The Rise & Rise of Short Form Video
This week I'm looking at short form video like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and most importantly, TikTok
One thing you can’t escape these days is the rise of short form video platforms and the music content there. Instagram Reels is probably the longest established of these, and the one most of us will have seen, and recently YouTube have entered the space with their offering Shorts. The one that anyone in music will have heard everyone talking about lately is TikTok - a standalone app that allows people to make videos on their phone and set them to music.
Music has always been about promotion, one way or another artists have had to promote themselves either by performing, or doing interviews with the press or publicity stunts or whatever. Nowadays many artists use social media platforms to promote their releases, with the state of the music press as it is and opportunities limited for most people the only way to communicate with fans and potential fans is via one of these social platforms.
Personally I don’t use TikTok, and have little interest in doing so, but amongst younger people it seems to be one of the most popular social apps, it’s still fairly new in the scheme of things, and people are still figuring it out. For A&Rs one of the first things they look at when they’re signing a song is how well it’s doing on TikTok, which I think is a mad way of doing things, but that’s how it is right now. If a song is blowing up there then you can make a reasonable assumption it’ll be popular on DSPs, so if anything it does the A&Rs job for them. Lets be clear I’m talking about mainstream pop & dance music here, I don’t think anything too experimental is going to go viral on the platform, that said, a viral challenge popped up a few years ago where youngsters had to listen to The Caretakers Everywhere At The End of Time albums (all eight hours of them). It doesn’t seem like the best fit for a platform based around short, 30/60/90 second clips, but for some reason it worked.
The other big reason TikTok has been in the news lately is as part of a dispute between them and Universal Music - essentially UMG are upset that TikTok don’t pay them a fair rate for use of their music (which they probably don’t, although I don’t know the details of their deal) so they first threatened to, and now have started to take their artists music down from the TikTok music library. There’s two schools of thought I have on this - one: that’s great for other artists on the platform as now one of the worlds biggest music companies content is on there, so there’s more pie to go round for everyone else. This view is shared by some distributors I’ve talked to.
The other view (and I get this one too) is that it’s pretty shitty for Universal artists trying to build a fanbase through the platform - we know how cutthroat being signed to a major can be, so having a promo opportunity blocked by your label must be pretty frustrating - if anything that’s going to make the job harder for their A&Rs as artists will consider signing to another major if they don’t have their music on TikTok. Ideally the other majors (plus Merlin and the indies) should have all pulled their music off TikTok in solidarity - the app is nothing without music - and a rising tide lifts all boats, a better deal for UMG would have filtered down to other labels too, but as is always no-one can ever agree on anything. Labels think they’ll have more to lose by pulling music from the platform, and that may be the case, especially if you take the view that TikTok is a promo outlet rather than a DSP you’d expect to bring in meaningful income.
One thing that seems certain is that TikTok is here to stay, and although I don’t use the platform myself I’ve engaged with them on certain releases of mine, and have seen some reasonably decent results. This is the thing about working in this industry, and what separates those who are successful on platforms and those who aren’t - sometimes we have to swallow our prejudices and work with things outside of our comfort zone, either music or promo-wise. That doesn’t mean you’ll see me doing a little viral dance trying to promote our next record, but it does mean I’ll hear them out and see what opportunities they can offer our artists, and go into that partnership with an open mind. In the meantime, you can catch me moaning about football on Twitter…
Hard Normal Daddy
On to this weeks new music, and I’m starting with a new album from Squarepusher. He’s stopped mucking around with the bass and the less said about that Daft Punk-inspired side project the better, this sounds like a return to form which made him one of the most essential artists of that late-90s/early 00’s Warp era, when it was pretty much a buy-on-sight label. The new album was meant to be out today but it’s not on Spotify yet, but the single is, and I’ve put some other tunes in the playlist which shows the breadth of his talent.
Dark Entries have reissued the second ‘lost’ Ike Yard album from 1982 - like many I discovered the first one through Blackest Ever Black, and that Regis remix of Loss. Most of this stuff hasn’t been heard in 40 years, with only a handful of tracks making a compilation a few years ago. Either way, essential.
Another reissue, this album from Celer originally came out on tape back in 2008. It’s a beautiful, haunting album of drones made by recording a variety of water sources. It doesn’t sound like you’d expect it to - it’s really worth giving this one a listen.
World of Echo announced a new compilation of Cat’s Miaow tunes yesterday, and they’ve put a teaser on DSPs. I love this stuff, the vocals are always beautiful, and it’s indie-pop at it’s utter best. RIYL if you liked that compilation on A Colourful Storm a few years ago, Sarah Records, Cocteau Twins, and that kind os stuff.
It’s a short but sweet roundup this week, thanks for reading, listening, commenting as always!