Content Creation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Algorithm
Fuck TikTok. Wait. Let me clarify. FUUUUUUUUUUUCK TikTok. It is not a medium for artistry. It is, like so many other social media platforms, designed to turn art into a commodity, to turn artists into shills, to turn music into muzak.
A significant segment of TikTok’s business model is TikTok for Artists. In bold headlines, they profess that hocking your songs on TikTok will “amplify your music.” It claims to do so through increased “exposure,” building “connections” with fans, and driving “engagement” so that you can "monetize" your music. And, as TikTok claims in a recent impact report, musicians on TikTok are twice as likely to have their music discovered and shared, are more likely to get more streams on platforms like Spotify, and are more likely to sell more merch.
Hell yeah! Tell me more, right! Where do I sign up? I mean, you are an unknown songwriter who wants to share your music with as many people as possible. What’s not to love?
You head to YouTube to unlock the formula to becoming the next Zach Bryan. Undoubtedly, you’ll find Jesse Cannon — bespectacled and smirking in front of some green screen graphics. Videos on his “Musformation” channel promise you “Game Changing Tips” and “Weekly Hacks” that will grow “ANY MUSICIAN from 0 to 1,000,000 Fans.” Cannon promises to teach you how to build a fan base “THE RIGHT WAY!!!” so that you will get “MILLIONS OF STREAMS While You Sleep.”
Cannon’s most popular videos are 25 minute, meme-filled screeds on the “4 Rules” that will get you to those promised 1,000,000 fans. He updates these videos yearly. This is the one from 2024. You can trust Cannon because “unlike these other YouTubers” he “does this work every day.” He works with “tons of musicians on their ascent to building a huge fan base.” And he assures you within the first 60 seconds that he is not “another one of those YouTube con-artists who is selling a course.” He’s written a book!
Unlocking the TikTok algorithm is vital to Cannon’s strategy because uploading and promoting content on TikTok is free. Like he says: “as long as you have some lighting, a decent camera on your phone, and study how to do TikTok and the nuances of it,” you can “blow up for no money.” Cannon’s topline advice, then, is “Understanding the Role of Algorithms in Music Discovery.” It’s simple: appeal to algorithms. You should “deliver music in the way the algorithm likes,” and you must "follow the rules of that algorithm.” That means releasing a new song every two months and promoting the hell out of it on TikTok and other social media platforms. These campaigns to please the algorithm are long — 12 to 18 months of uploading video after video after video after video. You end up spending far more of your creative energy creating slop content than writing songs or making music.
It’s worth pausing here to define some terms.
ALGORITHM: Algorithms are basically a set of programming instructions designed to complete a task or solve a problem. Getting and keeping your attention is the sole task of social media algorithms. They are designed to “feed” you a steady “stream” of content that you like based on what you’ve watched or even paused on previously before scrolling up. An oversimplification of this is: “If TikTok User A watches a cat video, then give TikTok User A more cat videos.” It’s basically the pleasure principle on shuffle. Because social media platforms make money off your attention, the longer they can keep you doom scrolling, the more ad revenue they generate. Social media algorithms, then, are finely tuned to keep you watching. New content is the lifeblood of these zombifying beasts.
CONTENT: You’ll hear this word over and over and over again in the echo chamber of music marketing. Content is the daily barrage of videos you make to get people’s attention by connecting your song to ever-changing TikTok trends. As Cannon puts it, the game is all about saturating the algorithm with content “to keep everyone’s attention spans engaged.” He emphasizes: “you’re also competing with a lot of people for attention" so you must “continually remind people” about your song. You do this “by over and over again showing them memes and reminding them to build a relationship with the song.” As it turns out, algorithms love memes.
MEME: Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He writes that a meme is a "unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation" which flourishes in human societies. Put simply, memes are infectious ideas that manifest in imitative behavior. Dawkins was particularly perplexed by why certain memetic ideas — ones that are obviously harmful to a species’s survival — persist and proliferate. Dawkins refers to memes as a sort of “mind virus.” And that’s where the notion of the internet meme takes shape. Social media platforms are the quintessential “memeplex,” a space where nonsensical content goes “viral” and spreads rapidly from person to person. (See Gen Alpha’s obsession with Brainrot). Because we spend so much of our lives on social media (the average teenager spends almost 5 hours a day scrolling), internet memes are the cultural currency of the day, the means by which one connects and communicates with others online.
So, if you’re a musician who wants to go from 0 to 1,000,000 fans, you should stop worrying and learn to love the algorithm.
In the intro of Cannon’s how-to videos, he concedes right away that this memeified-content, fire-hose strategy isn’t appealing to most artists. No shit, buddy. Art is NOT content. And nobody started writing songs because they wanted to “please the algorithm.” We started playing music and writing songs to please ourselves, to connect with others, to express the often ineffable experience of being human. We want to make art, not generate content.
Art making is an ancient, elemental, and sacred human practice that has existed since the dawn of human consciousness. It’s one of our greatest and most important inventions. We make art to inject beauty into an insufferably bleak world, so that we can turn the motley nature of being into something to behold. Novelist John Cheever was right when he said that "Art is the triumph over chaos."
From a strictly evolutionary perspective, art making doesn’t make sense for the survival of the species. Painting pictures or playing the flute doesn’t put food in your belly or help you avoid being eaten by some hungry beast (though it might get you laid). But I am not trying to be dramatic when I say frankly that music and songwriting have saved my life. Emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, our instinct to make art may be the very thing that helps us endure the trials and tribulations of being. Art does more than help us survive, it allows us to live.
Novelist Steven Pressfield put it bluntly in his book The War of Art: “To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.” He’s right! To defile your art by transmogrifying it into soulless content is to turn the sacred into the profane. And that’s what TikTok is — a space where artists are invited to sell their soul to the algorithm for the chance, the infinitesimal chance of becoming a viral meme. Fuck that, man. FUUUUUUUUUUUCK that!
