Dhe hits, viral on social networks, brought together in an album. On July 8, six first singles will be released on streaming platforms, before an August release, on CD and vinyl, from TikTok Classics – Memes and Viral Hits. All the titles therefore have one thing in common: they have become famous and have amassed hundreds of millions of plays thanks to the TikTok application.
In The world, the social network is mentioned for the first time on October 5, 2018, in an article aimed at better understanding the application of “teenage playback fans”. Journalist Pauline Croquet describes the short videos, choreographies and creativity of addicts to this still little-known platform. And, already, the first gray areas are mentioned: the censorship, in China, of the cartoon character Peppa Pig and the debates on the vulnerability of minors’ data.
More and more varied content
In full meteoric rise of the application, in March 2019, Simon Leplâtre, correspondent of the newspaper in Shanghai, recounts the “conquest of the world’s teenagers”, with over 1 billion downloads. “This is the first time that a Chinese company has managed to export itself with such success”, he writes, while pointing to more and more varied content. Cooking recipes, crafts or drawings attract a large audience. As far as India, says Guillaume Delacroix, from Bombay, where the application has 277 million subscribers, in early March 2020.
During the containment against Covid-19, TikTok even becomes a ” refuge “. In her column, journalist Pauline Croquet lists the tens of millions of views on videos where the pandemic is mentioned, often with humor. Sketches that at least allow you to forget “a few moments this damn coronavirus”. Thanks to these unpublished statistics, the Chinese company ByteDance, at the origin of the application, recruits 10,000 new employees, according to Vincent Fagot, in April 2020.
Another sign that TikTok has become serious business: a long article, “Black Lives Matter, on a loop on TikTok”, signed Grégor Brandy and published on June 15, 2020. Sometimes with the title This Is America, composed and sung by Childish Gambino, in the background, videos supporting the militant movement against police violence against black Americans are multiplying. ““In two or three days, the application has completely changed””, says Pierre Lapin, a French videographer quoted in The world. The moment is also described as a ““turning point”” for the app.
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