How TikTok Hijacked The Future Of Music - Nik Nocturnal - #1095

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How big of an impact do you think TikTok has played in shaping the way that modern metal music sounds now?

**Nik Nocturnal** (0:06)
Oh, it has a pretty big impact because all the young kids growing up right now on TikTok, and I remember even when I started YouTube, that was a newer thing. People were discovering music through YouTube. I discovered a lot of the big bands I listened to growing up through YouTube and that was unheard of. It was like no matter what, it was usually all on the radio or like, I don't know, your brother gave you a cassette or a CD.
That was already such a new thing. There was kids discovering music through the Internet. I mean, Myspace, YouTube, I mean, Facebook to some capacity after that. TikTok was just that next generation of people scrolling and whatever they might be doing. Doom scrolling or just, I'm trying to find cooking recipes and then all of a sudden, if they like music in any capacity or even if they don't, they hear a sound and they're like, this is cool and a lot of things with modern metal is there's a lot of good clip moments, usually with modern metal particularly. Whether it's the breakdown or the other breakdown or the crazy vocal moment, or even on the guitar, so crazy guitar moment, drum moment, right? There's a lot of musicianship and unique attributes that go into that skill in terms of metal as a genre. So when you're able to just clip farm some things like that and be like, oh, here's the best part, and you instantly get a payoff versus most people, you have to listen to the whole song or in a minute and a half until the breakdown happens. So TikTok, I think, really enforces that where people will be scrolling and they'll just hear this crazy noise or breakdown or some dude screaming and doing goblin noises, and it'll be like, oh, I want more of this. You instantly get hit with the punchline. It's like watching a horror movie and only getting hit with the jumpscares. So you instantly get kind of intrigued, and I think that has really helped push metal into a bigger, kind of more just normalized audience.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
Look at the state of Can You Feel My Heart? Look at the state of that Bring Me Track, which if anybody listened to that album when it came out, it was good. It was a good song. It's one of my favorite songs in the album.
It shouldn't be like 10 times better known than the next best known Bring Me Track. And then just because the Internet gets a hold of it and can do, if you make a track that is good to have videos laid over the top of, so that's what I'm thinking now. How many bands are thinking almost short form first? These are the three segments of this track that work for some reason. And then can we seed a meme early? Both of us know that the industry are doing exactly this. Like they're seeding.
Who is that band? Is it Geese or something? Is that the band? Geese. I swear it's called Geese. When it comes to writing tracks, when it comes to writing tracks, bands have to be curating that sound to go, this is a bit that everybody's going to clip to go on TikTok. Obviously, not everybody, but some non-zero number that think, hey, we've got a chance of really blowing this up. Yeah.

**Nik Nocturnal** (3:10)
I think bands are really aware of it. I think a lot of bands still nowadays are like, let's just write our bangers. You know what I mean? It's also weird because there's a different process of writing. Obviously, it's not, hey, everyone, let's hang in our garage and figure it out until mom tells us to come up for dinner, you know what I mean, or whatever, kicks us out of the house.
Everyone's on their laptops, everyone's either with their one producer or with, you know, now AI exists too, which is his own fun thing. So it's like, the process is also really different. And capturing that very exciting live, like start to finish song moment with you and your bandmates is not as common in general when songwriting. So now, because it's so segmented and a lot of people even are like, okay, well, let's start writing, let's start writing the song at the breakdown, you know, because that can start writing it at the climactic moment.

**Chris Williamson** (4:01)
We'll write how the movie ends and then we'll work back from there.

**Nik Nocturnal** (4:04)