Similarities and Divergences between Music Production and TikTok in the Memes Era

Abstract

In the digitally interconnected world, there seems to be a recurrent theme that simultaneously connects and divides modern music production and social media: “memes.” On the one hand, they are the modular and structural element towards which today’s music production seems to be moving; indeed, the musical meme causes the listener to lose interest in the integrity of the song and concentrate on a portion of it. On the other hand, they are increasingly acquiring the status of a foundational and constituent element of multimedia production conceived for social networks.

Memes somehow become a template to be individually edited and shared. They tickle the agency of users, inviting them to appropriate given content through the affordances contained in the meme itself. Therefore, the idea of the meme links social media—mostly TikTok—to music production. The user is impressed by a template and recognizes conformity in it, despite the apparent diversity. Template recognition and familiarity are fundamental elements that users grasp and exploit, often unconsciously. This element of familiarity, intended as an element that is like itself but almost never the same, is molded with a precise task until it becomes an entity with its own personality and function. This investment of attention will lead users to share the meme, to promote its diffusion, and to increase its potential communicative extent. At the same time, through variations in their specific connotations from user to user, memes can be read and perceived as something new and different. To further explore these similarities and differences between music production and social media content-making, I analyze in this article the different ways a song is endorsed, advertised, and shared on different types of platforms. My aim is to understand how users approach these modalities and how they can be analyzed by platforms and researchers.