9.10.2020

TikTok Treats, Week Of September 7th

David Guetta Shares a New Snippet, Sada Baby Brings a Whole Lotta Choppas, and More Interesting Music Stories From the World of TikTok

The News:

TikTok levels the playing field for artistic expression. Scrolling through the app’s “For You” page, you can find the latest viral dance trend, an unreleased song by a superstar artist, and the latest deep web meme–often they’ll appear back to back. Below, find a cross-section of music songs, trends, and memes that might pop up during a prolonged scroll:

• Superstar DJ David Guetta is back on TikTok, offering a preview of his unreleased new song “Let’s Love” ft. Sia earlier this week. Offering TikTok users a preview of the emotional new anthem, Guetta made “Let’s Love” available as a sound, urging fans to use the #letslove hashtag to express the things that help them stay positive during difficult times. Videos tagged with #letslove have earned over 81 million video views in just two days, highlighting such bright spots as eating pizza at the beach, joyful dancing, and heartwarming moments with furry friends. As for Guetta himself, he feels most at peace when exercising in his home gym.

• The culmination of years’ worth of organic growth, Detroit rapper Sada Baby has a TikTok hit on his hands. Built on a sample of “Whoomp (There It Is)” by The Tag Team, “Whole Lotta Choppas” gets a boost from Sada’s verbal dexterity and his ability to thread the needle between street rap and dance rap. TikTok users have gravitated to the song’s defiant chorus, taking Sada’s advice and doing their dance (expensive pants not required) and throwing hands at anyone who’d try to stop them. Spurred by a viral dance created by @ohbukster and by @tyler_legere‘s misanthropic memes, the song is #2 on Spotify’s US Viral 50 chart and is rapidly approaches 2 million video creations on TikTok. “Whole Lotta Choppas” has reached the ears of Tyga, Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, and many others.

• Scoring viral hits is more of an art than a science, but few people have gotten the formula down like Ricky Desktop. The platform’s foremost expert on making banging beats out of unlikely sounds, the young producer’s music has soundtracked more than 6 million TikTok video creations since 2019. His flute-flavored “Dice Beat Pt. 1” (1.5 million creations) spurred a viral dance (created by @kamronagee) and took off on Mom TikTok, and his bass-boosted “Banjo Beat” (950k creations) is versatile enough to accompany vocalists from disparate genres like death metal, yodeling, and, somehow, both at once. His latest masterpiece is “Chicken Wing Beat,” which soundtracks over 2.8 million video creations, ranging from puppy videos to Colonial-era haircuts to psychedelic spin art.

• The TikTok community can create an entire universe of memes with only the slightest inspiration. Ultra Music DJ and recording artist Hazel was the beneficiary of a bizarre trend when the community got ahold of “I Love Poland (Remix)” an energetic ode to Hazel’s home country. Spearheaded by users like @poland_is_everywhere, the expert photo editors of TikTok take user requests to transform any item of graphic design into Poland’s dichromatic flag. If you look hard enough, you can find the Polish flag in TikTok comments, assorted emojis, even other flags.

• There are very few perfect songs, but those rare songs have a way of popping up again and again in the popular consciousness. One such song is’ “Super Freak,” the immaculate funk jam by Rick James. TikTok follows in the footsteps of MC Hammer, Dave Chappelle, and Little Miss Sunshine as the latest cultural force to resurrect “Super Freak.” With over 66k video creations, many coming in the past week, “Super Freak” is the soundtrack to their ironic thirst traps, and helps users imagine what TikTok would’ve been like in the 1980s.

• TikTok is a platform where aspiring and amateur musicians thrive. Videos with the #ImAMusician hashtag have more than one billion views, collecting everything from Japanese indie pop, to country covers of emo pop, to music school kids goofing around to the tune of Britney Spears, to ukelele songs about dismantling unjust systems. Meanwhile, the hashtag #MusicSaves enlists TikTok’s music community to support Save The Music, an organization dedicated to supporting music education in schools across the country, by sharing their stories about how music education improved their lives or by offering a comedic take on common situations that music educators face.

For more info, please contact:
Michelle McDevitt, Andrea Higgins, Erin Treat, Audible Treats
Leah Linder, TikTokArtist Name Background:

The Background:

TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Their mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.

TikTok has global offices including Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.

Click here to read TikTok’s progress report on supporting Black communities and promoting diversity & inclusion: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/progress-report-how-were-supporting-black-communities-and-promoting-diversity-and-inclusion

Links:

TikTok’s Newsroom: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us

Check out previous editions of TikTok Treats, a weekly newsletter about the most interesting music happenings on TikTok:
BTS Hits #1, Kendrick Plants Money Trees, and More From TikTok
Dua Lipa Levitates, J. Cole Soundtracks Glow-Ups and More TikTok Stories
TikTok: The “WAP” Dance Challenge, Folklore, La Roux, and More Provide Joy and Catharsis
Charlie Puth, Pop Smoke, and More Trending TikTok Stories
Artists Unite to Say #SaveTikTok
How TikTok Users Use the App to Boost Their Musical Careers
TikTok Doesn’t Just Mint New Hits…It Revives Old Ones
These International TikTok Artists and Hits Eliminate Language Barriers
Who’s Hot on TikTok? Jason DeRulo, Rod Wave, and More
TikTok Success = Chart Success and the Hot 100 Proves It
TikTok Users and Artists Celebrate #MyPride Through Music
TikTok Promotes a Vibrant Artistic Community with #BlackMusicMonth