When I first discovered TikTok during Covid lockdowns, I laughed it off. As a blossoming freelance musician, I found nothing relevant on an app about comedy skits and homemade bread recipes. Word was spreading amongst my fellow artists that it could be great for self-promotion, but I felt sure it’d be in the social media graveyard sooner rather than later. Little did I know it’d soon change my life.
At first, I had a weird moral superiority about not signing up. The content was engaging, but nothing I couldn’t find elsewhere, and I cringed at the thought of making lip sync and dance videos like the platform’s early adopters.
That was until I went home for the summer, and instead of living with my friends, working, and studying all day, I found myself with endless free time. The music industry buzzed about making the most of every tool at your disposal. The perfect audience could be online waiting, so why not at least try to find them? My fear of missing out defeated my intense early embarrassment. This would be a lot of effort when I just wanted to make music, but it’d also be a waste to not do that music justice with TikTok’s advertising potential.
Out of sheer boredom, I registered and posted a few feeble attempts at singing and telling stories about musician life. Hyperaware of New Zealand’s tall poppy syndrome, at first I blocked my existing contacts, pushing away the possibility that peers would mock me behind my back. Unlike personal sites like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok felt like a tunnel of strangers, somewhere you’d never want to interact with someone you actually knew.
Nothing I posted worked… until it did. I grew up a pop music historian, obsessed with the likes of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande. Thinking about media studies every day at university also forced me to see music from new angles. I started seeing through marketing with such clarity. During a lecture, my class discussed rising pop girl Olivia Rodrigo, and how her brand shifted from girl-next-door to an edgier Y2K-inspired rockstar as her music blew up internationally. Suddenly fixated on Olivia’s narrative, I thought I should share my observations with my tiny following. I unblocked those who knew me in real life and shared a three-minute case study into Olivia’s identity shift.
The following week felt like a scene from a bad teen movie about going viral. “She’s got one million clicks, the whole school has seen it!” My video essay racked up hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of hours. My following sky-rocketed, and my comment section became an actual hellscape.
Whilst many people seemed to agree with my thoughts, many also seemed to purposefully misunderstand me, deeming my words hateful or dishonest. I couldn’t wrap my head around the misinterpretations, especially since everything I said came from the place of an educated superfan. Waking up for several days in a row to this bewilderment made me feel sick, but I also wondered if this could gain a following that might eventually translate to my real passion – my music.
For the next two years of my life, I posted almost every day, covering the historical events that mattered in my pop girl world. Lana Del Rey’s unreleased albums, the Janet Jackson Superbowl incident, the constant discourse around every Taylor Swift release. My ever-increasing followers loved my perspective, thrilled to learn so many new details about their favourite artists. The good outweighed the bad, but I did quickly notice that polarising opinions made for far better engagement. Mentioning certain names blew the video up no matter what. I learnt when to expect negative reactions, and sometimes purposefully courted them to boost engagement.
I quickly lost sight of my original intent. TikTok was supposed to be how I’d find like-minded people, who’d realize if they loved the same artists as me, they’d probably like my music too. But any time I made a video about my own releases, my views tanked. TikTok’s fickle algorithm didn’t help. Every few weeks, a new update threw all the rules about hashtags and formatting out the window, so my best material frequently vanished into the ether because of app changes that I had no control over.
It became frustrating to put so much work in for so little in return. The hateful comments were loud. I spent so much time overexplaining myself when in reality, nothing I said would change people’s minds about what they thought I meant. I’d bore real friends to death droning on about what strangers said in this niche online bubble. When I wasn’t hung up on the comments, I spent several hours everyday filming and editing, believing the industry pressure that skipping one post would crash my views. Yes, compared to traditional jobs, influencing was cushy. But this wasn’t a job – I wasn’t making any money.
In New Zealand, TikTokers can only earn money through livestream donations or private collaborations. But in countries with access to TikTok’s Creator Fund, like America and the UK, the grind is extremely lucrative. To my horror, I discovered if I lived in one of those countries, the amount of views I pulled would have bought me a house. Instead, I was broke, essentially working unpaid for TikTok on top of my studies and music career, for the reward of social validation (and rejection) from people I’d never met. The official TikTok team informed me there were no plans for a Creator Fund in Aotearoa, but at least I’d soon be able to sell merchandise on the TikTok shop!
I was broke, essentially working unpaid for TikTok on top of my studies and music career, for the reward of social validation (and rejection) from people I’d never met.
This financial discovery shocked me into realizing I’d completely lost sight of what I was doing it all for. I’d become so focused on talking about other artists, my own art had fallen to the wayside. Moreover, by 2024, the content landscape was shifting again. Whether it was the algorithm locking me in “200 view jail” or people were just losing interest, I stopped gaining followers, and even my best content flopped.
I took a break for a week, then a month, then I simply stopped making videos I didn’t want to make. I turned my attention back to my own work, writing my debut album, and building a visual world for the photoshoots, music videos and a national tour. This instantly felt so much more fulfilling than putting all my attention on everyone else.
Rather than cutting social media out of my life, I shifted my content to what already happened organically. I didn’t doll up to film, I filmed when I was already dressed and busy. My posts documented my own studio sessions, live shows and random thoughts I had about working as a musician. Even as hundreds of followers slipped away, I could not deny how much happier I felt without telling myself every day I needed to churn out content about other artists. My online bubble became people who legitimately cared about me and my music, rather than people who just wanted a stan war.
Today, arts industries insist we must post every waking moment, chase numbers at all costs, focus more on Content with a capital C than the actual art itself. But virality is largely unattainable, and entirely fleeting. If it ever comes, the quick high shifts your expectations so drastically in a way that can only damage your self-esteem and original goals. Social media is a valuable tool for connection, but it was never supposed to be the core point of being an artist. Instant success will likely lead to instant collapse.
Instead, we want to build sustainable audiences for ourselves, focusing on longevity and tangible interest that shows up in the real world. What’s the point of having 20,000 followers if I can’t sell twenty tickets to an actual show? If only a few people see my videos, but they turn up to my gigs, they are infinitely more valuable than the random usernames telling me I’m wrong about which Lady Gaga album is the best.
Every time I post now, I think of my fellow creatives and hope they too are thinking more carefully about their aspirations when sharing online. Content is not just content. It often takes more from you than it gives, so it’s worth finding what makes that process intentional and fulfilling for you, to sustain it long-term. At the end of the day, we started our journeys for the art, not the audience. The two are hopelessly intertwined, but it simply has to be for us above all else. What is the point of creating, if not to have something real we are truly proud of?
