When TikTokers conquer the radio
Curation, gatekeeping, and how breakthrough artists using new channels change the game everywhere
Em Beihold is probably the voice of Gen Z.
Her song Numb Little Bug, which wryly talks about burnout and depression and the like, captures the quotidian disaffection of the generation.
In a society of medicated attempts to pave over root-and-branch problems, you can certainly see her resonance.
She’s dueted with another meanwhile rising star, Stephen Sanchez.
Sanchez, in his Until I Found You, captures the generation’s nostalgia.
It’s a great song which I immediately felt when called back to the Platters when I heard it on the radio.
Then after seeing his rock ‘n’ roll get up in the music video, my suspicions were confirmed.
I don’t follow pop radio committedly, but when I do, I always see something interesting happening.
Right now, it’s no big news that young people are finding massive success on TikTok as singers (and any number of other things, but that’s beside the point of this article).
What’s so interesting to me is the fact this new medium of TikTok is providing so much spillover into the very old medium of radio.
I’ve written before about gatekeeping in radio.
These new channels, like TikTok or internet radio, surpass gatekeeping.
I mean, one of the biggest things that internet radio has done has provided a way to livestream profanity-laced, profoundly explicit lyrics by playing music where the FCC cannot reach.
I don’t consider this to really be a win.
Our lackadaisical attitude towards smut would be a better topic for another post though.
And what these new media represent are chances to set the generation’s sound.
Naturally, if you can get your sound to the people and it resonates and defies expectations from the industry, that’s just good fun when you can drill holes and release some of the standing, stagnating water of traditional radio.
That is to say, radio doesn’t keep cloning new music based on the same old formula.
They are challenged to do something new.
I can take my kalimba, my harmonica, my lyre, and my dulcimer, and if I come up with a sound that goes viral, then the music industry has to listen.
It’s one of the wonderful ways that independent artists get to forge their own paths.
That’s the beauty of the present age — going off the beaten path is being a trailblazer.
Just think — the channel Newsy began as a cable channel.
It then became an internet channel.
And now it’s worked its way back to antenna-broadcast, becoming the first 24/7 news service that’s completely free if you put up your rabbit ears.
Personally, I feel like I’m in an interesting position.
Em Beihold is just a few months older than me.
I’m a part of the same generation as the TikTok generation — what some call digital natives — but I have spent most my life in a fairly analog way.
I’m grateful for that though, as that I think has kept me grounded.
It makes me feel much older than many in a lot of ways, but that might just be me being full of myself.
But still.
One day, when I have kids, I’m gonna point to VHS rewinder and ask them to take their best guess as to what its function was.
The whole idea of “rewinding” anything probably will become completely foreign to them.
The day I’m writing this, I heard two men in their 60s, coworkers of mine, shaking their heads because another coworker, who’s my age, didn’t know what a busy signal was.
Some my age may not even understand VHS.
This is all a departure, of course, from my point.
The spillover from new media to old media, defining the direction and content of it, isn’t limited to TikTok and radio or Newsy and antenna TV.
Can’t a YouTuber pave their own path to becoming the next Scorsese?
Here’s a list of shows that started as web series, from our list-crazed friends at ScreenRant.
But I think you catch my point.
And it’s worth looking for more examples — as they’re out there.
It’s a deeply satisfying thing to see people not only forge their own path, but then to see Jericho’s high walls fall down for them, too.
P.S. I also found this fantastic piece from Vox’s Earworm series.