The Studio: When a Song Becomes a SKU
What's in a name, anyway?
Hi friend, thank you again for being here. As I mentioned previously, The Sound portion of the newsletter will be the home for my music recs (see my last post) while The Studio is where I’ll be writing about trends in music, reviewing albums, interviewing other artists, etc. Let’s get into it.
If I asked you to think about a “TikTok song”, what features would come to mind? Easy-to-follow lyrics and a sub-three-minute timestamp? A moment of silence before a drop, to give transition time between clips? Maybe you’re not on TikTok, in which case, god bless you…
The feature that comes to my mind most is the title of the song, sung in the opening line. While established artists can save their titular moments for the chorus, those of us without label promotion can’t afford such luxuries of attention. These days, there are lots of think pieces about the “TikTokification of music”, but I think this shift in nomenclature is an unturned stone. Stick with me here.
Historically, the title of a pop song consists of a few words referencing the key concept of the chorus, which hits within the first 60 seconds. Think of Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift, or Snooze by SZA. In the past five years, however, I’ve noticed that most independent artists who break through the TikTok algorithm and achieve virality do away with this convention by singing the song’s title immediately, even if it has little relevance to the message of the song itself.
I think back to a memory in 2022 when I had the privilege of seeing an up-and-coming artist named Lizzy McAlpine at the Fillmore in Silver Spring, MD. She debuted a new song that night called Ceilings, one that’s about falling in love while being in the chokehold of your past. The chorus describes a hopeful scene of kissing in a car that is deflated by the deja vu of a movie she’s seen before. “Ceilings” is the first word of the song, which became her viral breakout hit on TikTok.
Pre-TikTok, Lizzy might have called the song “Seen Before”, as it reminds you of that final line in the chorus which acts as the climax. But a ceiling is a tangible thing, something that brings up a mental image the moment the lyrics begin. And it doubly-reminds you of the title, so you’re more likely to remember what to search for later. Kind of like a Drivers License, or a Strawberry, or a Lil Boo Thang, or a Space Girl.
By going title-first with your lyrics, you theoretically get the marketing out of the way so you can move on to the product. But these days, the marketing often is the product. You’re signaling to the listener that you’re going to keep it snappy, because you know they have other things they could be listening to. You are conscious of yourself and your competition; you know attention is a scarce resource. Whether it relates to the theme of the song or not, you are itemizing your product for the listener like a SKU at the grocery store. They don’t even have to wait 60 seconds to get there. And while the TikTok features I mentioned earlier allude to similar commercial pressures, something about a name feels personal. It is the thing you know about a song before the opening note ever hits your ears.
Does this matter? The title of the song is not the song itself; perhaps we all have to play the game a bit to cut through the noise. But for me as a listener, that musician’s creative act is now laced with a patina of SEO and brand strategy rather than the pain of the breakup they’re singing about. As an artist myself, it feels like we’re collectively moving the song’s locus of meaning from key concept to key hashtag.
I do not blame artists for wanting a viral hit; I’m releasing a new album this year and The Alrgorithm has factored into several decisions I’ve made about the track list, the number of singles, and the album art. But when I hear the title in an opening line, I can’t help but feel like we’re singing to be remembered later that day rather than mulled over for a few weeks, and corrupting ourselves in the process. As Eliza McLamb writes in her piece, “The Algorithm Killed the Radio Star”, “When the key to success is to hack an algorithm, artists are incentivized to become hacks themselves.”
As a sometimes-aspiring hack, I think it’s time for the pendulum to swing back a bit. That swing requires a cultural shift back towards long-form journalism, following the tastemakers we trust, word-of-mouth, and a slow digestion of the songs we love. When we treat music as something that exists to furnish our interior lives, we take it off the shelf and change it into something messier, bigger, and blurrier. You won’t be able to find that at Kroger.