If Snapchat is the marker of the generational divide between Generation X and Millennials, then TikTok, a Chinese video sharing app, is the one for Millennials and Generation Alpha. When questioned about what my friends talk about, my answer of “we just send funny pictures back and forth on Snapchat” confuses my parents. Likewise, when Emily, my roommate's 13-year-old sister tries to explain the fun of recording yourself doing silly little dances for the whole internet to see, I tell her that I don’t understand how that’s enjoyable. “I like it. When I did ‘Renegade,’ I got 220 likes,” she explains.

TikTok, like Vine and YouTube before it, is an app where you can make and spread videos quickly across the globe. Vine’s 6-second clips come from authentic moments, and YouTube videos require filming, editing, and effort. TikTok falls somewhere in the middle. Some content is professionally shot and edited with special effects (like magician Zach King, who has 35.4 million followers), and others are edited in-app, and can take less than a minute to produce. TikTok harbors trends, various dances, and categories of content like “acting,” where kids lip-synch to television scenes or movies. To me, it is bizarre. To anyone under the age of 15, it is a never-ending hole of entertainment. Isabel, the 6th grader I tutor, is on the app every day, and loves making videos. Last week, I witnessed her making TikToks with friends, scrambling over who got to be in front.

The rise and power of TikTok cannot be understated. The app hit one billion total downloads in February 2019, and rose to 1.5 billion in November later that year. TikTok’s appeal to a younger generation is a major threat to Facebook, which has a monopoly on an older crowd. Of the top five most downloaded non-gaming apps of 2019, TikTok is the only one not owned by Facebook, analytics website SensorTower reports. It was ranked 3rd with 614 million downloads that year, behind WhatsApp and Facebook.

TikTok “influencers” are becoming increasingly powerful, and frighteningly mainstream. Influencers promote trends, like dancing to songs, participating in “never have I ever” challenges, or other activities that take less than 10 minutes to do and record.

The latest craze to hit TikTok is a dance to Kesha’s “Cannibal,” a 10-year old song. Briana Hantsch (@ya.girl.bri.bri97), a 14-year-old that has 450,000 followers on TikTok, created the dance after a Spotify playlist recommended “Cannibal” to her. After scouring the app for a while, I saw a TikTok of James Charles dancing to the song, tagging her in the description, giving credit to her for the dance. I browsed her page, eventually reaching out via Instagram DMs. “This song came on while I was eating dinner and the moves kind of just flowed together,” she told me. After posting a video of the dance on January 12, 2020, the song and dance caught on, and it’s currently the background to 5.5 million TikToks. Influencer Charli D’amelio capitalized on the new trend, and promoted the dance to her 33.8 million followers. Kesha caught wind of the song’s traction, and made a side-by-side video with D’amelio to dance to “Cannibal,” which has 8.5 million views and more than 1.5 million likes.

Because of its virality on TikTok, the song’s streams have increased 58.3% in the United States. It even re-entered the Canadian Hot 100 for the week of March 7, 2020 at #96, a decade after the song initially charted. To gain even more momentum, Kesha released a lyric video to the song on YouTube to make it more accessible.

If TikTok was self-contained, it might be a smaller problem. These dances/trends are spilling out into the real world, and are being propelled into the mainstream by teenage influencers on the platform.

“Cannibal,” is just the latest example. “Say So” by Doja Cat has gone viral on the platform because of its accompanying disco-throwback dance, and when the track picked up steam, Cat released a glitzy music video, propelling it to #16 on the Billboard Hot 100’s most recent chart. “The Box'' by rap newcomer Roddy Ricch spent its ninth week at No. 1 because of a trend started by @jaywill4real, parodying the song’s distinctive creaky door-like sample. According to lyric analysis site Genius, that TikTok and several others using the sound rapidly increased the pageviews the song got.

TikTok’s biggest hit, Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, was monumental enough to make headlines, and even my parents, who are only familiar with songs found on Sirius XM’s “The Blend” station, have heard of it. It was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 19 weeks, breaking Mariah Carey’s record of 16. The rap/country song touts the lyrics “I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road/I’m gonna ride ‘till I can’t no more” and has inspired thousands of TikToks of teenagers drinking “yee yee juice,” and dressing up like cowboys.

Lil Nas X “​started pushing it on my Twitter account through memes... It finally picked up on TikTok,” he told Genius. At the time of writing the song, he was living in his sister’s apartment, but ​Old Town Road struck gold. The song fulfills the TikTok rubric to be easily accessible for a large audience that wants to participate, including “​bass-heavy transitions that can be used as punch lines; rap songs that are easy to lip-synch or include a narrative-friendly call and response,” Jia Tolentino writes. Once content producers find out that these specific aspects of a song cause immense success, it’s possible for them to make songs simply to go viral, not because they’re interested in creating artistic work.

“Cannibal,” a song that was not merely created for virality, has exaggeration and silliness that can be chalked up to Kesha’s persona at the time, a party girl who makes guilty pleasure pop music. Because of its easy-to-follow rhythm and funny lyrics, the song invites everyone to join. “​Your little heart goes pitter-patter/I want your liver on a platter” accompanies the quirky dance by Hantsch that everyone can do. To fully “research” this article, I learned it, and as someone who has been confused by the purpose of TikTok’s multitude of dances, it is fun. However, with the rise of TikTok and “clout-chasing,” every song’s intentions might not be as harmless.

Adam Friedman, a 26-year-old music producer, is engineering songs specifically for TikTok. “​I write hooks, and I try it in the mirror—how many hand movements can I fit into fifteen seconds?” he told the ​New Yorker​. Friedman has “begun producing music directly for influencers, and engineering it for maximum TikTok success.” He told Complex that he’s heading to the studio to record three fifteen-second (TikTok’s preferred video duration) songs. A music producer creating songs simply for the purpose of virality warns me of the way music will be produced in the future, and Jia Tolentino, who talked with Friendman, echoes my sentiment. “I suggested that some people might think there was a kind of artistic integrity missing from this process,” she writes.

Right now, the problem isn’t worrying about if content producers will start to manipulate the algorithm in order to be famous quicker without caring about effort. The problem is that TikTok’s system allows them to do that, and several influencers are already planning to do so. When people making easily meme-able songs go viral, and their song reaches success, the question of the song’s inherent quality is evaded. Effort is no longer needed if you can get a meme out of a quickly and superficially created song to rocket to the top of the charts.

TikTok essentially removes every barrier between an ordinary person and a famous one. Anyone can post TikToks, no matter how many times a day, in an attempt to go viral. Every TikTok has background music, either created by the user or from a seemingly infinite library of songs from Spotify and Apple Music. To further help, TikTok has a “Trending” page, where you can see what sounds are being used most often. Once a TikTok is uploaded with a specific sound, the video displays the song at the bottom of the screen, which is a link to a page with every single TikTok made with that song, and a link to listen to it on your streaming platform.

When Lil Nas X says he should be paying the app for making him famous, he’s not wrong. Once a song blows up on the platform, users are constantly exposed to it, hearing 15-second snippets of the song over and over as they scroll through the “for you page,” a feed dictated by popular content.

Isabel tells me she gets new songs from TikTok all the time. When talking about “The Box,” she says, “I like it! I saw it on TikTok, and added it to my library.” Hantsch herself “​find[s] so many great songs on TikTok,” and thinks it’s awesome that the app has evolved into such a hitmaker. Admittedly, after watching hundreds of users dancing to “Say So,” I’ve downloaded it and have listened to it about 30 times, but it turns out there’s a reason for this.

In Robert Zajonc’s research on the mere exposure effect, he concludes that “a benign experience of repetition can in and of itself enhance positive affect,” meaning that songs consistently shown to users are more likely to be enjoyed. TikTok’s astute use of the mere exposure effect, feeding users a never-ending stream of content, is a win-win solution for both the company and users trying to promote their music.

Friedman’s work, and TikTok as a whole, is a drastic turnaround from the purchasing mechanisms of the 90s, where artists sold their songs through record stores, prompting fans to actually leave their house to buy the music. In 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimated that revenues for CD purchases reached its peak of $19.7 billion, but fell dramatically by 2019 to $614.5 million. The new frontrunner was paid music subscription services, with $5.9 billion total. This means people listened to music from the comfort of their home, adding songs to their library with a tap and no extra work. The same goes for CDs, also; with the convenience of Amazon, going to a record store seems like a thing of the past.

The road to total effortlessness in purchasing music in the 21st century calls into question the problem of immediacy. People nowadays have an unlimited library of songs that they can access for $9.99 per month with a Spotify subscription. Compare that with purchasing one vinyl with 10-15 songs for around $18 in the 90s, in which artists would have major competition convincing listeners to buy their music. Now, with my buffet-style streaming service, I can pay 10 bucks a month to listen to any number of songs that I want by anyone who releases music. I listen to about four new albums per month, the cost of each being less than a coffee at Starbucks (even if I didn’t add almond milk, which costs extra). But as with the case of Friedman, music’s new accessibility might not be a good thing.

One of my favorite songs at the moment, the disco-infused “Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa, is becoming a TikTok meme of its own, stemming from the first lyric, “Did a full 180.”

Users are inserting themselves in uncomfortable situations and turning around, syncing with the lyric. My favorite comes from a grandmother, who, at the sight of seeing her “blue haired granddaughter,” does a full 180 and walks away.

“Don’t Start Now” was released in early November of 2019, but its radio exposure and stream increase, partially due to TikTok, caused the song to slowly climb the Hot 100 from #30 where it debuted, to #3 on the chart’s most recent issue. The song becoming popular is a double-edged sword. I’m glad Lipa is profiting off of it as it becomes a hit, but the means in which it achieved success are murky. Can I really celebrate the song becoming mainstream when TikTok, the app that facilitates the popularity of morally questionable songs, is responsible for it?

It’s impossible to sound unlike a Luddite when criticizing TikTok. At times, I sense the need to make a definitive personal stance on the platform, to either paint it as the harbinger of the mediocre state of pop music today, or herald it as a way for artists to get the credit they deserve. But the algorithm that defines what accumulates popularity on the app varies, and inherent music quality isn’t factored into the decision. It’s ultimately the people deciding which songs are the best to make a dance to. So, to the younger generation, please make some good songs go viral. When I listen to the Apple Music “2020’s throwback hits” playlist in the future, I want to be proud.