Sometimes, you just want to see the retweets.
A month and a half back, while waiting for YouTube to finish processing my latest upload, I remember skimming through a couple of articles about activity patterns on social media. It came from an unusual feeling, because most times when I put out any sort of music, I don’t stress over the numbers. Let me explain. I deeply care about the reaction they get, sure, and it feels great to see the like-count rise, but my primary source of validation comes from the response of a chosen few friends, who I would’ve vetted the music through either way. So, as long as I receive good feedback and/or critique, social traction doesn’t usually bother me much.
But for this one, it did. I wanted this video to do well on social media; or at least, just be heard enough. I was even prepared for being told that this stinks worse than a week-old pile of faecal matter from an overfed rhinoceros. Because if people were listening to it and yet not liking it, that’s still great feedback.
It tanked. For the first few hours, there were barely any views across platforms; and even now, the YouTube link has paltry numbers. I thought about the reasons behind my disappointment and quickly found one of the major roots. While most of my other videos are just me covering a famous song, this is an original background score composition that took an entire month to piece together. Film scoring is incredibly fun, but it is equal amounts hard work. It takes some serious effort to build a good, and preferably unique, sound world, figure out the points in the scene where the mood of the music must change, and then compose something that will not only fit the visuals but also build interest and take the story forward. If I even begin to scratch the surface about the mixing and mastering process, this blog post will turn into a book.
But there was something else too, and it turned out to be a great lesson. About a couple of hours before I plastered my links on Facebook and Twitter, a friend of mine posted a TikTok video of her drawing irregular shapes with her fingers to the beat of some trance track. That video, alone, has more views, shares, likes, and retweets than all my videos, ever, put together. Worse, my own cover of a meme soundtrack from earlier this year, which took me a grand total of 20 minutes to make and upload, got better numbers than this original - and I hope detailed - composition. The second bit, especially, drove me to think about TikTok’s biggest differentiator in the already overcrowded content consumption space.
This past week, TikTok was among the 59 Chinese applications banned by the Indian government after the latest skirmish in their long-standing border dispute with China. The suddenness - I’m sorry, Arnab - with which a platform of 200 million monthly users was pushed off the table led to a fair amount of chatter.
A good takeaway from that conversation was the retrospective acknowledgement that TikTok greatly democratised creativity. The most popular videos on TikTok, at least in India, were made by those who, it would be safe to assume, don’t quite have the resources to generate regular content on any other platform. Creativity cannot, and should not, depend on the kind of camera you can afford. To that end, TikTok is amazing and justifiably attracts a lot of goodwill. But as refreshing as that is, I still believe TikTok’s biggest win, as a platform, has been to identify the kind of content that is the easiest and most fun to consume and build an entire ecosystem to nurture it.
Like Robert Frost once said - two roads diverged in a yellow wood; one chose text and the other chose memes. We have been speaking in memes for a while, but there has been a slight change in pattern over the last few years. What began as a Reddit-backed underground 2D scene has turned into a full-blown GIF carnival. Even WhatsApp has a built-in Giphy search now. Because what can top a short loop-able video, possibly involving pop colours, captions, and a famous personality, emoting the same things we want to?
TikTok took this format and revolutionised it by giving people the option to make short-form videos with a bunch of fancy filters, effects, and catchy background music. And…voila! The avalanche that then hit social media was an entire community putting out a ton of creative work with incredible consistency. Irrespective of tastes and biases, the popularity was bound to grow given the easy mode of consumption and in-your-face entertainment value. This, in turn, led to many skilled and adequately-resourced creators adopting that principle.
This video is so incredible that it could be a trailer in itself. This guy may not have spent an entire month making it, or maybe he has, who knows, but I can get behind the fact that anyone would find this very appealing to watch, share, and get on with their lives. The more videos I watch through Twitter and Instagram, especially in the aftermath of the soundtrack debacle, the more I’m convinced in the power of creativity that can fit into a social media scroll. If you can hold the audience’s interest in those 15 seconds, and do it consistently and effectively enough, you are doing something right. Like my friend with the woozy fingers.
Now that I think of it, it is a principle that I’ve heard comic-book writers talk about. They often work with a considerable restriction of space - an entire page of plotting and writing sometimes results in one line of dialogue in a tiny corner frame. But, given the format, every frame must count, and hence, they have to make the most impact using the least possible space. The best writers find a way around those limitations.
Creators on TikTok have used its format and constraints in spectacularly diverse ways. There are self-captured videos superimposed over Bollywood tracks; there are dramatic scenes shot with friends, full with plot twists and emotive dialogues; and then there is a bloody world-champion Australian cricketer jiving to Hindi dance numbers. Thing is, if you capsule my dose of entertainment and humour in a 15-second video, I don’t have to go through the context of a 4-minute piece of music or wade through the narrative maze of a 3000-word article.
This, of course, doesn’t point to any sort of problems with long-form writing, music, or video. Enough people are doing enough great things on each of them, but I doubt if much of it is meant for social media consumption, especially if you don’t have an established audience and are yet seeking the melting chocolate taste of a retweet.
This Week
Articles
VICE report about a bunch of Satan worshippers in Aligarh. Ermm..yeah.
The Ringer’s Michael Baumann on why Independence Day (the first one, of course) is lit AF.
Samanth Subramanian’s incredible, moving report on the Easter Sunday bombings in Colombo last April.
When we talk about MS Dhoni’s divine gut instinct, we’re talking about the wrong thing.
Malcolm Gladwell’s NewYorker piece, from 2000, about the incredible 1993 Wimbledon final between Jana Novotna and Steffi Graf, and what it means to fluff your lines at a crucial moment.
Shows
Dark Season 3. Oh my god. That’s all.
Fin.