listener is epitomised by Maisie Peters. In 2021, Peters created a series of short songs, created based on user’s comments describing their exes. As listeners could directly influence her music, this project placed Peters’ much closer to fans than your traditional mainstream artist. You’d never be able to ask Taylor Swift to write a song about your heartbreak, but you could ask the TikTok songwriter.
More generally, on TikTok, music often feels like a collaboration between the audience and the artist. The artist can post a song but then it may be reused by the audience, for a cover, a dance, or a trend, and in it we feel we have played a part in making it. Even liking or commenting marginally changes the appearance of the TikTok on someone else’s screen. Interaction like this makes the content feel personalised.
But the success of a singer-songwriter is also often down to their rawness and honesty. Sometimes you may have seen artists cheesily promote their music on TikTok by lip-syncing along to a prerecorded version and telling you this is the song you need to hear if you have experienced X, Y, or Z. Sometimes these videos do well. However, within Songwriter-Tok, the posts that gain the most traction are often the most-stripped back. Many artists use TikTok to post what may only even be a draft of a song from their bedroom, bathroom or living room.
Take Simon Robert French for example. His song ‘Do You Have Internet in Heaven?’, written about his experience of bereavement is unusually long for a TikTok, but it has over 230,000 likes from people who stayed and watched the full video. Listening to this song feels like eavesdropping at a door or reading a diary, you feel intrusive hearing a stranger’s emotions so in-depth. Yet, you stay because this feels like a moment of confiding, where music is just as much therapy for the writer as the listener. It is a privilege to hear someone open up in this way.
It starts with a random appearance on your For You Page. Sometimes you might scroll past. But other times, there will be something that will make you stay. Whether it is ‘Complex’ by Katie Gregson-Macleod or ‘Fat Funny Friend’ by Maddie Zahm, there is something about the viral singer-songwriter that stops you in your tracks. It’s like when someone starts playing a community piano in a train station and though you know you have somewhere to be, you see no harm in stopping and admiring just for a little while.
Yet, as with all sides of TikTok, Songwriting-Tok has its own negative side. Sometimes audiences gain attachment to these rough drafts posted by artists. When Lizzy McAlpine posted her song ‘You Ruined the 1975’ she was initially inundated with demands to release the song in full. The longer time went by without McAlpine releasing it, the more aggressive these pleas became. Of course, when you like a song, it’s natural to listen to it whenever you can and TikTok is undeniably inconvenient to do this. Though music permeates across all spectrums of the app, it is not a streaming platform (yet?). However, the demands on McAlpine, which still pop up time and again years later, show that though TikTok gives artists the power to build their brand, they also can lose control of their own artistry. On their personal accounts, they may experience rudeness that bigger artists with accounts run by their marketing teams would never see.
When TikTok songwriters begin to gain formal success, often they inevitably post less. I think a lot of songwriters initially post on TikTok because they want a way to share their music but they never imagine they’ll have the resources to formally release the song. As they build their audience, they become the ideal candidate for a record deal. With this change, they don’t want to release songs until they are fully refined because they don’t want to be held hostage to their drafts. So instead, these kinds of posts become replaced by promotion of their released music, concert videos, or sometimes no posts at all. But the beauty of songwriting on TikTok is that there are always old videos to go back to, and when one songwriter stops posting, another one starts.
Some of my favourite songs have been accidental discoveries found through TikTok. They are often short, unfinished, and raw. However, this is exactly what makes them special. So I’ll go back to my For You Page and try to find some more.