TikTok is the new music kingmaker, and labels want to get paid

TikTok and Douyin, both owned by the Chinese startup Bytedance, are propelling songs from obscurity to ubiquity overnight, rewriting the path to stardom for some acts

Fitz and the Tantrums were wrapping up the tour for their third album last year when their label, Atlantic Records, told them that their song HandClap was climbing the charts in South Korea. “We were shocked,” says Lisa Nupoff, one of the group’s managers. The Los Angeles-based pop band had never been there, or anywhere in Asia for that matter. But by April of 2018, HandClap had topped the international charts in the world’s sixth-largest music market, outperforming Camilla Cabello’s Havana, the most popular song in the world last year. A couple months later, the song surpassed one billion streams