TikTok’s impact on current viral trends has been made clear since its merge with Musical.ly in 2018.
Recently, Taylor Swift has caused quite a buzz with her appearance on the app. The pop star capitalized on the growing resurgence of her song “Wildest Dreams.”
With its short-video, constant-feed format being reminiscent of its predecessor Vine, TikTok has easily gained popularity among those who miss the memes of the old days before Vine shut down in October of 2016.
This has been especially helpful for the music industry since Musical.ly pioneered the trait of each video either having its main focus on a song and its lyrics, or at least a song playing in the background.
While not every TikTok has a musical focus, the overwhelming number that do have proven to be useful for new musicians to get their songs to a wide variety of people’s ears and get them stuck in their heads.
Since the acquisition of the record company Big Hit Machine in 2019, all of Swift’s older music has been in the possession of a talent manager named Scooter Braun.
Swift has been trying to buy back these master records, but the company will only release them under the terms that she creates a new album for the company for every album that she buys back. Thus, they have collected royalties on the songs without Swift.
Since the acquisition of the company first became an issue, Swift has been working on re-recording her first five albums and adding “(Taylor’s Version)” to the ends of the titles. Her first re-release was the album “Fearless” in April 2021, which will be followed by “Red” in November of 2021.
In between these releases, however, Swift noticed that “Wildest Dreams” had been gaining popularity via a trend where TikTokers slowly zoom in on themselves as they lip-sync to a section of the chorus.
She quickly rose to the occasion and released the song ahead of schedule. She then posted it on TikTok with the comment “If you guys want to use my version of wildest dreams for the slow zoom trend, here she is!”
Doing this has allowed for her re-release to become more popular than her original recording back in 2014, thus allowing for her to collect the majority of royalties once again.
She also plans to release her albums “Taylor Swift,” “Speak Now” and “1989” in the future, although “Red” is the only one with an announced release date.
