A Sydney musician I know woke up one morning to discover her song had been used in 40,000 TikTok videos overnight. Within a week, the track had accumulated three million Spotify streams. Within a month, she had a booking agent, a publishing deal, and more show offers than she could handle.

Six months later, the attention had evaporated. Her follow-up single did 12,000 streams. The booking agent stopped returning calls. She described the experience as “winning the lottery and then realising it was a voucher for one specific shop that’s closing down.”

That story, with variations, is playing out across the Australian music industry right now. TikTok has become the most powerful discovery platform for new music, and its impact on Australian artists is impossible to ignore. But the nature of that impact is more complicated than the success stories suggest.

The Mechanics

TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t care about your press clippings, your Triple J plays, or your live show history. It cares about engagement. A fifteen-second clip of your song that makes people stop scrolling, watch again, and use in their own videos will get pushed to exponentially larger audiences. That’s the basic mechanic, and it’s genuinely democratic in a way that traditional music industry gatekeeping never was.

The problem is that virality on TikTok is largely outside the artist’s control. You can create content, post consistently, and try to encourage use of your music, but whether the algorithm picks it up depends on timing, luck, and factors nobody fully understands — including, apparently, the people who built the algorithm.

What’s Working

Australian artists who’ve successfully built sustainable careers partly through TikTok share some common traits.

They treat TikTok as one channel, not the whole strategy. The artists who do well don’t abandon traditional promotion when TikTok takes off. They use the attention spike to build email lists, sell tickets, and establish relationships with industry people who can help sustain momentum.

They create content that’s genuinely entertaining, not just promotional. The most effective music content on TikTok isn’t “listen to my new song.” It’s a musician doing something interesting, funny, or surprising with music as the backdrop. Process videos (showing how a song was made), reaction content, and personal stories all perform better than direct promotion.

They release music frequently. TikTok rewards consistency. Artists who release a single every month or two maintain algorithmic relevance in a way that artists on traditional album cycles don’t. This has implications for how music is made and financed, and not all of them are positive.

What’s Not Working

Chasing trends. I’ve watched Australian artists contort their music to fit TikTok trends, and it almost never works. The platform rewards authenticity more than trend-chasing, and audiences can tell when an artist is performing for the algorithm rather than making music they believe in.

Ignoring TikTok entirely. Some artists, particularly in guitar-based genres, refuse to engage with TikTok on principle. That’s their right. But they should be clear-eyed about the trade-off. TikTok isn’t the only path to an audience, but ignoring the platform where most young Australians discover music has real consequences.

Conflating TikTok success with career success. A viral moment is not a career. It’s a moment. The artists who convert TikTok attention into sustained careers are the ones who have the live show, the catalogue, the work ethic, and the team to capitalize on the opportunity.

The Industry Impact

TikTok has shifted power dynamics in the Australian music industry in ways that are still being figured out.

Labels now monitor TikTok obsessively, looking for artists with viral potential to sign. This has created a talent pipeline that bypasses traditional development pathways — some artists are getting label deals before they’ve played a live show, which creates its own problems.

Booking agents and festival programmers are increasingly factoring social media metrics into their decisions. An act with 500,000 TikTok followers but minimal live experience might get festival slots that would have previously gone to road-tested bands with smaller audiences.

Music publishers are placing increased emphasis on sync-friendly, short-form content. Songs are being written and produced with TikTok in mind from the outset, which raises questions about whether the platform is influencing the actual art being made.

The data analysis behind these industry shifts is increasingly sophisticated. AI consultants in Sydney and similar firms are helping music companies analyse social media trends and audience behaviour to make better-informed decisions about artist development and marketing investment.

The Bigger Question

The fundamental tension is that TikTok optimises for attention, not artistry. The songs that go viral aren’t necessarily the best songs. The artists who thrive on the platform aren’t necessarily the most talented. This has always been true of any distribution channel — radio, MTV, streaming playlists — but TikTok’s scale and speed amplify the disconnect.

For Australian music to remain diverse and vital, we need pathways to success that don’t depend entirely on algorithmic approval. Triple J, live venues, community radio, word of mouth, local press — these channels still matter. They develop artists in ways that TikTok can’t.

But TikTok isn’t going away, and pretending it’s irrelevant isn’t an option. The artists who’ll build the most sustainable careers are probably the ones who use TikTok strategically while building the fundamentals that outlast any platform.

Post the clips. Play the shows. Write the songs. In that order of urgency, but in the reverse order of importance.