As I write this, the #InMyFeelingsChallenge, which involves dancing outside of a car to Drake’s “In My Feelings,” is one of the top hashtags, but that challenge and its accompanying song will soon be replaced with another and fade into irrelevance. There are typically a few songs that reign supreme among lip-syncing videos. The “community” is shaped by these shared activities. Others are more puzzling, like pretending the floor is lava and drawing pimples on your face. Some include lip-syncing a particular line or performing a popular dance. There are “challenges” to participate in. The most prevalent and enduring technique sees users quickly alternating camera angles and miming along with sped-up tracks.
It echoes and informs their lifestyle - the abbreviated hit songs, Kylie Jenner-inspired outfits, viral dance moves - like a 24/7 teen magazine.ĭistinct styles and trends develop across the app. The platform is built to nurture the habits of today’s youth. Tik Tok’s average user falls within the 13 to 18 age range, an easily-distracted and constantly-entertained generation whose tastes, desires, and politics govern the future of social media and, for that matter, culture. Girls belly dance in full-face makeup and sports bras. Twelve-year-old boys flex their preadolescent biceps. There’s something almost perverse about these hand-held performances. You don’t even have to scroll: as soon as one clip finishes, another plays automatically. The content feed is strangely addicting, like an IV drip of effortless entertainment. An escape route, however, is harder to carve out. Tik Tok has three basic functions: watch, search, and create. Immediately upon opening the app, trending mini music videos fill your phone screen for 15-seconds to a minute at a time - an endless stream of quick, commitment-free bursts of dopamine. Tik Tok’s no-frills interface gets right to the point, almost aggressively so. These new additions could very well catch on, but they lack the engrossing effect crucial to Tik Tok’s appeal. Facebook’s “Lip-Sync Live” is exactly what it sounds like. Instagram’s “music stickers” allow users to add music to their pictures and videos.
In what seems to be an effort to attract and retain young users, Facebook and Instagram have recently announced new features that mimic Tik Tok’s model. Tik Tok’s homepage suggests a digital playground, largely made up of tween girls performing viral dance moves and mouthing lyrics to Top 40 songs. But what sets it apart is its main focus: lip-syncing. Tik Tok fits in with the increasingly visual social media landscape. By comparison, Spotify is in its tenth year and reports 180 million monthly active users.
This year, four years after its inception, Musical.ly boasted 100 million monthly active users - whose accounts have been transferred over to Tik Tok’s identical platform - reflecting growth at roughly the same pace as Instagram during its first four years. By 2015, it was already drawing in millions of global users with the US teen market as its focal point. Just last week, Tik Tok merged with another Chinese video app called Musical.ly. And if you’re over the age of 18, you’ve probably never heard of it. Its tagline, “Make every second count,” is like “Do it for the Vine” for the “wellness” era. The Chinese app Tik Tok serves largely the same purpose that Vine fulfilled until its closure in 2016. You’d hear people shout it from behind their phone cameras as they filmed their friends dancing, planking in public, or blowing huge vape clouds.
“Do it for the Vine” was the unofficial slogan of the now-defunct, once wildly popular short-form video app Vine.
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