Why crazy popular music app TikTok spreads joy whatever your age
- An app for creating and sharing short videos set to music, TikTok has a cross-generational appeal like few others
- Want to see military men lip-synching to Baby Shark? You got it
Camille Gates’ husband would stare at his phone for long stretches of time, laughing at amateur music videos on an app called TikTok. Look, he would show Gates, nurses like her were on TikTok, dancing in their scrubs at work. He persuaded Gates to join.
One week later, the 30-year-old from the rural US state of Wisconsin had nearly 50,000 TikTok fans.
TikTok, at its core, is an app for creating and sharing short videos set to music, developed by the Beijing-based firm ByteDance. Lip-synching and dancing are pretty popular genres. Most creators jump on to viral “challenges”, emote over famous monologues from movies and TV, or produce clever illusions through editing.
Last month, TikTok was downloaded more than 6 million times in the United States. Its predecessor, Musical.ly, was where 13-year-old aspiring internet celebrities created and exhausted memes before the old people caught on.
But something funny happened after TikTok’s Chinese parent company bought Musical.ly this year and merged them: police officers, people serving in the military, mechanics and Walmart employees joined in. Fall into one of these occupational niches on TikTok and you’ll feel like you’ve stumbled into The Ellen DeGeneres Show audience: an earnest, non-stop, normcore dance party.
The app cemented this status when US comedian and lip-synch battle impresario Jimmy Fallon joined it recently, launching the tumbleweed challenge. It’s pretty easy: choose the song that Fallon’s show created for the challenge, and then film yourself rolling on the floor like a tumbleweed blowing in the wind. Anyone can do it.