I've Heard This Before: Initial Results on Tiktok's Impact On the Re-Popularization of Songs

TL;DR

This study investigates how TikTok influences the revival of older songs by analyzing their popularity trends on TikTok, Google Trends, and other web metrics, revealing TikTok's significant role in music re-popularization.

Contribution

First comprehensive analysis of TikTok's impact on song revival using multiple data sources and causality models, pioneering research in this area.

Findings

TikTok significantly influences song popularity trends.

There is a causal relationship between TikTok activity and Google search interest.

TikTok and Google Trends exhibit similar virality patterns in song re-popularization.

Abstract

With over a billion active users, TikTok's video-sharing service is currently one of the largest social media websites. This rise in TikTok's popularity has made the website a central platform for music discovery. In this paper, we analyze how TikTok helps to revitalize older songs. To do so, we use both the popularity of songs shared on TikTok and how the platform allows songs to propagate to other places on the Web. We analyze data from TokBoard, a website measuring such popularity over time, and Google Trends, which captures songs' overall Web search interest. Our analysis initially focuses on whether TokBoard can cause (Granger Causality) popularity on Google Trends. Next, we examine whether TikTok and Google Trends share the same virality patterns (via a Bass Model). To our knowledge, we are one of the first works to study song re-popularization via TikTok.