Elsewhere, indie band Mother Mother landed on the Rolling Stone Artist 500 and Breakthrough 25 charts despite not releasing music in over two years, when alt-TikTok videos about personal identity popularized three songs off the band’s 2008 album O My Heart. The song surfaced at Number Two on the Rolling Stone 100 chart off of a wave of Ocean Spray, reentering commercial charts for the first time in over 40 years. In the latter half of 2020, TikTok has revitalized old hits at a rapid-fire clip.įleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” is the most well-known case. The app’s music team has made good on their word. There’s a whole treasure chest of these earworms that I grew up with that you can see now are having a second life.” no “There’s so much opportunity out there for all these legacy labels, even for songs that are out of cycle to have another life. “Catalog is my bread and butter,” says Danny Gillick, TikTok’s senior manager of music content and label partnerships. The same abrupt re-explosion happened with L’Trimm’s 1988 “Cars With the Boom,” and of course with Lizzo’s 2017 “Truth Hurts.” In the early weeks of Covid-19 quarantine, Simple Plan’s “I’m Just a Kid” suddenly powered its way to a platinum certification 15 years after its debut when it was used in a huge TikTok Trend.
Corey Sheridan, TikTok’s head of music partnerships and content operations, told Rolling Stone in May that he saw music catalogs as the next major untapped market that the app could feed into its hit machine.