Content uploaded by Benjamin Toscher
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Benjamin Toscher on May 14, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
International Journal of Music Business Research
* E-mail: Benjamin.toscher@ntnu.no
Research Article
Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Benjamin Toscher*
Resource Integration, Value Co-Creation, and
Service-dominant Logic in Music Marketing:
TheCase of the TikTok Platform
International Journal of Music Business Research • xx • 2021
DOI: 10.2478/ijmbr-2021-0002
1
Received February 4, 2020; Accepted November 3, 2020
Keywords: music industry • co-creation • resource integration • platform • music marketing • service-dominant logic
© De Gruyter Open Sp. z o.o.
Abstract: It is a fact that the past research has explored service-dominant logic (S-D logic) and value co-creation in music marketing (Choi &
Burnes 2013; Gamble & Gilmorex 2013; Gamble 2018; Saragih 2019), yet a key aspect of S-D logic, namely resource integration, is
an unexplored territory and a promising phenomenon of study. A scattering of evidence demonstrates how actors, whether individuals
or organisations, in the music industry are making value propositions and providing operand resources to users of platforms (Poell,
Nieborg, & Van Dijck 2019), which may result in resource integration and commercial success at a quick pace and on a global scale.
Using secondary data in an archival research approach (Welch 2000), this paper examines TikTok, a rapidly growing platform where
users integrate short (e.g., under 15 s) clips of commercial music into user generated video content in which users dance to, lip-sync
with, accept social challenges, integrate hashtags and create memes based on musical content. Further, there is a discussion on
evidence about how music is being used by actors on TikTok in order to argue that (a) S-D logic (Vargo & Lusch 2016) is an insightful
perspective through which one is able to understand music marketing; (b) music providers essentially make value propositions with
their music that other actors, such as music consumers, can integrate into their lives through platforms like TikTok; (c) changes in
technology affect such resource integration and how actors in the music industry can adapt to such change; (d) value-in-social-context
(Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber 2010) is a driver of resource integration by users on the platform; and (e) this example of value created
by users on TikTok is just one example of the many types of value which guide action and interaction on today’s music platforms. The
discussion and analysis is concluded with several implications for research and practice.
1. Introduction
Consider the moving hip. Consider two moving hips, and two pairs of feet dancing together to the same rhythm.
Consider the conversation. “This band is great, have you seen them play before?” asks Dan. “Yeah, I love going to
their shows!” she answers. Then she reaches her hand out towards Dan. “Hi, I’m Tiffany.” Now consider this: musicians
don’t produce goods; they provide a service. They create and market experiences. And the value they deliver to people
from these experiences? Well, consider then this: after saying hello to each other, and dancing with each other, Tiffany
and Dan started dating. And then they fell in love. And then they got married. You can imagine what comes next.
I am not saying that the fundamental service of musicians and music is matchmaking. But in the story of Tiffany
and Dan, the opportunity to connect with another human being using a common interest, a common song, a
common concert, and a shared emotional experience is clearly a value proposition offered by music providers. And
in the service ecosystem of music and musical concerts, a romantic relationship is just one example of the types of
value users can co-create and attain.
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
Here, I argue that S-D logic (Ballantyne & Varey 2008; Vargo & Lusch, 2016) is an appropriate perspective
through which one can understand marketing in the music industry. I examine empirical evidence of resource
integration and value co-creation (Vargo & Lusch 2017) on the TikTok platform, a rapidly growing platform in which
users generate short videos in which they dance to, lip-sync with, and create memes based on short (15 to 30 s)
clips of songs. I discuss how both music providers and users interact on the platform in order to demonstrate that
(a) the theoretical lens of S-D logic is useful in understanding music marketing; (b) with their music, music providers
can be considered to be making value propositions to other actors, such as music consumers, who then integrate
musical resources into their lives through platforms like TikTok; (c) changes in technology affect such resource
integration and how actors, whether individuals or organisations, in the music industry can adapt to such change;
(d) value-in-social-context (Edvardsson, Tronvoll & Gruber 2010) is a driver of resource integration by users on the
platform; and (e) this example of value created by users on TikTok is just one example of the many types of value
which guide action and interaction on today’s music platforms.
The paper is organised as follows. First, I review the relevant literature on S-D logic, resource integration,
social media platforms, and the music industry to demonstrate why this study is particularly interesting. Second,
I present my methodology and approach. Third, I present the case of TikTok, illustrating how users, producers and
music marketers integrate resources, co-create, and derive value-in-social-context on the TikTok platform. This
follows with evidence of actors in the music industry whom are using a strategic S-D logic approach early on in
the production stages to take advantage of the co-creation and resource integration opportunities afforded by the
platform as they engage in a “logic of human exchange” (Vargo & Lusch 2014: 102). I conclude with implications
for both practitioners in the music industry as well as for future research, such as what role the platforms, through
a process of platformisation (Poell, Nieborg, & Van Dijck 2019), may have in affecting these value co-creation and
resource integration processes.
2. Background Literature
2.1 Service-dominant Logic and Resource Integration
Internet platform companies (e.g., AirBnB) are actors performing innovative activities that involve the reconguration
of resources and the integration of such resources within service ecosystems (Koskela-Huotari et al. 2016). Note
that actors is a term used to describe either the individuals or organisations which engage in some form of “human
exchange systems” here and also in the S-D logic literature (Lusch & Vargo 2014: 102). Within service ecosystems,
which are dened as “relatively self-contained, self-adjusting system[s] of mostly loosely coupled social and
economic (resource-integrating) actors connected by shared institutional logics and mutual value creation through
service exchange” (Lusch & Nambisan 2015: 161), the behaviour of actors has been theoretically and empirically
articulated using the perspective of S-D logic (Vargo & Lusch 2004). Under the perspective of S-D logic, value is
a “core organising principle” in which “actors are thus joined because of mutual value co-creation efforts, and the
actors together constitute a self-adjusting, self-contained service ecosystem” (Meynhardt, Chandler & Strathoff
2016: 2982). Platforms, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, are types of internet platform companies in which
actors “become resource integrators and co-creators of value in social contexts” (Letaifa, Edvarsson & Tronvoll
2016: 1937). Considering that information and communication technology are viewed as integral parts of service
ecosystems as both drivers and outcomes of the resource-integration processes undertaken by actors (Vargo &
Lusch 2008; Letaifa, Edvarsson & Tronvoll 2016), one begins to wonder exactly how technological change within
any given industry is related to changing resource integration processes.
Festa, Cuomo and Metallo (2019) show how actors in the Italian wine sector currently using S-D logic and could
use S-D logic approaches based on the evolution of electronic commerce technology and that “a strong orientation
towards value co-creation through S-D logic seems necessary and fruitful” (p. 481) to overcome challenges and
realise new opportunities in an electronic commerce market dominated by competing on price alone. Dahl, Milne
& Peltier (2019) argue in their investigation of the health service sector that advances in technology are moving
health service towards a S-D approach “driven in part by the emergence of the internet and new omni-channel
communication platforms that increase consumers’ informational access and empower their decision-making
outside of the service encounter” (p. 2). Consumers’ search for health information (which has been facilitated
by advances in technology) is a critical value co-creation activity. The other research examines how changes in
information technology have affected and enabled the resource integration capabilities of actors as they create
2
B. Toscher
user generated digital content in a process of co-opting brands (across many industries) to form their identities
(Halliday 2014). Although several researchers use the S-D logic perspective to explore the empirical context of the
music industry, past efforts fall short of capturing and detailing how technological change, in particular platforms, are
shaping resource integration and value propositions by marketers in the music industry.
The historical review of marketing in the music industry done by Ogden, Ogden and Long (2011) provide a
record of evidence demonstrating how technological changes have affected marketing practices in the industry—
whether it was Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph, the subsequent creation of the gramophone,
the emergence of broadcast radio, the beginning of the cassette and compact disc era, or the disruption of
the Internet and MP3 le sharing services such as Napster. And while the authors ultimately introduce the
concept of S-D logic and argue that it is applicable to the music industry, using examples of co-creative activities
and approaches taken by artists such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, the timing of their writing may have
precluded them from making more articulate arguments about exactly how S-D logic is applicable to the music
industry and how technology affects resource integration and value propositions. Choi and Burnes (2013) build
upon Ogden, Ogden & Long’s argument and describe internet-enabled value co-creation activities in the music
industry and use S-D logic to build a counter-argument to the music industry actors who viewed the technological
disruption of the internet as a threat to their business model due to the prevalence of piracy and free le sharing
on the internet. Choi and Burnes provide brief examples of music providers who co-create value with their
fans over the internet through socialisation and interaction (like artist John Prine), free dissemination of music
(under the so-called Swedish Model), and facilitation of fan-funded music production through the example of
crowdfunding platform ArtistShare. Yet, their examination is arguably supercial and it fails to adequately either
study the behavioural mechanics of resource integration (which would illustrate how actors actually co-create
value together) or addresses the platforms which the internet has created in its wake. Studies performed after
Ogden, Ogden, & Long’s review provide further evidence of how subsequent changes in technology affected
the music industry. It is observed that the distribution of music industry revenues (Wlömert & Papies 2016) are
impacted by the emergence of streaming service technology, and the proliferation of streaming platforms has
been found to affect how artists and their songs achieve “stardom” and “blockbuster” success on the music charts
(Ordanini & Nunes 2016). Gamble (2018) provides a thorough and rigorous empirical study of technology and
internet mediated co-production between end-consumers and music producers, and explicitly differentiated such
co-productive activity from value co-creative activity, leaving this latter activity unexplored and outside the scope
of their research. Gamble thus falls short of making a broader contribution to our understanding of S-D logic in
various empirical contexts.
Gamble and Gilmore (2013) also describe how the technological driver of the internet is fundamentally changing
marketing in the music industry and perform a literature review of the marketing literature to provide a compelling
argument why the music industry should embrace S-D logic. While they provide a typology of co-creational
marketing practices and empirical examples of how these examples are implemented in the music industry (through
platforms such as YouTube), they fail to mention resource integration or provide an in-depth examination of how all
actors (including consumers of music, producers of music and platforms like YouTube) are benetting and attaining
higher value from co-creative activity. Given that to S-D logic value is always created by multiple actors (Vargo &
Lusch 2016), a more thorough examination that includes the perspectives of all actors while looking at a single
co-creational marketing practice, may provide more valuable theoretical and practical insight.
Finally, Saragih’s (2019) systematic literature review, which is perhaps the most comprehensive overview of
S-D logic and co-creative activities in the music industry to date, nds that co-creation has been used in all phases
of the music industry value chain, whether they are festival producers, independent musicians, talent agencies,
DJs, or software developers. Saragih uses a large body of evidence to illustrate the prevalence of the S-D logic
amongst music industry actors. But since the concepts of resource integration and value propositions are absent in
the review, Saragih effectively demonstrates that these aspects of S-D logic are largely untreated in the literature
examining the music industry. Nonetheless, Saragih provides several interesting suggestions for future research, all
of which aligns with this study and provide additional justication for its necessity. Identifying gaps in literature which
examines the music industry using an S-D logic approach, Saragih argues that:
“rst, future research can address more detailed elaboration regarding how co-creational strategies are employed to leverage
social and monetary focus…second, future studies can also focus on how various co-creational strategies are employed in
the distribution stage, due to the fact that there has not been much discussion in this eld… third, future studies shall address
3
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
how the actors in development and distribution stages co-create value to achieve social objectives as these two particular areas
have not been discussed by previous scholars”
(Saragih 2019: 473)
Thus, this study attempts to the following research questions: how are actors in the music industry employing
co-creational strategies in the distribution of their music? How does resource integration occur under such
strategies? How do actors make value propositions under such strategies? In order to answer these questions
and explore several core aspects of S-D logic (resource integration on platforms and value propositions) which
are neglected by past literature, I examine TikTok, a rapidly growing platform with a reported monthly active user
base of 500 million people who integrate short (15–30 s) clips of commercial music to make short videos in which
they dance to, lip-sync with, accept social challenges, integrate hashtags and create memes based on musical
content. By describing evidence of resource integration and co-creational activities on the TikTok platform, I provide
a more detailed elaboration of how co-creational strategies are being used to leverage both the social and monetary
interests of actors, how such strategies are being employed in the distribution stage of music, how technology
continues to affect how actors in the music industry do approach marketing through S-D logic, and the various types
of value creation which guides interaction on contemporary music platforms.
3. Method and Research Design
3.1 Case Study Using Archival and Secondary Data
A study of an individual empirical case can be a valuable way to make a conceptual contribution by showing readers
how the concept may be applied in other empirical settings (Siggelkow 2007). Here, the empirical case is the TikTok
platform, and the broad concept of interest is S-D logic. Research strategies which use a case have been described
as “analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions, or other systems that are studied
holistically by one or more methods. The case that is the subject of the inquiry will be an instance of a class of
phenomena that provides an analytical frame—an object—within which the study is conducted and which the case
illuminates and explicates” (Thomas 2011: 513). In this paper, the subject under study is the TikTok platform and the
analytical frame (or the object, to use Thomas’s terminology) is the perspective of S-D logic (Vargo & Lusch 2004).
The TikTok platform has been chosen as the subject of study since it is a clear example of S-D logic being used as
a strategy in music marketing in order to create value and also it will be demonstrated later.
The data used in this study to describe TikTok and the behaviour of actors on the TikTok platform is archival and is
based on secondary data. This approach may be characterised as desk research or secondary research (Stewart &
Kamins 1993), which is chosen for several reasons. First, by means of gathering existing data and knowledge about
newly emerging phenomena, secondary research may be viewed as an effective strategy for dening subsequent
primary research questions for subsequent studies, especially when existing theoretical perspectives—such as
S-D logic—may be used in applied research, as in this study (Stewart & Kamins 1993). Second, it has been
suggested that there are multiple sources and types of evidence which are appropriate when using a case study
approach (Yin 1994), including archival data such as press or other secondary articles (Gibbert Ruigrok & Wicki
2008). Press and newspaper articles, including interview content conducted therein, may be a useful resource for
research while providing a timely description of empirical phenomena in business (Cowton 1998). Third, while many
of the objections to the qualitative analysis of secondary interview data relate to condentiality or ethical concerns
(Medjedović 2011), the interview data and direct quotes from music industry actors used in this study have been
published and made publicly available, which would negate any concerns about condentiality of such data. Fourth,
while this study uses music industry chart data and metrics from TikTok to demonstrate the extent of value creation
and resource integration occurring on the platform, secondary data available in the press archives is used as they
are relevant information on the research topic and that such use “gains benets…answering[ing] a newly formed
research question, smooth[ing] the pilot stage of a project, or provid[ing] the researcher with a wider sample base
for testing interpretation at far less cost and greater speed” (Hox & Boeije 2005: 594). Finally, much of the data
derived from secondary sources such as the numbers of videos created, views of those videos, or songs’musicians
on industry charts are actual and historical, allowing for their verication. This data reveal explicitly how actors are
integrating resources and creating and responding to value propositions on TikTok. Further, in the instances where
there may be an incentive for those being interviewed in press articles (such as musical artists or music managers)
4
B. Toscher
to misrepresent the degree of intentionality behind their actions on the TikTok platform, one must maintain a degree
of scepticism towards these actors’ after the fact knowledge of how effective an S-D logic approach on the platform
may have been before they tried it. In such a case, these actors may have some sort of reputational incentive to
appear, in the eyes of other industry actors or the public, as knowledgeable or particularly skilled in distributing their
music to a large audience and achieving commercial results. It is possible that press articles may be part of their
own strategic content creation. Despite this, the data and statistics presented later should show how music is being
integrated as a resource by users on the TikTok platform in a process which co-creates value for multiple actors, and
this is a process which is appropriately explained by the theoretical lens of S-D logic. Regardless, I articulate and
argue that whether or not these artists started with an intentional strategy to use S-D logic on the TikTok platform,
the evidence demonstrates that resource integration and response to value propositions are actually occurring on
the platform.
4. The Case: The TikTok Platform
TikTok, also known as “Douyin” in China, is a social media platform which been downloaded over 1.5 billion times
as of 14 November 2019 and has an estimated global monthly active user base of 500 million TikTok users (“users”)
across 150 countries (Lu & Lu 2019; Sensor Tower 2019). Some data show that users of the platform are largely in
their teens and 20s, and that 41 percent of users are between the ages of 16–24 (Inuencer Marketing Hub 2019).
Others estimate that 50 to 60 percent of users are between the ages of 13 and 24 (Ke 2018). In the TikTok app,
users generate short video content by integrating short clips (15 s or less) of popular music. Given that “music is
known to be important in the social and personal lives of adolescents and as such many researchers have examined
the role music has played in satisfying particular emotional needs (strategies for coping), social needs (belonging
and identity) and developmental needs (the socialisation ‘journey’)” (Nuttall 2008: 401), it may not be surprising that
TikTok is so popular with this young demographic. The music on TikTok is created by musicians, music producers,
music promoters, record labels and other music industry actors to a large extent (collectively referred to hereafter
as “music providers”) and uploaded on the platform for the purposes of being integrated by users in user generated
video content. The benets of this integration are numerous for all actors, which I discuss later. While it may be
benecial for readers who are unfamiliar with the platform and its content to immediately go to the platform and view
an example video to understand how users integrate music into their video content (https://www.tiktok.com/trending
may be a place to start), and throughout this article I will do my best to describe exactly how users co-create and
respond to music providers’ value propositions (Chandler & Lusch 2015) by integrating music resources into their
videos through several means, including dances, challenges, lipsyncs and memes.
There are arguably a conuence of technological factors that have enabled the possibility of growth as well as
driven the growth of TikTok. These factors include the individual processing power of smart phones, the widespread
availability of high speed mobile internet, advances in software programming, articial intelligence and user-friendly
rapid video editing, and improved technical accessibility to online music catalogues. It is important to acknowledge
that the starting of TikTok would not have been possible in 2009, and probably not even in 2014.
4.1 Co-Creative Activities and Resource Integration on TikTok
First, it is important to note that ByteDance Ltd, the owner and operator of the TikTok platform, is the actor responsible
for designing and deploying various instruments on the platform (such as the algorithms, user interfaces, technological
features and policies). This may mean that ByteDance Ltd. wields considerable power compared to other actors
on the platform. These instruments govern how both users and music providers can and do act and interact with
each other on the platform, including enabling and constraining their action. ByteDance Ltd., in turn, has to comply
with the legal, political and regulatory regimes in which it operates. This is in addition to its relationships with its
shareholders and stakeholders. This aspect of and inuence of governance has received increasing amounts of
attention in the literature on platforms (Gorwa 2019; Poell, Nieborg, & Van Dijck 2019), and while it is not the focus
of this study, the role of platforms (and governance) in service ecosystems perhaps merits its own dedicated study.
On TikTok, songs can be considered operand resources—meaning a resource on which an action or operation
is performed—and the users are operant resources—meaning resources which act on other operand resources
(Constantin & Lusch 1994). Actually, the bottom line is, users co-create with music providers by means of creating
video content. The resources that users integrate are the music providers’ music (including the music’s lyrical,
5
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
rhythmic, melodic, or other musical attributes). TikTok can be viewed as the institution, or the “humanly devised
rules, norms, and beliefs that enable and constrain action” (Vargo & Lusch 2016: 11), which coordinates the actions
of these actors. ByteDance Ltd, has reportedly received a market valuation of $75 billion USD as of 29 October
2019 (Chen, Wang, & Baigorri 2019), making TikTok arguably the biggest beneciary of nancial value in what
I characterise as TikTok’s service ecosystem. However, under the lens of S-D logic (Vargo & Lusch 2008), I claim
that all actors on TikTok co-create value and that this value is being determined by each beneciary. Further, all the
actors on TikTok benet from this co-creative activity. I now provide evidence as to why I believe this is being the
case, and the Figure 1 displays the process of value co-creation on TikTok.
4.2 How Music Providers Create and Make Value Propositions on TikTok
Value propositions have been dened as “invitations from actors to one another to engage in service… a value
proposition invites actors to serve one another in order to attain value, whether it is economic, nancial, or social value
or some combination of these” (Chandler & Lusch 2015: 6). On TikTok, music providers make value propositions
to users through their music. In turn, users respond to music providers’ value propositions by integrating their
music into videos, and this integration can occur in a large number of combinations which is mainly limited by
user creativity and the features and functionality offered by the TikTok app. However, to concretely understand the
mechanics of accepting these value propositions and the implications they have for music providers, I now describe
the four main ways by which users integrate these value propositions: dances, lipsyncs, challenges and memes.
4.2.1 Dances
Many users on TikTok co-create with music producers by embodying their music through dance. Given that music
and dance are “historically interdependent developments” (Mitchell & Gallaher 2001: 65) with a “logical association…
as temporally organized art forms” (Lewis 1988: 129), it may not be a surprise that one of the more popular ways to
integrate musical resources in a user’s video is dance. Often these dances are informed by and choreographed to
the lyrical and rhythmic content of the music. Take, for instance, the song Hot Shower feat. MadeinTYO & DaBaby
by Chance the Rapper (real name Chancelor Jonathan Bennett). Since publicly released on 26 July 2019, this
song has been used in approximately 4 million user generated videos on TikTok, because perhaps its rhythmic and
lyrical features lend itself to imaginative and co-creative dance activities. The 34 s clip of the song almost opens
immediately with the highly visual lyric “I got muscles like Superman’s trainer” (Genius 2019). Users commonly
integrate this lyric by curling their arms and exing their muscles and then moving through a series of choreographed
Service
metsysocE
Resource
Integration
Figure 1. The process of value co-creation on TikTok.
6
B. Toscher
movements to the song’s beat. In the next stanza of the song, Chance the Rapper sings that he “jump stomp stomp
on Lucifer, Satan,” with a hard oor drum thumping simultaneously as he says “jump stomp stomp.” The result?
Many users either stomp, kick, or shake their feet in synchronisation with this lyric and the accompanying thump
of the drum beat. A good example of this is a video posted by @BaronBootBoys, which appear to be a group
from the United States Airforce Academy (@BaronBootBoys 2019). Their integration of Chance the Rapper’s song
which features the above-mentioned dance moves has resulted in 18.4 million views, 3.4 million likes, and 14,300
comments on TikTok from the day 30 October 2019 they have created it. But perhaps more intriguing than the
amount of attention Chance the Rapper’s song has received just from this one video alone (with the video running
at about 15 s, one could estimate the song has been heard for a duration of 15 s x 18.4 million views, or 76,667 h
from this single @BaronBootBoys video, which is just one of the 4 million videos which the song has been used
in)—is that geographically dispersed groups of people from all over the world are all dancing together to this
song, whether it may be the members of the United States Air force Academy like the @BaronBootBoys or the
Rybka Twins or a pair of Australian identical twin sisters who are gymnasts (@rybkatwinsofcial 2019). Interestingly,
evidence from biomusicology and evolutionary psychology suggests that music and dance may have some of its
evolutionary origins as a coalition signalling system (Hagen and Bryant 2003). And while I do not suggest that the
@BaronBootBoys are intentionally signalling their coalition to those Australian gymnasts down in the southern
hemisphere, I do begin to wonder what collection of ephemeral yet forever-digital, cyber, global, dance-based tribal
coalitions are emerging across the world through a song like Hot Shower and the type of basic, human evolutionary
drives that fuel them. This is something for music marketers to consider.
4.2.2 Lip-syncs
Many users on TikTok make videos of themselves lip-syncing to music. In this circumstance, the value proposition
music providers propose to users is the lyrics and the melody, but also the opportunity to pretend like they are
singing the words which are being sung. This could be interpreted as an opportunity for such a user to identify with
or express feelings from the lyrical content itself. Interestingly, in Fischer’s (2016) analysis of popular rock lyrics,
they propose the possibility that a central activity of music audiences is the mental appropriation of lyrical content
(Fischer 2016). Framing songwriters and music providers as “thoughtwriters…[who] compose texts for others to use
in expressing their thoughts (feelings, attitudes)” (Walton 2011: 455), lyrics have become a clear value proposition
which a music provider offers a user on TikTok as users lip-sync lyrics to generate participatory (Lashley 2012)
content and share with their social network on the platform. While the observation that a global base of users
are lip-syncing to music from around the world is not new with TikTok, and it has been reported on YouTube also
(Lashley 2012),but the ease of making such content and the level of integration into the apps core functionality is
novel. Indeed, some have called TikTok “the Chinese lip-syncing app taking over America,” alluding to the popularity
of this core functionality (O’Neil 2018).
4.2.3 Challenges
The other way that music providers (and also users) on TikTok create value propositions is through issuing social
challenges. These challenges, which are often linked with a #hashtag, serve as a prompting mechanism which
initiates users to generate content and also as an organisational mechanism for the platform to organise related
content and maintain the “conversation” on TikTok. A rather famous example of a challenge is the #yeehaw
challenge issued by Atlanta, Georgia artist Lil Nas X. After uploading his track Old Town Road to TikTok and
challenging users to “drink ‘Yee Yee Juice’ and change into western garb in time for the song’s drop” (Shafer 2019),
“millions of video creators used the song as a soundtrack to transform themselves into cowboys and cowgirls…
[v]ideos [use the] hashtag #yeehaw, almost all of which sample Old Town Road” (Chow 2019). As of 6 December
2019, there are over 207.1 million views of videos on TikTok which used the #yeehaw hashtag. But besides serving
as a spark of creative inspiration, why else do users create value from these challenges and integrate them
into their content? The well-studied Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association’s Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014, in
which millions of people made videos of themselves pouring buckets of ice water over their bodies and issuing
a challenge to someone else on the platform to do the same, reveals that “people are almost certainly hoping to
achieve some sort of social currency” (Pressgrove, McKeever & Jang 2018: 5) by socially sharing and participating
in the challenge, and that high-arousal positive emotions were present in such viral sharing. Also, it may not be
a surprise that such social media challenges have also been explored using theories of social capital (McGloin &
Oeldorf-Hirsch 2018).
7
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
4.2.4 Memes
A challenge may be considered a type of meme. On TikTok, these memes are a popular way through which users
respond to value propositions and integrate resources on the platform. Internet memes can be dened as “a unit
of information (idea, concept or belief), which replicates by passing on via Internet (e-mail, chat, forum, social
networks, etc.) in the shape of a hyper-link, video, image, or phrase… it can be passed on as an exact copy or
can change and evolve” (Diaz 2013: 94). While the concept of a meme has its roots in biology, Darwinian thought,
and genetics (Dawkins 1976), viewing the cultural transmission of internet ideas as being rooted purely in biology
has been the subject of signicant debate (Shifman 2013). Shifman (2013) makes an important contribution to
understanding internet memes as units of purely cultural and social transmission that do not necessarily have a
biological explanation, and provides a useful typology for analysing memes based on the dimensions of content
(the ideas/ideology of a message), form (the physical formulation of the message) and stance (information about
the communicator relative to the message) (Shifman 2013). While Shifman’s typology may somewhat blur the line
between what differentiates a meme and a challenge on TikTok, there are other examples of memes whose form
is not a challenge but whose content is clearly transmitted and replicated amongst users. The “mirror move” meme
on TikTok which uses Absofacto’s song “Dissolve” is one example of how memes become popular and spread on
TikTok. “New Flesh,” a song released by Current Joys in January 2013 is an example of an old song being given
a new life on TikTok largely owed to its usage in meme-making (TikTok 2019). The song, which has a nostalgic
mood and sound reminiscent of 1980s new-wave rock, opens with the lyrics “I listened to the Cure… I watched
the Videodrome,” is used in videos in which users put on vintage clothes, often from the 1980s, hairstyles, and
dance moves all in an apparent allusion to the song’s own references to the 1980s and the decade’s characteristic
synthesiser rich new-wave sound (Genius 2019). The song and this “generational time-warp” meme have been
used in over 105,000 TikTok videos.
4.3. How Users Benet and Attain Value from Co-creative Activity on TikTok
One may infer that users on TikTok are motivated by creation and receiving of values, and that these values are
coordinated by the institution (TikTok). TikTok shares many similar features with other large platforms like Facebook,
Instagram and Snapchat, such as the ability to follow users, comment on content, or like/heart a piece of content—
and these features play a prominent role in how users create and derive value-in-social-context (Edvardsson,
Tronvoll, & Gruber 2010). Other research describes the ways in which users of social media derive and benet
from value-in-social-context. Eranti and Lonkila (2015) nd that the Facebook like button has been used to regulate
conversations, develop and maintain social relationships, signal acknowledgement of other users’ content, and to
build and/or maintain face with others. Oh and Syn (2015) found that social media use is motivated by reciprocity,
personal gain, altruism and social engagement. Nadkarni and Hofman (2012) performed a literature review and
found that Facebook use is predominantly motived by the need to belong and the need for self-presentation. Again,
considering Nuttall’s (2008) view concerning the importance of music in the lives of adolescents, one can begin to
imagine how the younger demographic on TikTok benets from co-creative activity. In addition to using social media
for the purposes of satisfying these social-psychological needs, other evidence indicates that value generated from
social media use may also have a deeper neurobiological basis in the human brain (Montag 2019). The same brain
regions involved in “ofine” social reward processing activities, such as giving and receiving positive feedback,
are also likely involved in “online” social media use where users are involved in a steady ow of social-reward
activities (Meshi, Tamir & Heekeren 2015). Cognitive neuroscientist Evaline Crone and media psychologist Elly
Konjin argue that “social reward sensitivity may be a strong reinforcer in social media use” (Crone & Konjin 2018:
4), by pointing to evidence from a study which examined the ventral striatum region of the brain, a region which is
“at the crossroads of neural networks that treat various aspects of reward processes and motivation” (Tremblay,
Worbe & Hollerman 2009: 55). Using functional neuroimaging, this study nds that activity in this brain region
“across participants, when responding to gains in reputation for the self, relative to observing gains for others,
reward-related activity in the left nucleus accumbens [a part of the ventral striatum] predicts Facebook use” (Meshi,
Morawetz & Heekeren 2015: 1).
4.3.1 Users as
“Inuencer”
businesses
Value creation on the social media platforms is not limited to that of the social, psychological, or neurobiological
type. Social media platforms generate and represent signicant economic activity. The market capitalisation of
Facebook was $566.67 billion USD as of 4 December 2019. Snapchat had a market capitalisation of $21billion
8
B. Toscher
USD on the same date. Users with followers on these platforms have built their businesses providing marketers
with access to their audience; it has been estimated that in 2018, advertisers spent $1.6 billion USD on messages
disseminated through these so-called inuencers on Instagram alone, with the inuencer marketing industry
growing to $5–10 billion USD by 2020 (Mediakix 2018). These inuencers essentially operate as business people
who document their lives in exchange for money, and are considered to be “sellers, buyers, and commodities; they
consume products and services; promote products and services; and sell themselves as a brand to be consumed
by audiences” (Stoldt et al. 2019: 2). In this sense, inuencers on the platform and musicians operate in an opaque,
yet arguably business to business service-exchange in which all actors benet; musicians provide the operand
resources (music) to these actors (inuencers) who use their own operant resources (knowledge and skills) to
create video content, which is enabled by the institutional platform (TikTok) and its institutional arrangements.
Such inuencers are incentivised to create videos that engage their audience, generate viral activity such as
likes or shares and increase their social presence (Rice 1993) among their audience. If the inuencers are
capable of building a level of trustworthiness and credibility with their audience, then they can, in theory, engage
in marketing activities which are more effective than traditional celebrity endorsements (Jin, Muqaddam & Ryu
2019). These types of inuencers will get the attention of marketers who may wish to use inuencers as part of a
social media marketing campaign. The result is a service ecosystem with “a conguration of people, technologies,
and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value” (Maglio et al. 2009: 395),
where technologies may be equivocated with the institution that has been previously discussed (Vargo & Lusch
2016). Coarsely speaking, this service-exchange may be distilled to the following: music providers and marketers
benet by increasing the reach and exposure of their music; business-motivated inuencers benet by creating
engaging content or exploiting trending memes or songs on TikTok; TikTok benets by keeping users on its platform
and delivering on its business model; and third-party marketers benet by reaching their target audience through
inuencers. This process is represented in Figure 1.
Further, music providers are actors on the platform who benet from nancial, attentional and publicity value.
I now present several anecdotes of music providers who have been beneciaries of resource integration on the
platform.
4.4 How Music Providers Benet and Attain Value from Co-Creative Activity on TikTok
Stunna Girl is a 21 year-old rapper from Sacramento, California, who released a single called Runway on
22 February 2019 (Genius 2019). But it was not until late July of 2019 that she rapidly rose to stardom when,
unknown to her, users on TikTok began using a clip of her song. The song seemed to be optimised for integration
into TikTok users’ content. Runway opens with a string of lyrics streamlined to a beat drop that goes “b*tch, I
look like I’m fresh off the runway (uh), b*itch, I go crazy the dumb way (uh), b*tches wanna be me, one day.” The
#runwaychalleng, which uses the song, reportedly emerged virally on the platform and has over 18.6 million views
as of 6 December 2019. The popularity of the challenge could be due to the lyrics connoting a strong sense of
self-esteem that resonates with the young demographic of TikTok users, and that these users feel that they are
empowered by both the words and the video content they make with them. Videos typically feature users condently
showing off their bodies like a model strutting on a runway. As a consequence, an 11 sclip of Runway had been used
in over 3.3 million videos on TikTok as of 3 September 2019 (Strapagiel 2019). The #runwaychallenge purportedly
helped to propel the song to the top ve of Spotify’s US viral 50 chart on 31 July 2019, and remained there till 28
August 2019 (Genius 2019) and on that same day Stunna Girl reported that she signed a million dollar deal with
Capital Music Group (Locker 2019).
Whether or not Stunna Girl’s strategy was to optimise her music for TikTok (it has been reported that she did not
even know the platform existed before the song went viral), established rms in the music industry such as Capital
Music Group seem to be aware of the platform’s ability to create stars (Locker 2019). Devain Doolaramani manages
content creators on TikTok, such as @thebaileybaker, a bakery which makes cookie decoration videos, and claims
to get “10 to 15 inquiries a day from artists and labels wanting to pay us to use their song” (Leight 2019). It has been
reported that:
“…record labels approach Doolaramani with requests for his clients to make videos that use their artist’s tracks. Sometimes
the labels just want him to enhance a trend that already exists, but other times they ask him to make the whole thing up
from scratch. His biggest success came from the former. Someone had created a lyric prank video using [the artist] Russ’
9
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
[song] “Civil War” several weeks prior to Doolaramani starting his campaign. ‘So we decided to jump on that idea and it
ended up absolutely tearing it up,’ [Doolaramani] remembers. There were around 340,000 videos made on TikTok, he
reveals, and the challenge spread to Instagram and Twitter. The impact was immediate. Streams on the song, a month old
at the start of the campaign, shot up from 20 million to around 48 million. And many YouTube comments referred to the
prank videos.”
(Setaro 2019)
4.4.1. Rapid and global audiences
Possibly the most notable example of TikTok’s apparent role in catapulting musicians to sudden fame and large
audiences is the previously mentioned rap/country artist Lil Nas X and his song Old Town Road. The 19 year-old
college dropout from Atlanta, Georgia (real name Montero Lamar Hill), signed a record deal with Columbia in March
2019 after “an intense bidding war” (Chow 2019). A possible reason why? If you recall his #yeehaw challenge, which
“spark[ed] a meme in which creators drink ‘Yee Yee Juice’ and change into western garb in time for the song’s drop”
(Shafer 2019), there have been “millions of video creators us[ing] [Old Town Road] as a soundtrack to transform
themselves into cowboys and cowgirls” (Chow 2019). As of 6 December 2019, there are over 207.1 million views
of videos on TikTok which use the #yeehaw hashtag, 116.5 million views of videos which use #lilnasx and 4.6
million videos which directly use the sound clip of the song in the video. But Hill seemed to be aware of the value
proposition inherent in his song, even if he originally wrote the lyrics based on personal meaning and the need to
express himself. Describing the history of the song, Hill says:
“‘Old Town Road’ came after a period of feeling like I was out of options. I was living with my sister. She was pretty much fed
up with me being there. That’s where the chorus lyric came from—it was me saying, ‘I want to leave everything behind’…
I promoted the song as a meme for months until it caught on to TikTok and it became way bigger. I was pretty familiar with
TikTok: I always thought its videos would be ironically hilarious. When I became a trending topic on there, it was a crazy
moment for me. A lot of people will try to downplay it, but I saw it as something bigger.”
(Chow 2019)
The result is that Hill used a strategy to create a meme which challenges users to transform themselves into
cowboys and cowgirls. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7yu-KMJ_iI for a compilation of this meme. This
intentional marketing may be reective of a clear understanding of the value proposition inherent in his songs, the
co-creative activity on the TikTok platform, and how users generate content by integrating musical resources. While
Hill’s public statements may be a post-hoc rationalisation of an uncontrollable viral emergence of the meme, other
evidences indicates that he has grown up with the internet, social media, and had previously “trafck[ed] in memes,
viral threads, [and] engagement bait” through his past experience in operating his own Twitter account (Feldman
2019) and that Hill has been “glued to the internet since adolescence… [seeking] refuge and community on social
media” (Kennedy 2019). Hill released his independent version of Old Town Road in February 2019. But shortly after
subsequent controversy which received much press attention, and then signing with Columbia, Hill performed a
remix of the song with country musician Billy Ray Cyrus (Pearce 2019). Their remix remained #1 on the Billboard
Hot 100 chart for a record-breaking 19 consecutive weeks and has been on the chart for 39 straight weeks as of 6
December 2019 (Brelhan 2019).
A Ventura, California rapper named Kyle claims that his single “Hey Julie,” which has over 7 million YouTube
views and over 25 million total streams, rose to popularity due to choreographed dances on TikTok. According
to Kyle and his team, over 6.3 million TikTok videos have been uploaded using “Hey Julie” and over 120 million
uploads use the #HeyJulie hashtag (Payne 2019). Kyle says that “I’ve always been a drama kid and this app
[TikTok] is like a drama kid’s dream...I couldn’t even tell you who the very rst person was who made the dance up.
I wish I could nd that kid.” (Payne 2019).
Other music producers discuss about how they are now making music considering how TiKTok users will
integrate the music and relate to a song’s value proposition. After a successful collaboration with TikTok user Andre
Swiller, Australian producer Adam Friedman said he:
plan[s] to produce these songs, purely with the intention of blowing up on TikTok. I want to write the catchiest songs with lyrics
completely designed to be mimicked, things that have hand movements…we have this one song that Andre is about to go into
10
B. Toscher
the studio for this week and it’s 15 s, the lyrics are like ‘waving goodbye’, ‘hope she calls back’, ‘her body is like...’, you know,
movements you can do with your hands.
(Lal 2019)
Apart from using TikTok to acquire talent and perform artist and repertoire (A&R) work, record labels are also
using the platform as a deliberate marketing strategy to promote their existing artists and music catalogue. And this
may be due to their acknowledgement of how the user driven resource integration and co-creation on the platform
is powerful and also good business. Zac Abroms, a project manager for music publisher and distributor eOne,
reected upon the success of British music producer Riton’s collaboration with Nigerian singer/songwriter Kah-Lo,
whose song Fake I.D. has been used in over 1.7 million videos on TikTok:
Last year Riton & Kah-Lo’s record label did a sync deal with [TikTok]…part of that arrangement was that ‘Fake I.D.’ would be
featured prominently within — essentially at the top of — TikTok playlists in the hope that inuential users would incorporate
it within their videos. To that end it was strategic but what followed was completely user-driven, to the tune of over two
million videos.
(Lal 2019)
4.4.2. Old songs receive new life
Not only new songs are used on TikTok. There are numerous examples of older songs which have been given a
new breath of life on TikTok. As Jeff Vaughn, VP of A&R at Artist Partner Group told Rolling Stone, “we’ve got songs
in our catalogue that are popping up into the Top Ten, Top 20 on TikTok for no reason other than people are using
it… it is causing us to go back and work some of those records, put more resources behind them” (Leight 2019). To
provide further illustration of how co-creative activity, resource integration and value co-creation on the platform are
integrating “old” songs, the following are few of examples.
4.4.2.1. “Dissolve”—Absofacto
Absofacto (real name Jonathan Visger) originally released “Dissolve” on 19 February 2015. The popularity of the
song on the TikTok platform was, apparently, not due to the result of a deliberate strategy. According to Billboard:
“It all began when a friend sent Visger a message saying his song was going viral on the app. Visger, who didn’t yet know
what TikTok was, downloaded the app and took a look. The main meme, or challenge, entailed people making their mirror
look like a portal, falling through as the specic lines (“I just wanted you to watch me dissolve/Slowly”) played. At that point, he
remembers that there were “maybe thirty or forty thousand videos using it.”
(Ginsberg 2019)
As of 12 December 2019 the song has been used in approximately 1.1 million videos on TikTok. Users integrated
the song via lip-syncs, dances, and other types of memes. One example of such a meme is what some call the
“mirror move,” in which users lm themselves briey in a mirror, then quickly move the camera either up, down, left,
or right, then quickly edit in another view of them when lming themselves in a mirror. However, in the subsequent
views of them, something about their physical appearance has changed. Other times, users move the camera
down to create the illusion that users are falling through a series of oors. A compilation video of TikTok activity
which shows this meme and other memes can be found on YouTube (Absofacto 2019). On 27 July 2019, Absofacto
charted on Billboard for the rst time (#29 on the Alternative Songs Chart). “Dissolve” had 67.4 million streams as
of July 2019, according to Nielsen and Ginsberg (Ginsberg 2019), and spent several weeks at #1 on the Alt18 Most
Requested Countdown.
4.4.2.2. “Spooky Scary Skeletons”—Andrew Gold
Andrew Gold originally released “Spooky Scary Skeletons” in 1996. Yet, as recounted in New York Magazine:
“A fortuitous chain of events has led “Spooky Scary Skeletons” become a megaviral TikTok meme. It even has its own dance,
created by user @minecrafter2011. There are, as of [October 16, 2019], 2,537,466 posts on TikTok featuring the track, and if
you need help with the dance, you can nd plenty of tutorials on YouTube.”
(Feldman 2019)
11
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
Exactly how the 23-year-old song has been integrated and used by users of TikTok is also covered by Rolling
Stone. As Dickson writes, users post:
“… TikToks of themselves doing a highly choreographed dance to an insanely catchy dubstep remix of a song called “Spooky
Scary Skeletons.” The dance itself is a bit comparable to the Chicken Noodle Dance, albeit jauntier, sexier, and more
spasmodic. Some, such as Ellen Show staffers who recently posted a version on the show’s TikTok, are attempting the dance
in full-blown skeleton costume; others take a more minimalist approach. An 11-s segment of the song has been featured in
about 2.2 million videos, and the #spookydance hashtag has about 243.1 million views.”
(Dickson 2019)
4.4.2.3. “Ride It”—Jay Sean, DJ Regard remix
Jay Sean originally released “Ride It” in January of 2008. Though the song was initially a success and according to
the artist, the one market in which it wasn’t so successful was the United States. However, 10 years later and with
a remix by DJ regard, Rolling Stone reports that:
“…now “Ride It” is getting a second chance [in the US]: A house remix by Regard — tempo pushed higher, vocals pitched
lower, but otherwise faithful to the original… is popular on the video app TikTok: All summer, users have been soundtracking
clips with Regard’s remix, which has been put in more than two million videos.”
(Leight 2019)
Users integrate the song in many ways, may be through a dance or playing off the lyrical content (like a video
of a small capuchin monkey riding a running Saint Bernard dog at an NFL football game). Over 2.7 million videos
on TikTok use DJ Regard’s remix of “Ride It”; and in August 2019, the remix debuted on the UK singles chart and
topped the Spotify viral chart in the US (Leight 2019).
Irrespective of the degree by which music producers and music industry actors like record labels deliberately
create and promote music while contemplating how users will use the music on TikTok, these examples show that
users on the platform generate content by intentionally considering the value proposition of each song (whether it
is the lyrics, chorus, the beat, the title, or other musical elements) and use it as a resource to integrate it into their
video. As a helpful summary, Table 1 provides a review of this discussion with examples of actors, co-creative
activities, and the co-creation and exchange of value on the TikTok platform.
Actor on TikTok Essence of co-creative activities Co-Creation and exchange of value
Music Providers
Make value propositions through melodic,
lyrical, cultural and other musical properties of
their songs, and make musical content available
as a resource for user integration in content
Values given to others: Musical resource value; symbolic, cultural
and brand afnity associated with musical artist; content inspirational
values, like psychomotor motivational value (i.e., giving cues on how
users can dance to a song); potential tribal coalition signalling value
Value attained from others: Increased audience exposure to music in
terms of both reach, scope and the amount of time music is heard;
Licensing and royalty payments from TikTok; Song resurrection value,
where old songs receive new life; Potential spillover value, where
users search for or listen to music on other platforms (i.e., Spotify or
YouTube)
TikTok Users
Consider the value propositions of songs, and
integrate musical resources in their generation
of content on TikTok through a variety of means
(such as dances, lip-syncs, memes, challenges)
Values given to others: Entertainment value; content value; attentional
value; viral dissemination value; social psychological value (i.e.,
through reciprocity mechanisms)
Values attained from others: attentional value; entertainment value;
inuencer value; neurobiological value; social psychological value (i.e.,
through reciprocity mechanisms)
TikTok Platform
(ByteDance Ltd.)
Creates technological and institutional
infrastructure which enables and constrains
action of users and music providers on the
platform
Values given to others: technological and institutional infrastructure
of the platform; royalties and licensing from music providers; social
network value; audience exposure value; creation of a context for
value-in-social-context
Values attained from others: attentional value; attentional control value;
commercial and computational value from user behavioural data;
market capitalisation; ability to monetise user attention
Table 1. Examples of actors, co-creative activities, and types of values exchanged on the TikTok platform.
12
B. Toscher
5. Implications for Research and Practice
Going back to our story about Tiffany and Dan—perhaps the year in which they met at that concert was 1980. But
what if the year was 2020—would they have met over TikTok instead, and started a conversation through direct
messages? Music is an essential and perfect resource which brings people together on TikTok. Whether it may be at
a concert or over the internet, it is difcult to discredit the view that music fundamentally provides a service of bringing
people together—and this service is the basis of exchange between multiple actors. I have provided evidence that
demonstrates how users on TikTok respond to value propositions made by music providers and integrate musical
resources into their user generated content. Both the users and music providers, in turn, receive benets and attain
various types of value from this co-creative activity. I have also provided a few anecdotal examples of new artists
who have achieved rapid stardom and also the old songs which have become popular again. This evidence should
be indicative of the size, magnitude and effect of the value attained from S-D logic in the music industry. Further,
there are a few implications for both research and practice resulting from this study.
First, the case presented supports the view that actors in the music industry should, if they aren’t already,
actively monitor technological changes and consider how people adopt and use technology. The development of
the TikTok platform is an example of one such change, and early adopters (like Lil Nas X) who are purported to
have considered what this change meant did so to their benet and advantage. Second, those music providers who
continue to characterise music as a “product” and audience as “consumers” may do so at the risk of overlooking
the fundamental nature of a service-exchange which is happening between themselves and the people who
listen to the music they provide; surely, there may be some space for a unidirectional push of musical product
to “consumers,” but anyone who has visited Argentina knows it takes two to tango. Third, TikTok is not the only
platform in which music providers can co-create with users through features and activities. Platforms which provide
similar functionality to encourage user interaction and resource integration include Instagram (via Reels), Triller,
Dubsmash and StarMaker, among others. The observed tendency for users to integrate music in their content (via
dances, challenges, lip-syncing and memes) in an effort to capture their own value-in-social-context may continue
beyond the existence of TikTok. Indeed, TikTok’s continued existence in one large market, the United States, has
recently come under scrutiny and question as US President Donald J. Trump has attempted to ban the platform
from the US and force a divestiture of ownership from ByteDance Ltd. But, as of 16 September 2020, ByteDance
has apparently reached a deal to continue operations in the US by partnering with US software company Oracle
(Swanson, McCabe & Hirsch 2020; White House, 2020a, 2020b). Notably, India has banned TikTok from operating
in its country in June 2020 (Abi-Habib 2020). These developments raise interesting questions as to what role
governments, policies and legal frameworks may have to the relation to both service ecosystems and platforms
such as TikTok. Such investigations might explore the consequences of such political decisions may have on actors
like music providers who have pursued marketing strategies around a given platform. These questions could make
a contribution to the broader theoretical literature in S-D logic. Irrespective of what impacts this change of ownership
or ban of TikTok might have, and including the subsequent changes of the platform’s governing mechanisms that
inuence how music providers and users can interact, the case presented in this study shows that S-D logic is a
useful perspective through which one can understand the music marketing strategy.
Fourth, this case provides a clear example of how users and music providers are co-creating value on the
TikTok platform—and in this case, one apparent type of value created is value-in-social-context. But, this is just
one type of value guiding and shaping action on the platform. There is a attentional value which music providers
receive as their music is used and listened for millions of time in content; also, there is a monetary value music
providers receive depending upon the terms of their licensing agreement with ByteDance Ltd; the brand awareness
value marketers receive in strategic inuencer content and the money inuencers make from those relationships;
and there is the neurobiological value which average users may derive from sharing their content and receiving
likes through reciprocity mechanisms. Then, of course, there is a signicant commercial value that ByteDance
generates for itself as the platform upon which all of these activities occur. It is important to note, again, that TikTok
is not the only music platform which exists today. Spotify, as an example of a music streaming platform, shows how
users create and generate other types of value—whether it’s the social-relational value of sharing a playlist with
someone you’ve just met (maybe Tiffany shares her favourite playlist with Dan?) or whether it is the motivational,
emotional value of using one of Spotify’s many mood or activity-based playlists (Skog, Wimelius & Sandberg 2018).
Additionally, future research should look into whether there exists “micro-platformization” on TikTok, similar to the
13
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
multichannel networks or third-party agencies which have been observed on YouTube (Hutchinson 2019). Indeed,
if this indeed is happening on TikTok, what may be the role of these micro platforms and the actors within them on
helping music providers to create value on TikTok? How would incentives and values valued by a micro platform,
such as an agency controlling a network of inuencers on TikTok, affect other actors in the service ecosystem?
Lastly, by using the TikTok platform as a subject (Thomas 2011), this case study has shown that S-D logic is an
appropriate theoretical lens through which how music marketing can be examined. While it was not the aim of this
study to thoroughly investigate the role of the platform’s owner (ByteDance Ltd.), nor the creation and adjustment of
the algorithms and functionality which govern how users and music providers interact on the platform, the inuence
of these governing instruments (Poell, Nieborg, & Van Dijck 2019) could be a promising topic for another study.
Theorists (Breidbach & Brodie 2016) within the S-D logic literature have elsewhere noted the enabling role these
platforms have in service ecosystems. Lusch and Nambisan (2015) have argued that these digital service platforms,
such as TikTok, enable value-co creation by guaranteeing a form of “resource liquefaction and resource density”
(Lusch & Nambisan, 2015: 163). This then, in turn, arguably helps users to provide and accept value propositions
(Gawer 2014). But what inuence can the platform, via its governing instruments and decisions to maximise its own
interests and appropriate value, have in controlling the “ow” and “character” of these resources? For example, just
like music providers and users on the platform, TikTok can generate its own value propositions and challenges and
issue them to users, who can then respond to TikTok by making new content. Not only can TikTok decide to give
their own challenges preferential placement in a user’s algorithmic feed and thus control the “ow” of resources in
addition to controlling the “character” of it by determining what the challenge actually is, they can also use the data
as input to train their own machine learning models in an effort to extract their own value from the service ecosystem
and platform. Further, the case described in this paper makes a theoretical contribution to the literature on S-D logic
by making a clear observation of the inuence of platforms in service dynamics. Indeed, TikTok may be an example of
so-called platformisation in which “infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of platforms
[penetrate] different economic sectors and spheres of life” (Poell, Nieborg, & Van Dijck 2019). Interestingly enough,
Poell, Nieborg, & Van Dijck (2019) view this process of platformisation as one which entails the “reorganisation of
cultural practices and imaginations around platforms.” Based on the descriptions in this study, one could see how
certain cultural practices of users and their imaginations are being reorganised around the TikTok platform. But
further investigation into how these platformisation processes affect not only cultural practices, but actors, such as
businesses and music providers, outside of a specic platform is an avenue of future research as new platforms and
technologies emerge. Regardless of TikTok’s future, this type of reorganisation of imagination will continue along
with new platforms—and with them, new opportunities to pursue music marketing strategies.
References
Abi-Habib, M. (2020) Indian Bans Nearly 60 Chines Apps, Including TikTok and Wechat, June 30. Retrieved from
The New York Times, August 28 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/world/asia/tik-tok-banned-india-
china.html
Absofacto. (2019) Absofacto - Dissolve [TikTok Compilation]. Retrieved from YouTube, February 28: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=0iK2IrdtQ8s
Ballantyne, D., & Varey, R. J. (2008). The service-dominant logic and the future of marketing. Journal of the Academy
of Marketing Science, 36(11), 11–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-007-0075-8
@BaronBootBoys. (2019). @BaronBootBoys on TikTok, October 30. Retrieved December 12, 2019, from https://
vm.tiktok.com/xJfkJg/
@rybkatwinsofcial. (2019). @rybkatwinsofcial on TikTok, November 10. Retrieved December 5, 2019, from
https://vm.tiktok.com/xJBohE/
Breidbach, C., & Brodie, R. (2016). “Nature and Purpose of Engagement Platforms,” in Brodie, R.J., Hollebeek, L.,
and Conduit, J. (Eds), Customer Engagement: Contemporary Issues and Challenges, Routledge, New York,
NY, pp. 124-126
Brelhan, T. (2019). “Old Town Road” Is #1 For A Record 19th Week, August 12. Retrieved from Stereogum: https://
www.stereogum.com/2054382/old-town-road-number-1-19-weeks/news/
Chandler, J., & Lusch, R. (2015). Service Systems: A Broadened Frameworkand Research Agenda on Value
Propositions,Engagement, and Service Experience. Journal of Service Research, 18(1), 6-22.
Chen, L. Y., Huang, Z., & Baigorri, M. (2019). TikTok Owner ByteDance Aims to Build Global Reach Before IPO,
14
B. Toscher
October 29. Retrieved from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-29/tiktok-owner-
bytedance-shores-up-global-operations-before-ipo
Choi, H., & Burnes, B. (2013). The internet and value co-creation : the case of the popular music industry.
Prometheus, 31(1), 35–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2013.774595
Chow, A. R. (2019). Lil Nas X Talks ‘Old Town Road’ and the Billboard Controversy, April 5. Retrieved from Time:
https://time.com/5561466/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-billboard/
Constantin, J., & Lusch, R. (1994). Understanding Resource Management: How to Deploy Your People, Products,
and Processes for Maximum Productivity. Oxford, OH: The Planning Forum.
Cooper, D. (2019). How TikTok Gets Rich While Paying Artists Pennies, February 12. Retrieved December 2019,
from Pitchfork: https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-great-music-meme-scam-how-tiktok-gets-rich-while-
paying-artists-pennies/
Cowton, C. (1998). The Use of Secondary Data in Business Ethics Research. Journal of Business Ethics, 17(4),
423-434.
Crone, E., & Konjin, E. (2018). Media Use and Brain Development During Adolescence. Nature Communications,
9(588), 0-0.
Dahl, A. J., Milne, G. R., & Peltier, J. W. (2019). Digital health information seeking in an omni-channel environment:
A shared decision-making and service-dominant logic perspective. Journal of Business Research, In Press,
1-11.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selsh Gene. Oxford University Press.
Diaz, C. M. (2013). Dening and characterizing the concept of Internet Meme. Revista CES Psicología, 6(2),
82-104.
Dickson, E. (2019). The Writer of the ‘Golden Girls’ Theme Is Blowing Up on TikTok For Being Spooky, October 8.
Retrieved December 2019, from Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/spooky-
scary-skeletons-tiktok-meme-895887/
Edvardsson, B., Tronvoll, B., & Gruber, T. (2010). Expanding Understanding of Service Exchange and Value
Co-Creation: A Social Construction Approach. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 39(2), 327–339.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0200-y
Eranti, V., & Lonkila, M. (2015). The Social Signicance of the Facebook Like Button. First Monday, 20(6).
Feldman, B. (2019). Before ‘Old Town Road,’ Lil Nas X Was a Tweetdecker, April 5. Retrieved from New York
Magazine: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/lil-nas-x-was-a-popular-twitter-user-before-old-town-road.
html
Feldman, B. (2019). How ‘Spooky Scary Skeletons’ Became the Internet’s Halloween Anthem, October 16.
Retrieved from New York Magazine: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/how-spooky-scary-skeletons-
became-tiktoks-halloween-song.html
Festa, G., Cuomo, M. T., & Metallo, G. (2019). The service-dominant logic perspective for enhancing the e-commerce
of wine - A test/application on the Italian wine sector. Journal of Business Research, 101, 477-484.
Fischer, P. (2016). ‘I wanna be a Rock Star!’ Lyrical Communication in Self-Referential Rock Songs. eitschrift für
Anglistik und Amerikanistik A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, 64(3).
Gamble, J., & Gilmore, A. (2013). A New Era of Consumer Marketin? An Application of Co-Creational Marketing in
the Music Industry. European Journal of Marketing, 47(11), 1859–1888. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-10-2011-
0584
Gamble, J. R. (2018). With a Little Help From My Fans : the Transformative Role of the Consumer in Music
Co-production. Production Planning and Control, 29(10), 826–844. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537287.2018.
1478148
Gawer, A. (2014). “Bridging Differing Perspectives on Technological Platforms: Toward an Integrative Framework,”
Research Policy(43:7), pp. 1239–1249.
Genius. (2019). Chance the Rapper Hot Shower Lyrics, July 26. Retrieved 12 05, 2019, from https://genius.com/
Chance-the-rapper-hot-shower-lyrics
Genius. (2019). In Search Of: Sacramento’s Stunna Girl Landed A Million Dollar Record Deal Thanks To TikTok,
August 28. Retrieved from Genius: https://genius.com/a/who-is-sacramento-rapper-stunna-girl-with-viral-
tiktok-hit-runway-million-dollar-capitol-records-deal
Genius. (2019). New Flesh - Current Joys Lyrics. Retrieved December 2019, from Genius: https://genius.com/
Current-joys-new-esh-lyrics
15
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
Genius. (2019). Stunna Girl Runway Lyrics, December 6. Retrieved from Genius: https://genius.com/Stunna-girl-
runway-lyrics
Gibbert, M., Ruigrok, W., & Wicki, B. (2008). What Passes as a Rigorous Case Study? Strategic Management
Journal, 29(13), 1465-1474.
Ginsberg, G. (2019). How TikTok Propelled Absofacto’s ‘Dissolve’ Onto the Billboard Charts, Four Years After Its
Release, July 11. Retrieved December 2019, from Billboard: https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/
pop/8519579/absofacto-dissolve-alternative-songs-chart-tiktok
Gorwa, R. (2019). What is platform governance?. Information, Communication & Society, 22(6), 854-871.
Hagen, E., & Bryant, G. (2003). Music and Dance as a Coalition Signaling System. Human Nature, 14(1), 21-51.
Halliday, S. V. (2014). User-generated content about brands: Understanding its creators and consumers. Journal of
Business Research, 69(1), 137-144.
Hox, J., & Boeije, H. (2005). Data Collection, Primary vs Secondary. In Encyclopedia of Social Measurement.
Elsevier.
Hutchinson, J. (2019). Micro-platformization for Digital Activism on Social Media. Information, Communication &
Society, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1629612
IFPI. (2018). Music Consumer Insight Report. London: International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
Inuencer Marketing Hub. (2019). 37 TikTok Statistics That Will Blow Your Mind, December 8. Retrieved from
Inuencer Marketing Hub: https://inuencermarketinghub.com/tiktok-statistics/
Jin, S., Muqaddam, A., & Ryu, E. (2019). Instafamous and Social Media Inuencer Marketing. Marketing Intelligence
& Planning, 37(5), 567-579.
Ke, D. (2018). Going Viral with 15-Second Videos: A Marketer’s Ultimate Guide to TikTok, December 26. Retrieved
from Medium: https://medium.com/@doriskeke/going-viral-with-15-second-videos-a-marketers-ultimate-
guide-to-tiktok-ed6502b3da57
Kennedy, G. (2019). Lil Nas X on coming out: ‘I wanted to be someone that people are proud of, December 6.
Retrieved December 2019, from Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/
story/2019-12-06/lil-nas-x-grammys-2020-old-town-road
Koskela-Huotari, K., Edvardsson, B., Jonas, J. M., Sörhammar, D., & Witell, L. (2016, August). Innovation in service
ecosystems—Breaking, making, and maintaining institutionalized rules of resource integration. Journal of
Business Research, 79(8), 2964-2971.
Lal, K. (2019). How TikTok Changed The Way We Discovered Music In 2019, October 3. Retrieved from Junkee:
https://junkee.com/tiktok-music-industry/224016
Lashley, M. C. (2012). Lip dubbing on YouTube: Participatory culture and cultural globalization. Transformative
Works and Cultures, 11.
Leight, E. (2019). ay Sean’s ‘Ride It’ Is a Hit Again, 12 Years Later, August 29. Retrieved December 2019, from
Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/jay-sean-ride-it-regard-viral-tiktok-876545/
Leight, E. (2019). ‘If You Can Get Famous Easily, You’re Gonna Do It’: How TikTok Took Over Music, August 12. Retrieved
from Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/tiktok-video-app-growth-867587/
Letaifa, S. B., Edvarsson, B., & Tronvoll, B. (2016). The role of social platforms in transforming service ecosystems.
Journal of Business Research, 69(5), 1933-1938.
Lewis, B. E. (1988). The Effect of Movement Based Instruction On First and Third Graders’ Achievement in Selected
Music Listening Skills. Psychology of Music, 16, 128-142.
Locker, M. (2019, September 4). TikTok Star Stunna Girl Sparks the Flashy ‘Runway’ Challenge, September 4.
Retrieved from Time: https://time.com/5667496/tiktok-star-stunna-girl-sparks-the-ashy-runway-challenge/
Lu, X., & Lu, Z. (2019). Fifteen Seconds of Fame: A Qualitative Study of Douyin, a Short Video Sharing
MobileApplication in China. In G. Meiselwitz, Social Computing and Social Media. Design, Human Behavior
and Analytics. HCII 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11578. Springer.
Lusch, R., & Nambisan, S. (2015). Service Innovation: A Service-Dominant Logic Perspective. MIS Quarterly, 39(1),
155-175.
Maglio, P., Vargo, S., Caswell, N., & Spohrer, J. (2009). The Service System is the Basic Abstraction of Service
Science. Information Systems and E-business Management, 7(4), 395-406.
McGloin, R., & Oeldorf-Hirsch, A. (2018). Challenge Accepted! Evaluating the Personality and Social Network
Characteristics of Individuals Who Participated in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The Journal of Social Media
in Society, 7(1), 443-455.
16
B. Toscher
Mediakix. (2018). Retrieved December 5, 2019, from https://mediakix.com/blog/inuencer-marketing-industry-ad-
spend-chart/
Medjedović, I. (2011). Secondary Analysis of Qualitative Interview Data: Objections andExperiences. Results of a
German Feasibility Study. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(3).
Meshi, D., Morawetz, C., & Heekeren, H. (2013). Nucleus Accumbens Response to Gains in Reputation for the
Self Relative to Gains for Others Predicts Social Media Use. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7(439), 1-11.
Meshi, D., Tamir, D. I., & Heekeren, H. R. (2015). The Emerging Neuroscience of Social Media. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 19(12), 771-782.
Meynhardt, T., Chandler, J. D., & Strathoff, P. (2016). Systemic principles of value co-creation: Synergetics of value
andservice ecosystems. Journal of Business Research, 69(8), 2981-2989.
Mitchell, R. W., & Gallaher, M. C. (2001). Memory, Embodying Music: Matching Music and Dance in. Music
Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19(1), 65-85.
Montag, C. (2019). The Neuroscience of Smartphone/Social Media Usage and the Growing Need to Include
Methods from ‘Psychoinformatics’. In Information Systems and Neuroscience Lecture Notes in Information
Systems and Organisation 29 (pp. 275-283). Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Nadkarni, A., & Hofmann, S. G. (2012). Why Do People Use Facebook? Personality and Individual Differences,
52(3), 243-249.
Nuttall, P. (2008). For Those About to Rock: A New Understanding of Adolescent Music Consumption. Advances in
Consumer Research, 35, 401-408.
Ogden, J. R., Ogden, D. T., & Long, K. (2011). Music marketing: A history and landscape. Journal of Retailing and
Consumer Services, 18(2), 120-125.
Oh, S., & Syn, S. Y. (2015). Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology, 66(10), 2045-2060.
O’Neil, L. (2018). TikTok: the Chinese lip-syncing app taking over America, November 21. Retrieved December 2019,
from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/21/tiktok-lip-synching-app-jimmy-fallon
Ordanini, A., & Nunes, J. C. (2016). From fewer blockbusters by more superstars to more blockbusters by fewer
superstars: how technological innovation has impacted convergence on the music chart. International Journal
of Research in Marketing, 33(2), 297-313.
Payne, O. (2019). Rapper Kyle Talks ‘Hey Julie,’ The Power Of TikTok And Furthering His Acting Career, May 10.
Retrieved December 2019, from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ogdenpayne/2019/05/10/rapper-kyle-
talks-hey-julie-the-power-of-tik-tok-and-furthering-his-acting-career/
Pearce, S. (2019). “Old Town Road (Remix)” [ft. Billy Ray Cyrus], April 5. Retrieved from Pitchfork: https://pitchfork.
com/reviews/tracks/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-remix-ft-billy-ray-cyrus/
Poell, T., Nieborg, D., & van Dijck, J. (2019). Platformisation. Internet Policy Review, 8(4), 1-13.
Pressgrove, G., McKeever, B. W., & Jang, S. M. (2018). What is Contagious? Exploring why content goes viral on
Twitter: A case study of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. International Journal of Nonprot and Voluntary Sector
Marketing, 23(1), 1-8.
Rice, R. (1993). Media Appropriateness: Using Social Presence Theory to Compare Traditional and New
Organizational Media. Human Communication Research, 19(4), 451-484.
Saragih, H. (2019). Co-Creation Experiences in the Music Business : A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of
Management Development, 38(6), 464–483. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMD-11-2018-0339
Sensor Tower. (2019). Sensor Tower Blog: Authoritative Insights Into the Global App Economy, November 14.
Retrieved from Sensor Tower: https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-downloads-1-5-billion
Setaro, S. (2019). How Data Is Making Hits and Changing the Music Industry, September 5. Retrieved from Complex:
https://www.complex.com/music/2019/09/data-changing-music-industry
Shafer, E. (2019). Started on TikTok, Now We’re Here: A Look Back at the Meme-Tastic Beginning of Lil Nas X’s
‘Old Town Road’, July 29. Retrieved from Billboard: https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8524319/lil-nas-x-
old-town-road-tiktok-beginning
Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of computer-
mediated communication, 18(3), 362-377.
Siggelkow, N. (2007). Persuasion with case studies. Academy of management journal, 50(1), 20-24.
Skog, D., Wimelius, H., & Sandberg, J. (2018). Digital service platform evolution: how Spotify leveraged boundary
resources to become a global leader in music streaming. In Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences.
17
Understanding Music Marketing through the Case of the Tiktok Platform
Stewart, D., & Kamins, M. (1993). Secondary research: Information Sources and Methods (Volume 4). Sage
Publications.
Stoldt, R., Wellman, M., Ekdale, B., & Tully, M. (2019). Professionalizing and Proting: The Rise of Intermediaries in
the Social Media Inuencer Industry. Social Media + Society, 1-11.
Strapagiel, L. (2019). TikTok Has Created Another Viral Music Star in Stunna Girl, September 3. Retrieved from Buzzfeez
News: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/laurenstrapagiel/stunna-girl-runway-tiktok-viral
Swanson, A., McCabe, D., & Hirsch, L. (2020) Backlash Grows to TikTok-Oracle Deal, September 16. Retrieved
from The New York Times, September 18 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/technology/tiktok-oracle-
opposition.html
Thomas, G. (2011). A Typology for the Case Study in Social Science Following a Review of Denition, Discourse,
and Structure. Qualitative Inquiry. 17(6), 511-521.
TikTok. (2019). New Flesh - Current Joys. Retrieved December 2019, from TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/music/
New-Flesh-6687949077042285318?refer=embed&source=h5_t
Tremblay, L., Worbe, Y., & Hollerman, J. (2009). Chapter 3 - The ventral striatum: a heterogeneous structure involved
in reward processing, motivation, and decision-making. In J.-C. Dreher, & L. Tremblay, Handbook of Reward
and Decision Making. Academic Press, Elsevier
Vargo, S., & Lusch, R. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68, 1-17.
Vargo, S., & Lusch, R. (2008). Service-dominant logic: continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing
science, 36(1), 1-10.
Vargo, S., & Lusch, R. (2014). Service-dominant logic: Premises, perspectives, possibilities. Cambridge University
Press.
Vargo, S., & Lusch, R. (2016). Institutions and Axioms: An Extension and Update of Service-Dominant Logic. Journal
of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44(1), 5-23.
Vargo, S., & Lusch, R. (2017). Service-dominant logic 2025. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34(1),
46-67.
Walton, K. (2011). Thoughtwriting - in Poetry and Music. New Literary History, 42, 455-576.
White House. (2020a). Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok – Executive Orders. Retrieved
August 23, 2020, from the White House: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-
addressing-threat-posed-tiktok/
White House. (2020b). Order Regarding the Acquisition of Musical.ly by ByteDance Ltd – Executive Orders.
Retrieved August 23, 2020, from the White House: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/order-
regarding-acquisition-musical-ly-bytedance-ltd/
Wlömert, N., & Papies, D. (2016). On-demand streaming services and music industry revenues—Insights from
Spotify’s market entry. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 33(2), 314-327.
Welch, C. (2000). The archaeology of business networks : the use of archival records in case study research.
Journal of Strategic Marketing, 8(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965254X.2000.10815560
Yin, R. (1994). Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Beverly Hills: Sage.
18
